Immersion Into Noise

5. Viral Attack within Connectivist Noise Schematics

We have seen that the aesthetic logic of noise may no longer be reduced to the unwelcome. What was said of the subtle and peculiar noise of the Rococo interior—and its suggestive resemblance to the vast array of nerve bundles descending from the cortical areas onto the intralaminar nuclei and the nuclear reticularis in the thalamus and its array of massively inter-connected neural circuits—is also expansively applicable to the all-over interlacing network of today: the World Wide Web.

Let’s review how we got here. On October 27th, 1969, two computers began exchanging messages with each other through a link leased from the telephone company as part of an experiment funded by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Researchers did so seeking to construct a resilient inter-network of military communications that could survive the destruction or failure of any, even most, of its component parts and maintain communication in a nuclear war. Hence the Internet was designed to have no center and limited hierarchy by, ironically, the most hierarchical of institutions known to democracy, the US military/industrial complex. In reviewing these simple facts, I am assured that my previous proposition that the noise of militarized space and the threat of annihilation of the civilian population has been the primary motivational force responsible for the boom in immersive art noise following the Second World War. Indeed, I can say that this narrative of militarized space will continue to be the unconsciously encoded noise impulse in the future. Everything, everywhere, all at once in a rhizomatic web of communication: this is (and will continue to be) the zeitgeist (spirit of our age) inherited from the C3I military model which, according to Hegel, ensures a similar complexion in all the activities of a period, from science to art, literature and music. Hence intricate lattices of linked noise, available to all at any time, characterizes my hypothetical understanding of where noise culture is today. [312]

But noisily, the web also regenerates deep connections to the past; so cyberspace, this territory which stretches out from hypertext to the world-wide computer network, from virtual reality to video games, might also be theorized as the domain of Raymond Roussel’s (1877–1933) idea of noise without place, reduplicating without duplication, reiterating without repeating. As with the conceptual machine works of Roussel, viral web art is a coldly concerted and particularly dizzying activity. [313] It is a strident activity lost in an infinite navigation from one sort of encounter to another in which the affirmation of the other keeps appearing and disappearing in the play of mechanical maneuvers (or mechanisms) destined to avert gratification. This is where the bachelor apparatus of Duchamp repeats itself ad infinitum by transmitting the noise of the machine via alter-ego. For example, such an art of noise is in almost all of Knowbotic Research KR+cF projects that I have encountered, [314] but mostly in their work Simulation Mosaik Data Klaenge from 1993. Knowbotic Research KR+cF (principally Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Hübler and Alexander Tuchacek) have experimented with so called intelligent agents—applications that can conglomerate diaphanous information by themselves (also called knowbots) and intelligent virtual spaces (flexible information-environments distributed in electronic networks). Theirs is noise art spread wide. [315]

It seems to me that network art noise [316] like theirs will continue to develop into a transforming endeavor affecting the full spectrum of culture. Such networked art noise will of course be multi-national, which in itself implies a growing super-totality unfettered by many physical limitations (once the required technological hard- and software is at hand). The enlargement of this linked art noise is only (fundamentally) limited by lack of human imagination, lack of equipment and the knowledge to use it, and by what is numerically or mathematically feasible. Hence I think it fair to say that the possibilities that noise art offers our net ecology today are enormous.

Noise art, I hope I have demonstrated by now, is about being in the ready position of excess, and the Internet's World Wide Web, of course, is the means for linking the excess of noise art. On the Web, information can be smoothly accessed in a synchronous system permitting anyone connected to click and enter. This affects the speed with which new associations are assembled and disrupted, as well as the kinds of interactions that arise and emerge, which together allow art noise to be linked in terms of desire rather than physical geographic position. This net-condition allows new feedback-loops of noise theory and noise experimentation not formerly obtainable to emerge. New noise artists and their Internet noise music can, through this net-condition, become more accessible, permitting a closer aesthetic symbiosis between computer technology and culture. Assuredly, with the conflation of noise art and the World Wide Web (which strings such art together), noise artists better procure the connectivist-perspective of the network that Roy Ascott has identified and encouraged. [317] Hence connected noise art can advance a net-condition awareness of rupture and plurality in hyper-homogeneity (a supplementary order of diversity within orders of hyper-noise) as noise puts us in the position of initial critical distance.

Again the militarization (and subsequent de-militarization through art) of consciousness is what will be fashioning this net-conditioned scenario into an eventuality when linked to the forces of capitalist colonization.

Our technology is historically informed not only by its materiality but also by its political, economic, and social context. Even so, the uncommon visionary artist may override these tendencies by envisioning discernibly different utilizations of the technology via noise. [318]

To investigate how the art of noise applies to linkage today, I will now discuss the book, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, by Jussi Parikka. One could be forgiven for assuming that a book with that title would be of sole interest to those sniggering horn-rimmed programmers who harbor an erudite loathing of Bill Gates and an affection for the Viennese witch-doctor. Actually, it is a rather game and enthralling look, via a media-ecological approach, into the acutely frightening, yet hysterically glittering, networked noise world in which we now reside. A world where the distinct individual is pitted against—and thoroughly processed by—post-human semi-autonomous software programs which often ferment anomalous feelings of being eaten alive by some great indifferent artificiality that apparently functions semi-independently as a natural being.

Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes concerning the ramifications for a creative and aesthetic, if post-human, future. A computer virus is a self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed an infection, and the infected file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a host.

Digital Contagions is impregnated with fear and suspicion, but we almost immediately sense that it also contains an undeniable affirmative nobility of purpose, which is to save the media cultural condition—and the brimful push of technological modernization in general—from catastrophically killing itself off.

This admirable embryonic redemption is achieved by a vaccination-like turning of tables, as Parikka convincingly demonstrates that computer viruses (semi-autonomous machinic/vampiric pieces of code) are not antithetical to contemporary digital culture, but rather essential traits of the techno-cultural logic itself. According to Parikka, digital viruses in effect define the media ecology logic that characterizes our networked computerized culture in recent decades.

We may wish to recall here that, for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular technological and humane strings that have attained virtual consistency. Our current inter-network ecology is a comparable combination of top-down host arrangements wedded to bottom-up self-organization where invariable linear configurations and states of entanglement co-evolve in active process. Placing the significant role of the virus in this mix in no uncertain terms, Parikka writes that, “the virus truly seems to be a central cultural trope of the digital world”. [319] Indeed Parikka recognizes digital viruses as the crowning culmination of current postmodern cultural trends—as viruses, by definition, are merger machines based on parasitism [320] and acculturation. So it is not only their symbolic/metaphoric power that places them firmly in a wider perspective of cultural infection, it is their formal structure, in that they procure their actuality from the encircling environment to which they are receptively coupled.

Moreover, with the love of an aficionado, Parikka lucidly demonstrates that computer viruses are indeed a variable index of the rudimentary underpinning on which contemporary techno culture rests. He astutely anoints the indexical function of the virus by establishing not only its symbolic melancholy power in relation to the human body and sex, but by folding the viral life/nonlife model into key cultural areas underlying the digital ecology, such as bottom-up self-organization, hidden distributed activity and ethereal meshwork. Scientists have argued about whether viruses are living organisms or just a package of colossal molecules. A virus has to hijack another organism's biological machinery to replicate, which it does by inserting its DNA into a host. In that sense, Parikka describes network ecology as both actual and virtual, what I have previously identified as the viractual. [321] But some viruses do not simply yield copies of themselves, they also engage in a process of self-reproducing autopoiesis: they are copying themselves over and over again but they can also mutate and change, and by doing so, Parikka maintains, reveal distinguishing aspects of network culture at large.

I would add that they mimic the manneristic noise aspects of late post-modernism in general, particularly if one sees modernism as the great petri dish aggregate in which we still are afloat. So computer viruses are recognized here as an indexical symptom also of a bigger cultural tendency (noise) that characterizes our post-modern media culture as being inserted within a modern (purist) digital ecology. This aspect provides the book with a discerning, yet heterogeneous, comprehension of the connectionist technologies of contemporaneous techno-culture.

But beyond the techno-cultural relevance, the significance of the viral issues in Parikka’s book to all cultural production is evident to anyone who has already recognized that digitization has become the universal technical platform for networked capitalism. As Parikka himself points out, digitization has secured its place as the master formal archive for sounds, images and texts. [322] Digitization is the double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us in what we do—and which accounts for our cultural feelings vacillating between anxiety and enthusiasm over being invaded by something invisible—and the sneaky suspicion that we have been taken control of from within.

To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual allegories, antibody a-life projects, various infected prosthesis, polymorphic encryptions, ticklish security issues, numerous medical plagues, the coupling of nature and biology via code, incisive sabotage attempts, anti-debugging trickery, genome sequencing, parasitic spyware, killer T cell epidemics, rebellious database deletions, trojan horse latency, viral marketing, inflammatory political resistance, biological weaponry, pornographic clones, depraved destructive turpitudes, rotten jokes, human-machine symbiosis as interface, and a history of cracker catastrophes. All are conjoined with excellent taste. The shock effect is one of discovering a poignant nervous virality that has been secretly penetrating us everywhere. [323]

Digital Contagions’s genealogical account is proportionately impressive, as it devotes satisfactory space to the discussion of historical precedent, including Turing machines, Fred Cohen’s pioneering work with computer viruses, John von Neumann's cellular automata theory (i.e. any system that processes information as part of a self-regulating mechanism), avant-garde cybernetics, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the Creeper virus in the Arpanet, the coupling machines of John Conway, the nastily waggish Morris worm, Richard Dawkins’s meme (contagious idea) theory, and even the under known artistic hacks of Tommaso Tozzi. Furthermore, the viral spectral as fantasized in science fiction is adequately fleshed out, paying deserved attention to the obscure but much loved (by me, anyway) 1975 book The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner and the celebrated cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, among other speculative books and hallucinatory films.

But the pinnacle of interest, for me, of this engaging and educative read is its conclusion where Parikka sketches out an alternative radical media-ecological perspective hinged on the viral characteristics of self-reproduction and a coupling of the outside with the inside typical of artificial life (a-life). He correctly maintains that viral autopoiesis undertakings, like Thomas S. Ray's Tierra virtual ecology art project, provides quintessential clues to interpreting the software logic that has produced, and will continue to produce, the ontological basis for much of the economic, political and cultural transactions of our current globalizing world.

Here he has rendered problematic the safe vision of virus as malicious software (virus as infection machine) and replaced it with a far more curious, aesthetic and even benevolent one, as whimsical artificial life (a-life). Using viral a-life’s tenants of semi-automation, self-reproduction and host quest, Parikka proposes a living machinic autopoiesis that might provide a Moebius strip-like ontological process for culture.

Though suppositional, he bases his procedure in formal viral attributes—not unlike those of primitive artificial life with its capability to self-reproduce and spread semi-autonomously (as viruses do), while keeping in mind that Maturana/Varela’s autopoiesis contends that living systems are an integral component of their surroundings and work towards supporting that ecology. Parikka here picks up that thread by pointing out that recent polymorphic viruses are now able to evolve in response to anti-virus behaviors. Various viruses, known as retroviruses, [324] explicitly target anti-virus programs. Viruses with adaptive behavior, self-reproductive and evolutionary programs can be seen, at least in part, as something alive, even if not artificial life in the strongest sense of the word. Here we might recall John Von Neumann’s conviction that the ideal design of a computer should be based on the design of certain human organs—or other live organisms. The artistic compositional benefit of his autopoiesic virality theory, for me, is in allowing thought and vision to rupture habit and bypass object-subject dichotomies.

I wish to point out here that, although biological viruses were originally discovered and characterized on the basis of the diseases they caused, most viruses that infect bacteria, plants and animals (including humans) do not cause disease. In fact, viruses may be helpful to life in that they rapidly transfer genetic information from one bacterium to another, and viruses of plants and animals may convey genetic information among similar species, helping their hosts survive in hostile environments.

Already various theories of complexity have established an influence within philosophy and cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and adaptability, but Parikka here supplies a further step in thinking about ongoing feedback loops between an organism and its environment; what I am tempted to call viralosophy. Viralosophy would be the study of viral philosophical and theoretical points of reference concerning malignant transformations useful in understanding the viral paradigm essential to digital culture and media theory that focuses on environmental complexity and inter-connectionism in relationship to the particular artist. Within viralosophy, viral noise comprehension might become the eventual—yet chimerical—reference point for noise culture at large in terms of a modification of parameters, as it promotes parasite-host dynamic interfacings of the technologically inert with the biologically animate, probabilistically.

So the decisive, if dormant, payload that is triggered by reading this book, for me, is an enhanced understanding of pagan and animist sentiment that recognizes non-malicious looping-mutating energy feedback and self-recreational dynamism that informs new aesthetic becomings that may alter artistic output. An example might possibly be a heuristic becoming [325] that transgresses the established boundaries of nature/technology/culture such as the time-bomb cognitive nihilism of Henry Flynt. [326] This affirmative viral payload forces open-ended multiplicities onto art that favor new-sprung conceptualizations and rebooted realizations. Here the artist comes back to life as spurred a-life, and not as a sole articulation of the pirated environment of currency. So the so-called art virus is not to be judged in terms of its occasional monetary payload, but by the metabolistic characteristics that make art reasonable to discuss as a form of extravagant artificial life: triggered emergence, resilience and back door evolution. [327]

How might this approach to noise work in a physical expanded field? Perhaps R&Sie(n)’s 2005 exhibition I’ve heard about…© at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris's temporary space at the Couvent des Cordeliers suggested to me a possibility. R&Sie(n) is an investigational architectural firm consisting of François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaux, and Jean Navarro; working here with Benoît Durandin. Together, they utilized generative heterogeneous mutations in the creation of proposed utopian city spaces. In fact what they propose at the Musee d’Art Moderne is the artificial growing of extruded urban housing (generative & robotic) where new cities are constructed via robotic processes [328] by feeding off the carcasses of older dying cities. Very noisy-viral. Envisioned is an approach to city planning based on growth scripts and open algorithmic procedures.

Towards these ends, the show itself includes some subtle audio tracts, model-sculptures, a fully immersive hypnosis chamber with video monitors, booking services, 3D movies and robotic drawings/plans that reveal the source code of the generative program at the heart of their work. There is a definite tangled and intertwined approach to the city vector that reminds me of the dithyrambic noisy visual hyper-logic which has manifested in all modes of decadent artistic periods. The multiplicity of its interwoven experiences challenges the now bogus idea of simplicity, a modernist-minimalist idea that has taken on the intensity of a righteous injunction in many cases. Given the organic-like, biomorphic architectural forms R&Sie(n) spawned by their generative program, I could not avoid thinking about the visionary city-planning put forth by the Situationists. One thinks immediately of Guy Debord’s essay On Wild Architecture, for example. Like the Situationists, for R&Sie(n), the urban form no longer depends on the arbitrary decisions or control over its emergence exercized by the elite few. Ultimately R&Sie(n) lead me towards juicy Situationist-like complexities and engagements by way of immersion into an open-ended noise field.

As R&Sie(n) say themselves, “Many different stimuli have contributed to the emergence of I’ve heard about…© and they are continually reloaded. Its existence is inextricably linked to the end of the grand narratives, the objective recognition of climatic changes, a suspicion of all morality (even ecological), to the vibration of social phenomena and the urgent need to renew the democratic mechanisms. Fiction is its reality principle…”. Ah, the domain of decadent noise artifice.

What has been somewhat poorly determined however is the degree to which a dweller feels totally immersed in an optically excessive space. And this depends to a large extent on personal psychological need and adaptability in accord with the proposed spatial depth cues. Cognitive-aesthetic space has to be coordinated phenomenologically with the proprioceptive space of the eye—and R&Sie(n)’s only failure is in maintaining the evident structural seams of the immersive faux-hypnotic chamber (the only enterable structure and the highlight of the show) because what the entire show is proposing is a seamless immersion into generative noise, and the visual seams take us out of that exquisite fantasy. So they are denied the loveliest of triumphs.

A small pity, as one might otherwise imagine oneself totally immersed there somewhat like a 21^st century dandy. Like those at the birth of the 20^th century, this new hyper-dandy constantly might affirm his or her originality down to the decorative details of the home. In that the robots are doing the algorithmic planning and building, this work unquestionably proposes a new form of dandyism—if dandyism’s defining characteristic is remembered to be the making of one’s person a work of art while extolling laziness and displaying contempt for work. Evident here are the Baudelairean/Duchampian dandy ideals of impassivity, nonchalance elegance, and inscrutability. What matters are the triumphs of a radical contempt for one’s hand.

Indeed, one can say that I’ve heard about…© favorably extolled artificiality, indifference, impassiveness—the reign of an ironic causality and knotted ambivalence—while staying open to all noise transactions. Most importantly, a-life forms are embedded within it and its growth is artificial and synthetic. So R&Sie(n) maintains a version of transcendental phenomenological idealism, but they do not disavow the extant actuality of the material sphere. Instead they seek to elucidate the sense of the world-as-is today—that is viractualized—by stressing the embodied nature of human and artificial consciousness and bodily existence as the original and originating material premise of sense and signification.