Immersion Into Noise Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recent- ly, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that im- pact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial inven- tion, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distri- bution. As the pressures and re-alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, po- litical premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in- terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo-political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Immersion Into Noise Joseph Nechvatal OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2011 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2011 Freely available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9618970.0001.001 Copyright © 2011 Joseph Nechvatal This is an open access book, licensed under the Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Cover image: Joseph Nechvatal, sOuth pOle, 2011, computer-robotic assisted acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 cm, Galerie Richard, New York ISBN-10: 1-60785-241-1 ISBN-13: 978-1-60785-241-4 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mis- sion is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at MPublishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Contents List of Figures 7 Preface 9 The Art of Noisy Noologies 13 Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 35 Noise Vision 59 Signal-to-Noise Eye 104 Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 133 Viral Attack within Connectivist Noise Schematics 199 Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 209 Notes 230 Bibliography 258 Additional Licenses 269 List of Figures Figure 1: Uplifting, 1983, 11x14”, graphite on paper, Joseph Nechvatal Figure 2: Palace of Power, 1984, 11x14” graphite on paper, Joseph Nechvatal Figure 3: XS the Opera: Shakespeare Theatre Boston 1986 Figure 4: Enhanced detail image from the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux, Dordogne (France) Figure 5: Gods of Politics, 1984, 14x11” graphite on paper, Joseph Nechvatal Figure 6: Side ossuary in the Cimitero dei Cappuccini located be- neath the chapel Santa Maria della Concezione (Rome) Figure 7: Detail of a section of the Parisian Catacombs (Paris) Figure 8: Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church (Puebla, Mexico) Figure 9: Rococo interior of the Ottobeuren Abbey (Bavaria) Figure 10: Interior view of Egid Quirin Asam’s Asamkirche (Munich) Figure 11: Fidelis Schabet’s décadent Venus Grotto, 1877 (Linderhof) Figure 12: Interior stairway of Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel (Brussels) Figure 13: Exterior view of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló (Barcelona) Figure 14: Exterior view of the Palais Idéal by Facteur Cheval (Hauterives, Drôme, France) Figure 15: Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb Preface On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally medi- ated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and produc- tive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? This is the question I have set out to explore in Immersion Into Noise. For many people, if anything is representative of the art of noise, it is ambivalence. Ostensibly, everything is permitted in art today—and thus nothing is necessary. As a result, art and entertainment are said to have merged. For me, however, perhaps surprisingly, the denial of this merger and the answer to the question posed above is to be found within the challenge of style. In writing this book I have come, counter-intuitively, to see the style of cultural noise as the necessary (and thus valid) art of today—precisely because it does not cave in to the supposed need for immediately legible, spectacle. Indeed it restores art’s responsibility of resistance. Some claim that art, as entertainment-spectacle, participates in the dumbing-down values that have proved useful to big business, values that address all communications to the lowest common denominator. I tend to agree. Therefore my feeling is that today art must indict—or at the very least play the role of the noisy jester who unmasks the quietly persistent lies of the powerful. Corporate and government propaganda is often designed to deceive and victimize us—and if art cannot rebuff and contest this by fueling the political will and imagination of resistance, I wonder why we need it at all. So for me, an intricate art of noisy re- sistance is increasingly valuable to an analytical social movement based on skepticism as it strengthens unique personal powers of imagination and critical thinking through self-perception, while undermining market predictabilities. Such art noise counters the effects of our age of simpli- fication—effects that have resulted from the glut of consumer-oriented entertainment messages and political propaganda, which the mass media 10 Joseph Nechvatal feed us daily in the interests of corporate profit and governmental ma- nipulations. This look at self-perception is the impetus behind this book. My initial question concerned contemporary art’s commitment to the idea that a central core of art is that which purports to transcend the banal economic world and portray a wider vision of awareness, includ- ing private spiritual, ecstatic or numinous themes that become accessible through the subjective realm of each individual: this is a self-perception that reveals in minute particulars the full spectrum of the extensive so- cial-political dimensions of the mind. I wondered about art’s new role in recognition of the fact that the logo representational paradigm is being overlaid by newer cognitive processes based on dynamic systems, con- nectionism and situated emergence. I began this writing with the assumption that developing visual and cognitive noise as a cultural strategy is an important element of this dy- namic model, one that challenges a cultural analysis founded on unam- biguous representations necessary for entertainment. This was based on my observation that a noisy cultural constructivism is in the process of confronting unconnected ideal models of entertainment with infor- mation processing and self-re-organization through the digitization of knowledge. So, in this somewhat eccentric piece of writing, I have tried to explore such questions through a range of references, touching on some of the cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of noise, including the connection between noise and violence and noise and the sacred. But I was always lead, from beginning to end, by my involvement with art. In my own case, I came to practice the art of noise through the research into ideology and power that I conducted in the 1980s in the form of drawings and photo-mechanical blowups of the drawings. For ex- ample, see Figure 1. For me, the validity of art noise rests on the assumption that while rhizomatic growth and inter-relations are unpredictable, this does not mean that they proceed randomly. Noise may break some connections, but connections will always continue to grow in other directions, creat- ing new thoughts and new affects. The notion of noise as creation itself is thus an important one that needs to be reconsidered and reevaluated. Preface 11 Figure 1 – Uplifting, 1983, 11 x 14”, graphite on paper, Joseph Nechvatal. In the collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota This creative art of noise draws us closer to our inner world, to the life of our imagination with its intense drives, suspicions, fears, and loves— that which guides our intentions and actions in the political and econom- ic world. Our inner world is the only real source of meaning and purpose we have and a participatory, political visionary art of noise is the way to discover this inner life for ourselves. So, my intent here in Immersion Into Noise is to contrast these ideas with our market-frenzied materialist cul- ture by training us to develop the eyes of clear outer perception. Finally, Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook for the development of a personal political visionary art of noise. This art of noise’s visionary realm embraces of course the entire spectrum of imaginary spaces, from the infinitude of actual forms to formless voids of virtuality. I would like to deeply thank Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, my editors at Open Humanities Press, Sigi Jöttkandt from OHP, and the staff at University of Michigan for their insightful assistance in bringing this 12 Joseph Nechvatal idiosyncratic text to fruition.