Russolo, a Futurist painter and composer is considered to be a progenitor of “noise” as a cultural form. Futurism, and by extension “noise” as a genre, are often discussed in an industrial context – born out of the machinations of the industrial revolution. The digital revolution has given rise to another form of noise: data which flows through networks at an almost inconceivable rate. In this shift from industrial to informational, the assaultive or dissonant form of noise is diminished; instead, noise is manifested as the monotonous and banal forms to which Russolo refers.

Twitter publicizes that approximately 500 million tweets a day are posted, and YouTube brags that 20 hours of footage is uploaded per minute. Add to that the myriad of blog posts, Facebook updates and other social networking sites that pump news, personal information and images into the ether, and the result is an unimaginable accumulation of digital sediment. Sometimes generated consciously and other times as a by-product of our lives lived online, a generation of artists are sifting through this digital flow and making undetectable digital noise much “noisier.”

This exhibition is presented as part of a larger  series of panels and performances exploring the changing role of noise in culture. The two-day symposium Noise not Noise will examine new realms for noise making and its broader meanings and interpretations across disciplines.

http://mydesktop.jodi.org/

Since the late 1990s Jodi.org (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) have confronted us with the noise – audio, visual and sometimes emotional – that has become the constant backdrop to our relationships with our personal computers. Confusing and sometimes assaulting, a celebration of the “glitch” is at the core of their explorations of computer processes. Their artistic treatment of accepted conventions – be they blogging, mapping or gaming – consists of the deliberate addition of noise as a way to problematize “simple” computer processes. Previously both a performance and installation, the multiplying windows, duplicating files, near constant error messages and upgraded operating systems of My%Desktop are documented here online.

http://www.theageofmammals.com/babies/

The first steps of a baby are a remarkable moment – intensely personal yet common to all. The Internet has made it possible to share this moment, and others like it, with a wide audience. The resulting glut of footage became the source material for Guthrie Lonergan’s Babies’ First Steps. Made before YouTube (if one can imagine that there ever was such a time), Lonergan combed Yahoo! for evidence of this most important milestone and compiled the first steps of the likes of “Riley” and “Annie”. Played out ad nauseum, the loving and encouraging tones of parents and grandparents are reduced to noise,  and become almost appalling in their unvarying script.

Download OnC.pdf

A student of music composition and theory, Cory Arcangel has engaged with the concept of noise in many ways. Be it performing folk songs with the help of auto-tune or generating Schoenberg piano works out of found cat footage, assumptions about our aural environment are threads that runs through most of his work. In his essay On Compression, originally part of a larger publishing project designed in collaboration with artists Dexter Sinister, Arcangel takes on visual noise from a purely technical perspective. Although an invisible process to most of us, compression lies at the heart of digital technology, making it possible for example to have feature length films streamed over the web. Arcangel’s dry yet informative treatise on the subject (which includes a lot of math) calls into question the expectations and assumptions about what is or is not extraneous data.

http://www.leewalton.com/projects/fbook/

One of the noisiest places currently online is Facebook. The ubiquitous ‘status update’, which keeps us up-to-date on what friends have eaten for lunch or who has “poked” who, has become part of the white noise of our lives. With his work F’Book: What My Friends are Doing In Facebook, Lee Walton brings this background to the fore. Re-enacting, filming and posting back to Facebook, Walton’s series of performative videos are selected from the status updates of (what is at last count) his 1,518 “friends.” His deliberate engagement with these throwaway comments makes us consciously consider the ways we all contribute – actively and passively – to noise of the web.

http://aleksandradomanovic.com/dictumacfactum.html

The web is both a means and an end for artist and curator Aleksandra Domanovic. A collaborator in the online curatorial project Vvork Domanovic’s work illustrates the potential for the Internet to completely recontextualize cultural products – be they art, cinema, music, commercials, or politics.  Seen through the normalizing frame of our computer screens these various forms of “high” and “low” culture are completely leveled. Made as part of the InternetPavilion project at the 2009 Venice Biennial, Biennale (Dictum Ac Factum) is about the processes of research and inspiration in the Internet age. Originally inspired by Lars Von Trier’s stripped down set for his film Dogville and the inclusion of The Pirate Bay in the same Biennial exhibition, Biennale (Dictum Ac Factum) is a “portrait” of inspiration. From Von Trier, who was inspired by the song “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera and Bertold Brecht’s idea of verfremdungseffekt (a device “which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character”), to Domanovic’s personal dreams, anxieties and related influences, this website makes visible the seemingly endless paths and circuitous routes of influence and appropriation.