Immersion Into Noise

Critical Climate Change

Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colbrook

The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond
20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and
critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, 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 distribution. As the pressures and re-alignments of this re-arrangement
occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political 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 interface 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 mission 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 OHPs 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.

www.publishing.umich.edu

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

www.openhumanitiespress.org

Contents
List of Figures

Preface9
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

Notes230
Bibliography258
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 beneath 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 Asams Asamkirche (Munich)
Figure 11: Fidelis Schabets dcadent Venus Grotto, 1877 (Linderhof)
Figure 12: Interior stairway of Victor Hortas Htel Tassel (Brussels)
Figure 13: Exterior view of Antoni Gauds Casa Batll (Barcelona)
Figure 14: Exterior view of the Palais Idal by Facteur
Cheval (Hauterives, Drme, France)
Figure 15: Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb

Preface
On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive 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 todayand 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 todayprecisely
because it does not cave in to the supposed need for immediately legible,
spectacle. Indeed it restores arts 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 indictor 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 usand 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 resistance 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 simplificationeffects 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 manipulations.

This look at self-perception is the impetus behind this book.
My initial question concerned contemporary arts 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, including 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 social-political dimensions of the mind. I wondered about arts new role in
recognition of the fact that the logo representational paradigm is being
overlaid by newer cognitive processes based on dynamic systems, connectionism 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 dynamic model, one that challenges a cultural analysis founded on unambiguous 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 information 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 example, 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, creating new thoughts and new affects. The notion of noise as creation itself
is thus an important one that needs to be reconsidered and reevaluated.

Preface11

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 economic 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 culture 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 noises 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 Jttkandt from OHP, and the staff
at University of Michigan for their insightful assistance in bringing this

12 Joseph Nechvatal

idiosyncratic text to fruition. I am very grateful to Tom Cohen, who first

took interest in this work. Also, I wish to express my gratitude for the generous early support of Maja Hoffmann and to the French Ministre de la
Culture for granting me access into the Grotte de Lascaux. Furthermore,
I express my thanks to Laurent Fairon and Lauren Sedofsky for their early reading of the text. Lastly, I thank profoundly my wife, Marie-Claude
Nechvatal, for her encouragementand toleranceof my noisy bursts.

Introduction

The Art of Noisy Noologies

Where there is simple information processing, there
is simple experience, and where there is complex
information processing, there is complex experience.
David Chalmers, Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness

[. . .] the value of an old work of art should be assessed on

the basis of the amount of radical theory that can be drawn
from it, on the basis of the nucleus of creative spontaneity
which the new creators will be able to release from it [. . . ]
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the
supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes.
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

You never know what is enough unless you

know what is more than enough.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Applied to culture, the concept of immersion into noise is an unfamiliar

one. What do I mean when I say immersion? It is by no means uncomplicated. It is, like art, gradient. Even the word noise1 on its own is fraught
with philosophical implications and deserves to be closely scrutinized.
And what is this diaphanous, dark designation called noise music and
even more problematicallyart noise?
It would be preposterous to pass judgement on the aesthetics of noise
without asking such questions at the start. And so to begin, I will endeavor to answer them in terms of what I will propose as an art of noise.2 This
art of noise will be embodied in the literary/scholastic technique used
here, one that embraces a noisy heterogeneity that at times may simul-

14 Joseph Nechvatal

taneously be fun, frustrating and funny. Thus what I offer the reader is
a text that will engage them in a dynamic play of noisy forces and fluctuating perspectives that exemplifies the propositions put forth here:
propositions concerning the recognition ofand immersion into
cultural noise.
First, we must consider that noise takes place in a general media
culture of massive electronic deluge, where the mercurial reproduction
of free-floating (ineffable) signifiers of language, sound and images has
blurred into a problematized complex/compound/prodigality sometimes referred to as information overload. In one respect, all sounds and
images are already a kind of noise: data without meaning.3 But I want to
argue that an art noise takes a slight step outside overload/intoxication
by means of its fuzzy identity as art (something vaguely abstract that is
linked to pleasure and critique). Of course, any simplistic explication of
the function of art (a concept that has no single function, but several)
within Western society alone today would be inept. However, by examining the various definitions offered over the centuries, we can see that the
idea of art developed primarily out of notions of anthropomorphic aesthetic agency displayed first through manual dexterity and then through
intellectual stratagems concerning collective or intimate demonstration.
As this embraces many types of production that are not conventionally
deemed to be art, perhaps a better term for art would be culture.4
If so, perhaps an art of noise can also be postulated as a realm of antisocial cultural purpose directed toward the revolutionary transformation
of an irrational social reality that insists on calling itself rational. I would
like to think so and will argue this with the support of Gilles Deleuzes
(1925-1995) notion of the vacuole. This concept of noncommunication
comes from Deleuzes Postscript on Control Societies.5 Deleuzes notion
of control is connected to information-communication technologya
concept he pulled out of the work of William S. Burroughs (1914-1997).
A vacuole is like a sac in a cells membrane, completely bound up inside
the cell but also separate from it. Vacuoles play a significant role in autophagy, maintaining an imbalance between biogenesis (production) and
degradation (or turnover) of many substances and cell structures. They
also aid in the destruction of invading bacteria or of misfolded proteins
that have begun to build up within the cell. The vacuole is a major part of
the plant and animal cell.

The Art of Noisy Noologies 15

If we agree to combine this thought of noise art as a vacuole of noncommunication with an insistence on signal-to-noise6 psychological circuit
breaking, we gain a more complicated image of noiseas vacuoles that
re-route and break-up the pathways of control. Let us therefore entertain
a noncommunicating art of noise as an aesthetic act that nevertheless
communicates intricately.
Consequently, I will focus here on the beatific aspects of noise (as I see
it, the negation of negation) connected to an abstract non-communication
as located in art that uses noise to re-route and break up our mental habits.7 Thus the focus will be on signal-to-noise art relations, those relations
that signal anti-social interruption, resistance, damage and frustration as
sources of psychic pleasure. This concentration directs us towards an understanding of art noise as an art that distorts and disturbs crisp signals of
cultural communications.
Our focus will conclude with a broader theory of pleasurable resistance as applied to noise culture in viral infected networked systems.
So to begin, I hypothesize that an art (or culture) of noise8 produced
in our milieu of image superabundance and information proliferation can
problematize culture and hence enliven us to the privacy of the human
condition in lieu of the fabulously constructed social spectacle9 that engulfs and (supposedly)10 controls us.
As a consequence, this books aim is to open a dissonant space for a
beatific noise theory that constitutes an alternative, although not necessarily a competitor, to the quiet manner in which most art and music
theory is generally practised. As such, its strategic goal is focused less
on delivering to the reader a sealed cultural product of recognition, and
more on calling the reader into an immersive state of procedure that is
based on the attributes of continuous spanning (distentio). This emphasis
on the continuous spanning of listeningwhich itself is indicative of the
immersive modus operandi of soundlends a focus to thought that delivers a sense of continuity over time (extentio animi), as opposed to readily availableand thus fixedintellectual strategies. This is particularly
so in that the starting point of this intellectual investigation is the immersive position from within: intus. A position that necessitates a broad span
of hearing, sight and thoughtas well as a tight focus on disturbance.

16 Joseph Nechvatal

Towards an Immersive Noise Consciousness

The highest art will be the one that presents in its contents
of consciousness the thousand-fold problems of the time; to
which one may note that this art allows itself to be tossed by
the explosions of the last week, that it pieces together its parts
again and again while being shoved by the day before.
Tristan Tzara, Franz Jung, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Richard
Hulsenbeck, Gerhard Preiss, Raoul Hausmann, Dada Manifesto

...our previous history is not the petrified block of

single visual space since, looked at obliquely, it can
always be seen to contain its moment of unease.
Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision

In everyday use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution. I look at it (and listen to it) differently: from an immersive perspective. In music, dissonance is the quality of sounds that seem unstable,
with an aural need to resolve to a stable consonance. Despite the
fact that words like unpleasant and grating are often used to describe
the sound of harsh dissonance, in fact all music with a harmonic or tonal
basiseven music that is perceived as generally harmoniousincorporates some degree of dissonance.
For music, I am using the term immersion in a strong sense: sound
surrounds us, and in a weak sense: as a spontaneous substitution involved
in suspending disbelief and outside stimulus for an interval of timeas
when ones attention gets wrapped up in something compelling. For visual art, the term will be applied to suspending disbelief when using ones
own interpretative imaginationplus a more physically based, and more
scopic, application. For consciousness, the term is here almost mashed up
with immersion.
As with art, reductive explanations of consciousness have proved
impossible.11 And as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) said, the fact that
ready-mades are regarded with the same reverence as objects of art probably means he failed to solve the problem of trying to do away entirely
with art. Thus, Immersion Into Noise will take on a very wide aesthetic interpretation of noise (in art) and push it to the limit: defining immersive
noise art as a saturating border experience.12 So the raucous understandings

The Art of Noisy Noologies 17

proposed here are going to fashion a synchronous theory of art, particularly informed by encounters withand concepts ofthe inside (and
outside) of sensual noise. By attacking the important abstract aspects of
aesthetic noise, Immersion Into Noise will propose a supplementary understanding of contemporary culture. But it will also touch on aspects of
ancient Western culture as detected in the histories of art and architecture and so develop a general theory of immersive noise consciousness: one
that is a disturbing, sensorially reverberating, compound unified field.
In electronics, noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as snow on a degraded
television or video image. In signal processing (or computing) it can be
considered data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to
transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product
of other activities. Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of
a message in both human and electronic communication. What the art
of noise does is to take the meaninglessness of noise and convert it into
the meaningful.
White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral
density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed
bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise is considered analogous
to white light, which contains all frequencies.
The French philosopher Michel Serres has interrogated the idea
of noise in two of his books, Gense and The Parasite, where he established that inherent to the concept of noise is the incident of interference. For him, noise is a chaotic parasite that is an excluded middle (or
third)without which the entire logical structure of western thought is
unthinkable.13
In noise art, modes of representation (categories) tend to be interfered with and thus bend towards collapse. I intend to show how the
cavernous conversion in aesthetic perception engendered by noise (as
it wraps around us) can also be stretched to identify certain shifts in
ontology that are relevant to our understanding of being by attending
to sound-wave vibration frequency. To do so, an automatismic artisticphilosophical consideration of noise must assume the two-fold task of
establishing an axiomatic aesthetic epistemology based on theoretical
texts (of artists whenever possible), while testing them against my own

18 Joseph Nechvatal

artistic experiences and by placing myself within the operations of noise,

thus raising questions of the reciprocity between theory and practice. I
have approached this reciprocity through the creation of a 99.28 minute
laptop noise opus entitled viral symphOny in four movements with pOstmOrtem (2008).14
Unsurprisingly, the fairly recent surge in the popularity of glitch electronica15 and its clicks-and-cuts aesthetic of error (and to a lesser extent
musique concrte) directly relates to my interest in noise as a form of negative dialectics, as it mines what was once the erroneous use of musical
technology in the production of sound. In glitch, the effects of malfunction, such as bugs, crashes, system errors, hardware noise,16 skipping
and audio distortion, can be captured on computers and this material
provides the fundamentals of glitch music. In the glitch sense, deciphering noise in art will be tied to the potent erroneous in a general way. But
noise art is not pop, and the broad spectrum of people do not appreciate
it. In each case, from the mainstream point of view, something is wrong
with the art. Subsequently, I will examine what noise signifies to those
who love it.
To do so, I will be looking at the cultural and aesthetic benefits of
noise17 from my point of view both as a practising artist and as an art theoretician. Hence, in addition to preparing the reader for the previously
indicated stylistic bounces back and forth between the first and the third
person voice in the text, I shall establish my fundamental contention that
all art is fundamentally conceptual and imaginative because art only exists conceptually and its goal is to change our consciousness. That is what
Joseph Kosuth teaches us. This is not an uncomplicated matter however,
for as the philosopher and specialist in consciousness studies, Dr. David
Chalmers, says in his seminal essay Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, there is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing harder to define.18
According to Gilles Deleuze, consciousness is the passage, or rather
the awareness of the passage, from less potent totalities to more potent
ones, and vice versa.19 This hypothesis receives support from Thomas
Metzinger who writes in Conscious Experience that holism is a higher-order property of consciousness and that this global unity of consciousness seems to be the most general phenomenological characteristic of
conscious experience.20

The Art of Noisy Noologies 19

Noise is often loud, elaborate, interlaced and filigreedbut almost

always gradient and highly phenomenological.21 Noise is often a potent
and transcendent negating intensitybut it is never unassimilable. The
prime example of this will be the short history of noise music to follow.22
What was once noise (unacceptable) has now become noise music (acceptable and even desirable).23 What was once negating and exterior now
fuels the inner artistic imagination. But for noise to be first noise, it must
destabilize us. It must initially jar. It must challenge. It must initiate a glitch
of psychic crumbling.
Through the relationship between noise and noise music24 we can
see how both notions of in and out (of the psychic edge/frame) are contained in an expanded idea of noise25 that becomes potentially unhindered.26 This understanding offers the critic a complex amplitude that
deepens both the inside and the outside because they both extend as part
of a potentially vast scope. In noise, potentially opposing directions can
lose their positions and meet in a crushed connectivity. This recalls Gilles
Deleuze's wonderful statement that the interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior.27 If we amend these divisions
within a conceptual noise homogeneity I believe we are much closer to the
truth of the matter as concerns the experiential levels of aesthetic immersion into noise.
Noise art theory, then, involves the exaltation of the void and the
melting of unstable frontiers as it expands definitions both inwardly and
outwardly to envelope from both sides a felt understanding of the unfettered immensity and myrrh of our universe (where noise of one sort or
another is everywhere).28
Given this thinking about noises special conundrum (particularly
when depending upon the supposed filter of analogic thought, the stepby-step comparison of partial similarities between things) art as noise
or noise in artis well suited for reflecting on noises overwhelming sensations and qualities of excess: an incoherent and multivalent excess that
defeats attempts at reducing reality29 to the indexical level of representation. I am theorizing here, then, a potentially shifting total excess where
many once discrete elements are conceived as occupying the same space
in a preliminary step towards producing an innovative unity (or ontological identity) as mash chaosphere.30

20 Joseph Nechvatal

Undoubtedly, at times in the past totalizing analogies have been

fatuously and unequivocally self-sententious in their urge towards perfectification, embellished (as they must seem to be) with a sort of selfsignificance and often fallacious, sweeping universalism. However, this
awkward question of totalizing in terms of immersive noise art and immersive noise consciousness is at the hub of this investigation31 and so it
immediately beckons the questions: what models we make for ourselves,
which do we prefer aesthetically, and why?
In terms of creativity and self-programming, the resultant new sense
of synthesized unity noise provides is valuable in that it allows the creator
to move from what exists and is known to the limits of knowledge and experience, and therefore to move into the realm of the unknowna move
from the familiar to the unconceived.
To address this gradient subject of audio noiseand then take it
outside the organ of the earI have accumulated aesthetic examples of
noise tendencies as experienced by myself and as found in the histories of
art and philosophy. These examples subsequently contribute towards the
articulation of what I have come to call noise cultureor betternoise
consciousness,32 as even the proclamation, culture, presents a set of highly
ambiguous notions in that the word culture has immediately conflicting
insinuations, and it is invariably best to observe scrupulously the context
of its use. For some it means High Art, but for others (myself included)
the word has more anthropological applications where culture represents
less hypothetical measures of excellence than a widespread way of hearing, seeing and being.
What I will show here is that while formulating such an art of noise
consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the western ontological tradition has been found in the western tradition itself
when we hear with new ears and look with new eyes and ask indeterminate questions.

The Art of Noisy Noologies 21

Noisy Aesthetics
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of
pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any
sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or
operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source
of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest
emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

The term aesthetics is traditionally used to distinguish the appreciative

from the expedient. The notion originated with a 1739 text by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) who
introduced the term aesthetic in his text Meditationes Philosophicae de
Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus, defining it as the study of attraction as
concerned solely with discriminating perception. For Baumgarten, in other
words, aesthetics should be a separate, independent concern dealing only
with perception. In Baumgarten's theory, much attention was concentrated on the creative act and the importance of feeling. For him, it was
necessary to modify the traditional claim that art imitates nature by asserting that artists must deliberately alter nature by adding elements of
feeling to perceived reality. In this way, the creative process of the world
is mirrored in art activity. Baumgarten's thought in this regard was influenced by the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and
that of Leibniz's pupil Baron Christian von Wolff (1679-1754).
The problems of aesthetics had been treated by others before
Baumgarten, but he both advanced the discussion of art and beauty
and set the discipline off from the rest of philosophy. Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804), who used Baumgarten's Metaphysica as a text for lecturing, retained Baumgarten's use of the term aesthetics as applying to the
entire field of sensory knowledge. When combined with logic, aesthetics formed a larger discipline which Kant called gnoseology, a theory of
knowledge that other philosophers called epistemology. Only later was
the term aesthetics restricted to questions of beauty and of the nature of
the fine arts.
Kant used the term aesthetics to argue that aesthetic appreciation
reconciles the dualism of theory and practice in human nature, thereby

22 Joseph Nechvatal

leaving the way open to identify beauty (a relative, shifting and elusive
concept) as a profoundly psychological quality (and not inherent in the
artwork) by formulating a distinction between determinate, determinable, and indeterminate concepts. For him, beauty is non-determinate
because we cannot know in advance whether something is beautiful or
not by applying a set standard. He also deemed the concept of beauty
non-determinable because, due to creativity, we will never find such a
standard. Beauty, therefore, must reside in the indeterminate supersensible. And so must noise. This approach supports Walter Benjamins (18921940) conception of aesthetics not as a part of a theory of the fine arts,
but as a theory of perception.
For me, such an approach to noise aesthetics was anticipated by
Georges Bataille (1897-1962)33 when he considered excess the non-hypocritical human condition, which he took to be roused non-productive
expenditure (excess) entangled with exhilaration. Excess, for Bataille, is
not so much a surplus as an effective passage beyond established limits, an
impulse which exceeds even its own threshold.34 When one takes an interpretative metaphorical view of noisebroader than the typical, somewhat fatuous, reductive explanationsone soon detects that the concept
of noise itself is an open concept.35 The concept of noise itself is pantheoristic. But in my use of the term (based on my activities as an artist) I understand art noise to be fundamentally an extravagant activity of creativity.36
However, a new meaning for noise in art (and in life) is not developed
by thinking about the aesthetics of noise as an invasive and unpleasant
return to a dark primal unconscious.37 It works when noise is also understood as an expanded38 psychic thermidor: when it takes us back from
the edge and rounds out our sensibilities as it forces us to get with the
underlying assumptions of excess inherent in noise.39 As Allen S. Weiss
says in his incisive book Phantasmic Radio, Noise creates new meaning
both by interpreting the old meanings and by consequently unchanneling auditory perception and thus freeing the imagination.40 This book is
an attempt at facing up to the radical implications of those assumptions,
and at purging us from conventional ways of thinking about noise (which
is often disapprovingly).
This purging strategy provides a means of exemplifying various methods of thinking about noise. But it will not position noise in an easy opposition to Johann Joachim Winckelmanns (1717-1768) codification of

The Art of Noisy Noologies 23

classical ideals as those being primarily uncomplicated and Apollonian in

their logic, for when the idea of simplicity takes on the intensity of a righteous injunction, the implied equation between simplicity and goodness
obscures a less evident function, that of cognitive constraint.
Plus noise today has become too subjective41 and ambient for that
kind of dialectic between Apollonian calmness in relation to Dionysian
non-restraint. And too sublime,42 with its mix of alarm, approval, apprehension, and ascendancy. As Edmund Burke says in his A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they
are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually
in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it
turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive
pleasure. Whatever excites this delight I call sublime. So this time, sublime immersion into noise promotes a conflicted but promiscuous ontological feeling (awareness/consciousness) where aesthetic cognition of
the limits of the aesthetic attain the actual state of the generally subjective
world of consciousness itself.
Pertinent to these noise concerns is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900) and his acute criticism of the static culture of the bourgeoisie, particularly as it relates to the gesamtkunstwerkkonzept in Die Geburt
der Tragdie (The Birth of Tragedy), Nietzsche's account of classical
Greek drama and its merits. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche procures
the concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian principles from Greek
tragedy. According to Nietzsche, the Apollonian principle: reasoned,
restrained, self-controlled and organizing is subsumed within the Dionysian principle: that which is primordial, passionate, chaotic, frenzied,
chthonic and creative. This dialectical aesthetic tension allows the imaginative power of Dionysius to operate, in that the products of this operation are kept intelligible by Apollonian constraint.
Hence Nietzsche examined the dialectic between an Apollonian
calmness in relation to an antecedent Dionysian non-restraining tragedy
which has its origins in the chants of the Greek chorus. By invoking the
power of the Greek drama, Nietzsche implied a pejorative judgement on
subsequent dramatic forms of realism and inert spectatorship. Generally speaking, this aspect of Nietzsche's thought thus participated in the

24 Joseph Nechvatal

widespread ideal embedded in Romanticism43 of a popular recovery of

the mythic precondition necessary for cultural consciousness based on,
in most cases, the sublime excess of the infinite.44
In ancient polytheistic Greece, sacred rites were in certain cases enacted on or near sacred grove sites. One such well-recorded rite was the
ecstatic Dionysian rite. The Dionysian rite was directed not at the nymphs
however, but to Dionysos (also known as Dionysius, Bacchus and/or
Bakchos), the God of wine, intoxication and creative ekstasis. Dionysian
ecstatic festivities were based on an even earlier form of ritual, the ancient
Springtime Spree which was a three-day agricultural gala which involved
the uncasking and drinking of that years wine, the planting of seeds, and
the encountering of ghosts.45 By intoxicatingly mixing seeds with memories of their dead in the earth (which was viewed as the domain of the deceased) the ancient Greeks were able to incorporate their departed into
the drinking and planting festival of the Spring Dionysia.
Subsequently the Spring Spree evolved into the even more intense
rite of Dionysian ekstasis which intensified consciousness through drink
and ecstatic prancing. The culmination of the Dionysian ekstasis rite was
an ecstatic frenzy in which the dancers tore apart and devoured raw a sacrificial animal, such as a goat or a fawn. At the center of the rite are the
mental states of ek-stasis and en-thusiasms, states where psychological
frontiers are torn down in preparation for the immersive divine dive into
a world of animalistic unity.
As we will see further on, noise in art often evokes vast entropy46
as a form of vacuole, even as entropy quantifies uncertainty in encounters with random variables. In his book, Potique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space), Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) speaks of the French poet
Charles Baudelaire's (1821-1867) frequent use of the word vast, which
is, Bachelard claims, one of the most Baudelairian of words: the word
that marks naturally, for this poet, the infinity of the intimate. This, at first
seemingly paradoxical statement, is correct, for Baudelaire is above all
celebrated as a poet and practitioner of double consciousness: incarnating
two intertwined natures. Apparent polar opposites play against (and ultimately with) each other dialectically in his thinking.
In comparable ways, art noise is both decadent and sublime when
it is founded on vacuole principles of debauchment and self-indulgent
consternation. Of course, such a dithyrambic logic has manifested in all

The Art of Noisy Noologies 25

modes of decadent artistic periods, from the Hellenistic and Flamboyant

Gothic, to the Mannerist, Rococo, and Fin-de-Sicle, as they all opposed
dogmatically imposed paradigms with hyper-engendering strategies.
This is precisely what art noise does today. Because of noises stimulation
of the nerves, the decadent sublime (as safe terror) is agreeably engaging
(particularly in grating harsh noise music)47 even as this psychologically
intense feeling is bound up with our sense of mortality in an existential
way similar to the terms of Jean-Paul Sartre's (1904-1980) Being and
Nothingness. Indeed the term sublime specifically refers to an aesthetic
vacuole value in which the primary factor is the presence or suggestion of
undivided vastness and immense breadth of space, which is incapable of
being completely ascertained.
Noise art (musical and visual) therefore never offers us conventions.
Rather, when good, it is like a fertile seedbed which undermines the
hitherto clear, false distinctions between representation (identity) and
the imagination by way of negating and recombining. Here, semblances
and sounds are always already connected within a crushed and dark and
obscure excessive orb, as noise art negates artistic representations (and
all they imply), thereby affirming a consciously divergent way of perceiving and existing. Such excessive artistic noise can therefore spawn in us
a sense of affinity which communicates individuality in totality without
forfeiting liberty.
I should say that several of my ideas on this subject of noise stemmed
from reading Georges Bataille's Visions of Excess (which appeared in English translation in 1985) after which I began to experiment with (and analyze through my artwork) various artistic approaches towards noise and
excess.48 In the terms Bataille proposes, any restricted economy, any
sealed arrangement (such as an image, an identity, a concept or a structure) produces more than it can account for, hence it will be inevitably
fractured by its own unacknowledged excess and, in seeking to maintain
itself, will, against its own rationalized logic, crave rupture, expenditure,
and loss. More specifically, for Bataille, the term expenditure describes
an aspect of erotic activity poised against an economy of production.49
Yet Bataille's accomplishment transgresses disciplines and genres so repeatedly and so thoroughly that capsule accounts of his work in terms of
noise are compelled to delegate themselves to abstractions. One can say
with assurance that his thinking consisted of a meditation on, and fulfil-

26 Joseph Nechvatal

Figure 2 Palace of Power, 11x14 graphite on paper, 1984, Joseph Nechvatal

ment of, transgressions through excess. Thus Bataille's Visions of Excess immediately impressed me as it resonated handsomely with the overloaded
nature of my palimpsest-like grey graphite drawings from the early-1980s
(which were reflective of the time's concerns with the proliferation of
ideology connected to the proliferation of nuclear weapons).
So via Bataille, I can say that noise arts probing at the outer limits
of recognizable representation, the excited all-over fullness and fervor of
this syncretistic probe, isn't a failing of communications in the art; it is
its subject. Good noise art, for me at least, is capable of nurturing a sense
of polysemic uniqueness and of individuality brought about through its
counter-mannerist style (circuitous, excessive and decadent); it is a style
that takes me from the state of the social to the state of the secret, distinguishable I by overloading ideological representation to a point where it
becomes non-representational. It is this non-representational counter-mannerist representation which breaks us out of the fascination and complicity
with the mass media mode of communication. Noise art frees us, then,
from accustomed coyness, platitudes, and predetermined perceptions

The Art of Noisy Noologies 27

with which we are deluged daily by the mass-pop media. It is my experience that it is in this artistic condition of privately excessive formlessness
that we can ascertain the delimitation of mass-pop media ideology and
the resultant implications of that cognizance.
Noisy Methodology
The method used here reflects on the insights noise suggests to the traditional western history of unified being (which indeed engenders extraordinarily deep conflicts). This will entail a review of past and present approaches towards ontology and an analysis of a variety of artistic
maneuvers. I will non-teleologically synthesize these questions and examples of ontology into an interrelated theoretical model for noise art by
clarifying its underlying philosophy of significance. I will thus outline an
integrative noise philosophy by tracing the visual noise impetus through
its various expressions so as to examine the immersive noise philosophy
from all possible sides. Of principal interest will be the discussion of subject/object cognition.
Even though Otto Kernberg pointed out that the splitting of the subject from the object is the crucial mechanism for the defensive organization of the ego at its most basic (pre-oedipal) level,50 the subject/
object question pursued in this discussion will not appear in any stable
binary positioning51 of easy subject/object opposites as I recognize, as
Stephen Talbott points out, that the subject/object set functions more
along the dialectical lines of the magnet, where the north pole exists only
by virtue of the south pole (as is the contrary). Like the supposed subject/object opposites, neither pole exists in isolation.52 Hence a subject/
object debate in terms of immersive perspective (a debate I do not wish
to shy away from) is possible only with the radical conflation of this polarity into an omnijectivity (see below) which recognizes the mutual interpenetration that unites the apparent opposites. Then there is something
of the subject in the most impenetrable object, and an objective, worldsustaining presence in the sheerest subject. As with the magnet, where if
you nip off the slightest piece of one end of the magnet you will discover
that it still possess both a south pole and a north pole, so the forces of
subjectivity and objectivity co-exist in omnijectivity. It is as impossible
to conceive of an isolated subject or an isolated object as it is to conceive

28 Joseph Nechvatal

an isolated north or south pole, but it is entirely imaginable to relinquish

sight of their conjoint importance.
Useful here is the concept of omnijectivity (the metaphysical concept stemming from the discoveries of quantum physics which teaches
us that mind (previously considered the subjective realm) and matter
(previously considered as the objective realm) are inextricably linked in
reconciling the relativist (subjective) style found here mixed with the
more absolutist (objective) styleas omnijectivity is possible only
with the conflation of polarities. It is a stance which recognizes the mutual interpenetration that unites the apparent opposites of subjectivity
and objectivity. More specifically, the concept of omnijectivity emerged
from the theories of quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992)protg of Albert Einstein (1879-1955)and Karl Pribram, author of the
neuropsychological textbook Languages of the Brain. Pribram noted that
modern theories of how the brain stores memories did not explain how
memories seem to be distributed throughout the brain as a whole. Each
memory a person has was believed to have a specific location somewhere
in the brain cells. Pribram, however, made the discovery that memories
are not localized, but are somehow spread out or distributed throughout
the brain as a whole. Even when considerable damage is done to a brain,
or pieces of it are removed, organisms don't lose sections of their memory. He knew of no process that could account for such a phenomenon.
Finally, the process that made the most sense in metaphorically explaining this aspect of the brain was holography. Therefore Pribram offered the
holographic model as an explanation of the functioning of the brain.
The term, omnijectivity, corresponds with Gene Youngblood's term
extra-objective, which he used to describe the synaesthetic and psychedelic features of what he termed synaesthetic cinema, an underground
cinema tendency of the late-1960s that ostensibly combined subjective,
objective, and non-objective features into a syncretistic perception of
the simultaneous space-time continuum.53 This syncretistic perception
was chiefly accomplished by the use of superimposition and by reducing depth-of-field to a total field of non-focused multiplicity after closing the span between the inside and the outside of the picture plane.54
Youngblood derived the term synaesthetic from Anton Ehrenzweig's
(1908-1966) idea of syncretistic vision, which Ehrenzweig characterized
in his book, The Hidden Order of Art as a Total Vision.55

The Art of Noisy Noologies 29

An immersive noise aesthetic beckons and amends the mind/body

problem, the metaphysical problem of how the mind and body (and I
would stress the body's ears and eyes) are related to one another, and
of how consciousness relates to conjectural substantiality in immersion.
Aesthetic immersive consciousness, particularly when comprehended as
noisy, may be said to be in a vibratory self/non-self referential mode and
thus illustrative of what Metzinger sees as the infinitely close and at the
same time infinitely distant56 characteristic implicit in all states of consciousness. This pre-pleonastic vibratory comprehension, which illumes
Metzinger's attestation, occurs by way of the distance that the artifice of
immersive noise art confers to consciousnessan artifice which lends
itself to a reactive, self-attentive unification. As such, immersive artifice
works to circumvent the current fragmentary view of the body/mind
in the world which has been underpinned by the Cartesian/Newtonian
model of optical physics.
Based on these understandings of immersive consciousness, the abstract, immersive noise theory proposed here could develop a means for
achieving insight into how the agency of aural and visual thought works
when we release them from their compos mentis obligations.57 To achieve
such an examination would be to overcome the tendency for aesthetic visual thought to analyze itself in terms of a presumed separation between
the process of visual thinking and the content of visual thought which is
its product, and this view of immersive consciousness clarifies an initial
issue of immersion into noise in one grand sense. Since visual thinking is
shown to be a process consisting of the transformations of nuero-physical visual-thought impulses impregnated in continuous waves, our visual
thoughts are not distinct from visual thinking. Similarly, immersive visual
thought, visual thinking, and visual thinker make up a reverberating, incessant, multiple, and unified continuity.
I realize that this comprehension is nothing more than visual aesthetics catching up to basic science today. As the analytical philosopher
Thomas Metzinger says, in the physical outside world there are only
electro-magnetic oscillations of certain wavelengths, and that in a scientific look at reality, all we find are myriads of subtle electrical impulses.58
Taking it a step further in seeking the field of contact between the inner
cognitive world and the outer penetrable world of physics (a realm which
I posit is the veritable domain of art), it makes sense to see thinking,

30 Joseph Nechvatal

thought, self, and experienced immersion into noise as a non-localized

flow of reverberating, incessant, multiple, but hyper-unified frequencies
in which self-conscious manifestations occur through an awareness of
the richness of noise.
Among the more important positions in the formation of this general debate is Ren Descartes' (1596-1650) argument that the mind and
body are quite disconnected elements that nevertheless interact with one
another. Richard Rorty (1931-2007) asserts that Descartes' feat was to
conceive of the human mind as an internal chasm in which both pains
and clear and distinct ideas passed in examination before an inner eye. By
contrast, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz asserted a theory of psycho-physical parallelism based on his theory of Monadology, his model of a system which conceived of unity in plurality and plurality in unity. Leibniz's
monadological ideas have substantially influenced Gilles Deleuze, whose
fertile philosophical articulations have played an important role for me.
Based on the above understanding of aspects of qualified hyper-absolutes and post-modern omnijective understandings concerning immersion into noise, my formative contention is that immersive aesthetics
when re-contextualized in a wider historical arenacan be reasonably
adept in assisting us in the intrinsically hermeneutical comprehension of
our existence. Such an omnijective/immersive aesthetic could be capable
of heightening the relative theoretical worth of art historical scholarship
in relation to the most recent developments of the information revolution, in the service of an expansive conversation concerning our aesthetic
self-consciousness.
But for us to get started on the road to a fuller aesthetic self-consciousness, I wish to assert the idea of hyper-noise59a notion of noise as
art constructed via connected-competing vectors.60 This anti-pure approach
suggests an encircling mental ideal61 that allows unaccustomed creative
situations and sensations to connect and tolerantly co-exist. This hypernoise idea is based on my understanding of the flat random aspects of
white noise in conjuction with the all inclusiveness inherent in white
light. In hyper-noise, signal-to-noise touch, run over and become akin to
each other, so that self-centered human comprehension may both deepen and spread into an expansive constitution of being. This being as centered vitality might be described, as John Cage (1912-1992) suggests, as

The Art of Noisy Noologies 31

central to a sphere without surface, [...] unimpeded, energetically broadcast [...] as transmission in all directions from the field's center.62
So art as white-noise-light speaks to us both at the center and at the
edges of our frame of cognition (that frame semi-forced on us by the social and psychological conditioning of empiricist/positivist philosophy).
And, as such, white noise art might allow us to feel the outer limits and
finer levels of our most exquisite vacuole sensibilities.
Because we will never succeed completely in understanding these
feelings, white noise art is tragic. Because we never stop trying, white
noise art is comic.
Towards a Noise Vision: the revolution will be visualized
Following a short discussion of Noise Music (I point the reader to Paul
Hegartys book Noise/Music, Caleb Kelly's Cracked Media: The Sound of
Malfunction, Brandon LaBelles Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound
Art, Salome Voegelins Listening to Noise and Silence, Thomas Bey William Baileys Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music And Sound Art In The
21st Century, Joanna Demers's Listening Through The Noise and Steve
Goodmans Sonic Warfare for a fuller audio/music-specific discussions of
noise) I will exemplify my notion of visual hyper-noise with the physically contained (but optically boundless) palimpsest-esque, all-over,
wall-paper-like image spread found in the Apse of Lascaux, that I experienced. Here I will speak of a kind of eye noise: a distinct visual-cognitive proclivity that addresses the multiplicitious/heterogeneous impetus
within a visual aggregate. I will define this visual noise as being produced
by an all-over, elaborate, spread out distribution of visual incident which
calls upon the optic procedure of spatial summationa process which
unconsciously totalizes the visual excess encountered. I will refer to this
noise aggregate as a summational but all-over net-condition/awareness of
plurality in hyper-homogeneity, a supplementary order of diversity within orders of noise. Such creative noise, I will suggest, is capable of creating new
forms of order. This creative condition will relate to what I will call hypercognitive noise with respect to my conclusions, conclusions that recognize
that from now on things will be heard and seen only from the connected
depths of a noisy and nervous inclusive density, withdrawn into itself,
perhaps, adumbrated and darkened by its obscurity, but bound tightly to-

32 Joseph Nechvatal

gether and inescapably grouped by the vacuole vigor that is noise.63 I submit that such conclusions are capable of fermenting a phantasmagorical
discourse that is both nervously capricious and, perhaps paradoxically,
socially responsible.
Accordingly, I wish to present the idea of noise art as that art which
precludes established significance by replacing the assumption of conclusive
meaning with one of vital excess (a non-objective communication of emotional significance). A noisy hyper-cognitive is where the particular of
electronic connectivity is seen as part of an accrual total system by virtue
of its being connected to everything else while remaining dissonant.
The strategy of a dissonant hyper-anything includes principles of networked connections and electronic links which give multiple choices of
passages to follow and continually new branching possibilities. The totalhyper-being model for a new connected noise noology64 (especially when
placing emphasis on tabulating an evasive orb) is the self-re-programmable internal function which explicitly offers a furtherance in envisioning
internal, anti-hierarchical models of thought to ourselves. As such it is a
procedure of epistemological symbolization.65
This self-connected epistemological-strategic approach is based on
the premise that behind all noise art, either representational or abstract,
is the hypothetical exploration of the introspective rhizomatizing world
of the imagination under the influence of today's high-frequency, electronic/computerized environment. Any analogue-to-digital conversion
process transfigures various physical quantities into homogeneous numbers. And numbers, it must be remembered, are abstractions that have no
solid tangible actuality. Moreover, since it is difficult to make sense of today's swirling, phantasmagorical media society, the general proposition
behind noise art may best be to look for a paradoxical summation of this
uncertainty by taking advantage of today's superficial image saturation
a saturation so dense that it fails to communicate anything particular at all
upon which we can concur, except perhaps its overall incomprehensible
sense of ripe delirium as the reproduction system pulses with higher and
higher, faster and faster flows of digital data to the point of near hysteria.
Perhaps the result of this ripe information abundance is that the greater the amount of information that flows, the greater the non-teleological
uncertainty that is produced. Hence noise. So, the tremendous load of
imagery/sound/text information digitally produced and reproduced all

The Art of Noisy Noologies 33

round us today ultimately seems to make less, not more, conventional teleological sense. Information as knowledge is myth.
This seems to be in agreement with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), as
he too thought that the boundaries which make up the various territories
of art historical knowledge needed to be transcended by their relation to
the depth of mythic representation.66 As a result, in my view, it is noise
art's obligation to see what mythic, unconventional, paradoxical, summational sensein terms of the rhizomatizing world of the imagination
noise might make of all this based on an appropriately decadent reading
of our paradoxically material-based (yet electronically activated) social
media environment.
This formulation is familiar with respect to the fantastical aspects
projected into the qualities of an idealized situation (as we know from
many kinds of antediluvian religious metaphysics and their artistic transcendental expressions). Salient here is that the function of the symbol
is to (supposedly) intellectually transposition people momentarily to
other realms of reality. Indeed one prime aspect of any noise is its ability
to relocate consciousness into another aspect of the world. 67 Noise art,
then, is a form of deviant encoding that precipitates inner shifts within
a communicative space by use of an annoying grammar that can smash
together and interfere with neighbouring discourses.
This subject of noise vision, and the rhetorical strategy needed to
explore it, especially interests me in that encounters with noise art (one
may assume) could create an opportunity for personal transgression and
for a vertiginous ecstasy of thought.68 As I suggested before, noise-based
perception-cognition (awareness) requires a plenum consciousness
where there is only the slightest difference between an intentional and
an involuntary exceeding of representation. Such an explosive collapse of
utilitarian consciousness (combined with the pursuit of inexactitude), I
wish to suggest, may fashion an abstract intensity within our perceptual
circuitryhence exceeding the assumed determinism of the technological-based phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in our post-industrial information society.
The history of art is, of course, full of new epistemological shifts and
I maintain here that the shift in perspective which noise provides is just
such a shift, replete with a newness based on a long preparatory gestational development.69 Indeed, it seems to me that as human psychic en-

34 Joseph Nechvatal

ergies are stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass

informational technology, such a personally transgressive ecstatic phenomena will most likely increasingly break out in forms of noisy thinkingresulting in noisy art.
In closing this introduction, I just want to mention that in my view
one of the most important characteristics of immersion into noise is its
sense of encompassing being within a field of vibratory enshrouding: an
intertwined embossed shrouding that places us at odds with the closed,
clich, visual-audio signal and resituates us within vibrancy.
The emergence of the theoretical project I have outlined above will, I
hope, contribute to the surpassing of thought representations by inventing a noisy thinking/art in which what matters is no longer only uninterrupted identities, or logos, or distinctive characters,70 but rather a lush,
phantasmagorical clamour developed on the basis of inclusion.71 Such
dynamic abstract thinking (and the art forms that result) I hope will be
presented to us only in an already pre-connected vivacious state of noise,
already articulated in that insinuated clatter that is linking us in a vacuole discourse which is both non-teleologically oriented and intellectually
responsible.

Chapter 1

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui

I consider myself successful only when I do something
that resembles the lack of order I sense.
Robert Rauschenberg

Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating

sobriety in that complementary to it?
Walter Benjamin, Reflections

To set in motion the above reflection, I will address my experiences and

understandings of noise as an immersive recalcitrance cultural characteristic through its sonic aspects.72 That is how noise is generally understood. But then (perhaps more perplexingly) I will address noise as
constructive visual, conceptual and theoretical phenomenon that has
both communicative and philosophical ramifications connected to the
unsound and the intricate.
Noise is a dark and thorny thought, for the notion of noise does not
have an unchanging, artistic unworthiness or worth. Rather noise is what
lies outside of our habitual comfort zone at any point in time.73 It is what
awakes us from our silent dream and leads us to the excesses of ecstatic
encounters.74 It is non-homogeneous and incomplete, while being always
hermetic. At the same time, noise is predominantly phantasmagorical.
It suggests an outside other and points us elsewhere by sabotaging our
sense of harmonious balance. Hence it is a corrective to efficiency and
aesthetic correctness and an urge for psychic newness, as we feel compelled to move on. In this sense it is aligned with a Dada-like illogical determination.75
One consequential effect of noise is on connected-internal cognizant
models, such as the psychological ego-center and the subject's psychological motivational drive; these are factors which raise felt intensity.

36 Joseph Nechvatal

Hence the persuasiveness of noise. This is demonstrated by the fact that

one enjoys noise as art (or doesnt) depending to a large extent on ones
personal psychological needs and adaptability in accordance with the
proposed audio cues. The philosophic rhizomatic theory of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (1930-1992), at a general level, supports such
a connectivist approach towards theorizing the noise experience, as rhizomatic theory encourages philosophic non-linear and non-restrictive
interdisciplinary thinking and hence reinterpretation, which in this case
will proceed from the point of view (not a point of fact anymore, but an
orb) of immersion into noise. A rhizome literally is a root-like plant stem
that forms a large entwined spherical zone of small roots that criss-cross.
In the philosophical writings of Deleuze and Guattari, the term is used
as a metaphor for an epistemology76 that spreads in all directions simultaneously.77 More specifically, Deleuze and Guattari define the rhizome
as that which is reducible to neither the One or the multiple. [] It has
neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it
grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n
dimensions having neither subject nor object.78
Noise music often delivers a rhizomatic Dionysian jittery quality
packed with levels of complexity, if not always indulgent Dionysian chaos. Certainly, noise (as art) merits the adjective polysemic, a word which
stems from the Greek phrase meaning many signs. A polysemic awareness of noise acknowledges the hypothetically infinite range of meanings
of noise that result when determinacy is replaced by indeterminacy, an
awareness which contradicts the verisimilitude thought to correspond
to the assumed exactitude of naive naturalism. Noise art is properly concerned with ideals of self-transcendence, then.
Nevertheless, for the sake of discussion, the reader will, I hope, consider my somewhat less precise and less formal definition of noise art as
boundary-quivering creation that involves the destruction of the conceptual
frame that often uses temporary excess coupled with negativity (in some
sense). In noise art, even a form of negation like anti-art79 functions finally as a way of opening up our capacity for plurality and expanding
what has heretofore been accepted.80 The preferred decisive point in understanding immersion into noise in the context of art is its facilitation of
a more potent conscious-totality in the art audience produced by merging
the audience's perceptual circuitry with the artwork.

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 37

Ultimately for me, though, noise is just a rupture signifying transmission of excess and/or negativity for the artist to employ or disregard at will.
It can be lavish and thrilling. It can be incredibly tedious and boring.
Good noise music has the proclivity to solicit us to respond to the
work in time in both a contemplative and physical way, or at least in an
implied tension between these two poles when one side outweighs the
other. Noise, as all sound, dissipates over time, hence the only consistent
non-expansive definition of the term noise that works for me in the context of the arts is in its irreversibility of time.
As it is bound to dissipate over time, noise is death hiding in life, and
it is true that expectations of death clearly condition our sense of boundaries. Our prospects for an everlasting life are not so drastically different
than they have ever been. So perhaps beauty and noise dont care for
each other much. Nevertheless, in respect to noise, lets consider Kants
formulation of his sublime idealsomething that moved philosophical
inquiry away from what was weakly established as the objective ideal in
which the world, and the human subject within it, could be described as
if from an outside (logocentric) position.81 Kant, in Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, showed us that intellectually humans
are incapable of knowing the sublime ultimate reality, but this need not,
and must not, according to Kant, interfere with the human obligation of
performing as though the ideal character of this reality were certain.
So without being certain, I will embark on this inharmonious meditation of noise discernment by remembering how I first became aware of
noise as a cultural agent with aesthetic power.
Tabulating Cybernetic Hendrix
My childhood was set in a rather peaceful suburban setting. The distant
sound of the train is the only noise I can recall, other than occasional
thunder and other sounds of nature. My first cultural aspect of noise occurred at age 17 when I attended The Jimi Hendrix Experience concert December 1, 1968 at the Chicago Coliseum and sat in the very last rowfar
far away from the stage. Hendrix appeared miniscule. However the speakers were located just behind my head and his grandiloquent feedback was
ear-splitting; an intensely pleasant, if disjunctive noise experience.

38 Joseph Nechvatal

That day I felt and sensed that this fabulous feedback I had been hearing was expressing inner aspirations for my own personal cybernetic circumstances, exemplified by Hendrixs ongoing mixing of the electronic
with the loose gesture. As pointed out by John Johnston in his The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI, a special
feature of cybernetic theories (theories of feedback systems primarily
based on the ideas of Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964) is that they explain
processes in terms of the organization of the system manifesting it (e.g.,
the circular causality of feedback-loops which enables cybernetics to
elucidate complex relationships from withinuseful in formulating a
creative epistemology concerned with the self-communication within
a psyche and between the psyche and the surrounding environment).82
I believe that via my confrontation with the exterior spectacle of Jimis
noise music, an intimate grandeur unfolded for me connected to noise
for the first time and a private readiness to amalgamate dislocated profusion was quickened. Indeed in reading Johnstons The Allure of Machinic
Life, I came across a quotation by Wiener on cybernetics83 where he discusses the study of automata, pointing out that one of its cardinal notions is the amount of disturbance or noise engaged.
Of course, Hendrix creatively used self-generating noisesthe
sounds that used to be denounced as non-musicaltherfore it seemed
to me, he understood that through the mediation of machines the technological built-in can be contorted and bent, thus changing our awareness of what technology is or can be. In that sense, his use of noise as
a musical element demonstrated to me for the first time how an art of
superabundance-proliferation can also be an art of pleasure that enlivens
us to the privatenessand unique separatenessof each of us in lieu of
the constructed social spectacle that engulfs and (supposedly) controls
us (through technology). This private excess/noise created a separateness that offered me a personal critical distance via a bacchanalia gap
with which to problematize technologyand thus another perspective
on (and from) my given social simplicity. Thus noise as music is rhizomatic and increases our cultural territory by moving towards deterritorialization. As such, noise music demands a different kind of hearing and
feeling not always belligerent and thunderous.

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 39

Noise Music
Generally speaking, Noise Music is a term used to describe varieties of
avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their
realization. In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty cites the
work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), Georges Bataille and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and, through their work, traces
the history of noise. He defines noise at different times as intrusive, unwanted, lacking skill, not being appropriate and a threatening emptiness, and he traces these trends starting with 18th century concert hall
music. Hegarty contends that it is John Cage's composition 4'33"in
which an audience sits through four and a half minutes of silencethat
represents the beginning of noise music proper.84 For Hegarty, noise music, as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between desirable sound (properly played
musical notes) and undesirable noise that make up all noise music from
Erik Satie (1866-1925) to NON to Glenn Branca.
Douglas Kahn, in his work, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in
the Arts, discusses the use of noise as a medium and explores the ideas of
Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, Sergei Eisenstein,
Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo and Dziga Vertov.85
In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali explores the
relationship between noise music and the future of society.86 He indicates
that noise music is a predictor of social change and demonstrates how
noise acts as the subconscious of society, validating and testing new social and political realities.87
Like much of modern and contemporary art, noise music takes characteristics of the perceived negative traits of noises and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways. One can find the distinct effort to create
something harshly beautiful from something perceived as ugly in what
can possibly be identified as a search for a post-industrial sublime in art.
In much the same way that the early modernists were inspired by nave art, some contemporary digital art noise musicians are excited by the
archaic audio technologies such as wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge,
and vinyl records. Many artists not only build their own noise-generating

40 Joseph Nechvatal

devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment and custom software (for example, the C++ software used in creating my viral
symphOny).88
For me, art noise combines stimulation into an all-inclusive totalization through sympathetic vibration, just as strings of a piano vibrate
in sympathetic agreement, especially when tuned to the tuning system
called just intonation. Just intonation, in music, is a system of tuning in
which the correct size of all the intervals of the scale is calculated by different additions and subtractions of pure natural thirds and fifths (the
intervals that occur between the fourth and fifth, and second and third
tones respectively, of the natural harmonic series). Supposedly used in
medieval monophonic music (melody without harmony) and considerably discussed by 20th-century sound artists and art-music theorists, just
intonation proved impractical for polyphonic (multi-part) music and was
replaced at least by the year 1500 by meantone temperament.
Noise art music can feature distortion,89 various types of acoustically
or electronically generated noise, randomly produced electronic signals
and non-traditional musical instruments. Noise music may also incorporate manipulated recordings, static, hiss and hum, feedback, live machine
sounds, custom noise software, circuit bent instruments, and non-musical vocal elements that push noise towards the ecstatic. The Futurist art
movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic,90 as
was the Dada art movement91 (a prime example being the Antisymphony of Jefym Golyscheff performed by Hannah Hch in Berlin on April
30th, 1919 with kitchen utensils)92 and later the Surrealist and Fluxus
art movements, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones, Yasunao Tone,
George Brecht, Wolf Vostell, Yoko Ono, Walter De Maria's Ocean Music,
La Monte Young, Robert Watts,93 Takehisa Kosugi and Milan Knizaks
Broken Music.94
During the early 1900s, a number of art music practitioners began exploring atonality. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg proposed the
incorporation of harmonic systems that were, at the time, considered dissonant. This guided the development of twelve-tone technique and serialism. In TheEmancipation of Dissonance, Thomas J. Harrison, in 1910,
suggested that this development might be described as a metanarrative to
justify the so-called Dionysian pleasures of atonal noise.95 Contemporary
noise music is often associated with excessive volume and distortion, par-

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 41

ticularly in the popular music domain with examples such as Boys Noize,
Jimi Hendrixs previously mentioned use of feedback, Nine Inch Nails
and Lou Reeds Metal Machine Music.
Other examples of music that contain noise-based features include
works by Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann,
Theater of Eternal Music, Cornelius Cardew, Rhys Chatham, Ryoji Ikeda,
Survival Research Laboratories, Whitehouse, Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic
TV, Jean Tinguelys recordings of his sound sculpture (specifically Bascule VII'), the music of Hermann Nitschs Orgien Mysterien Theater, and
La Monte Youngs bowed gong works from the late 1960s, for example
23 VIII 64 2:50:453:11 am The Volga Delta From Studies In The Bowed
Disc' from The Black Record (1969). Genres such as industrial, industrial
techno, and glitch music exploit noise-based materials.
Luigi Russolo, futurist painter of the very early 20th century, was perhaps the first noise music artist.96 His 1913 manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori,
translated as The Art of Noises, stated that the industrial revolution had
given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds.
Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise
music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number
of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori and assembled a noise
orchestra to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the
audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices
have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used
in performances. Although Russolo's works have little resemblance to
modern noise music, his pioneering creations cannot be overlooked as
an essential stage in the evolution of this genre, and many artists are now
familiar with his manifesto.97
An early Dada-related work from 1916 by Marcel Duchamp also
worked with noise, but in an almost silent way.98 His ready-made, With
Hidden Noise ( bruit secret), was a collaborative exercise that created a
noise instrument that Duchamp accomplished with Walter Arensberg.
What rattles inside when With Hidden Noise is shaken remains a mystery.
By the 1920s, modernists Edgard Varse and George Antheil began to
use early mechanical musical instrumentssuch as the player piano and
the sirento create music that mirrored the noise of the modern world.
Antheils best-known noise composition is his 30 minutes-long Ballet

42 Joseph Nechvatal

mcanique (1924), originally conceived as the musical accompaniment

to the Dada film of the same name by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Lger. Eventually the filmmakers and composers chose to let their creations
evolve separately, although the film credits still included Antheil. Nevertheless, Ballet mcanique premiered as concert music in Paris in 1926. In
1920, the poem Bruits (Noises) was created by Lajos Kassk, a Hungarian
painter, publisher and writer who made several visual poems with newspaper fragments and the superimposition of letters and graphics. In this
poem, noises are interpreted as interferences of the media.
Antonio Russolo, the brother of the more famous Luigi Russolo, was
another Italian Futurist composer. A 78rpm record made by him in 1921
is the only surviving sound recording that features the original intonarumori. Both pieces, Corale and Serenata, combined conventional orchestral music set against the famous noise machines. Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti also assembled noises into a collage in which silence is an integral part. In 1923, Arthur Honegger created Pacific 231, a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive. Arseny
Avraamov's composition Symphony of Factory Sirens involved navy ship
sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, foghorns,
artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes, a specially designed steamwhistle machine creating noisy renderings of Internationale and Marseillaise for a piece conducted by a team using flags and pistols when performed in the city of Baku in 1922.
In 1930, Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch recycled records to create sound montages and in 1936 Edgard Varese experimented with records by playing them backwards and varying the playback speeds. John
Cage started his Imaginary Landscape series in 1939, which combined
recorded sound, percussion, and, in the case of Imaginary Landscape #4,
twelve radios.99
In the 1940s, Pierre Boulez (who made his name with violently expressive scores and opinionated polemics) embodied a strict sound style
shorn of Romantic nostalgia and the detritus of a defunct tradition.100
Boulez moved on to the rigorously organized technique of total serialism,
which organized various aspects of soundpitch, duration, volume, and
attackinto a series of twelve, in line with the twelve-tone system. Under
the influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco, Lou Harrison and John
Cage began composing music for junk percussion ensembles, scouring

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 43

junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately-tuned brake

drums, flower pots, gongs, and more.
In Europe, during the late 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term
musique concrte to refer to the peculiar nature of sounds on tape, separated from the source that generated them initially. Following this, both
in Europe and America, other modernist art music composers such as
Karlheinz Stockhausen, G.M. Koenig, Pierre Henry, Iannis Xenakis, La
Monte Young, and David Tudor, explored sound-based composition. In
late 1947, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) recorded Pour en Finir avec le
Jugement de dieu (To Have Done With the Judgment of God), an audio piece
full of the seemingly random cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed
with various percussive elements, mixed with the noise of alarming human cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia.101
In 1949, Nouveau Realisme artist, Yves Klein, wrote The Monotone
Symphony, a symphony that consisted of one held note, thereby demonstrating that the sound of one sustained tone made viable music. Also in
1949, Boulez befriended John Cage, who was visiting Paris to do research
on the music of Erik Satie. John Cage had been pushing music in even
more startling directions during the war years, writing for prepared piano,
junkyard percussion, and electronic gadgetry. In Paris, Cage encountered
the pioneering electronic composer Pierre Schaeffer, who, after the war,
began assembling sound collages made up of pre-recorded pieces of tape.
The first of Schaeffer's Cinq tudes de bruits, or Five Noise Etudes, consists
of locomotive sounds that the composer recorded at a train station.
Back in New York in 1952, Cage constructed his own tape collage,
Williams Mix, made up of some 600 tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching. Cage's early radical phase reached its
height that summer of 1952, when he unveiled the first art Happening
at Black Mountain College, and 4'33", the so-called controversial silent
piece. The audience saw David Tudor sit at the piano, and close the lid.
Some time later, without having played any notes, he opened the lid. A
while after that, again having played nothing, he closed the lid. And after
a period of time, he opened the lid once more and rose from the piano.
The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor
or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he
timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score.
Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon: that

44 Joseph Nechvatal

there is no such thing as silence. Noise that may make musical sound is
always happening.
In 1957, Edgard Varse created on tape an extended piece of music
using noises not usually considered musical entitled Pome lectronique. Varse conceptualized his last work in the immersive, conceiving his
unfinished Espace as voices in the sky, as though magic, filling all space,
criss-crossing, overlapping, penetrating each other.
Among the techniques used in this period were tape manipulation,
subtractive synthesis, and improvised live electronics.
On May 8th, 1960, six young Japanese musicians, including Takehisa
Kosugi and Yasunao Tone, formed the Group Ongaku with two tape recordings of noise music: Automatism and Object. These recordings made
use of a mixture of traditional musical instruments along with a vacuum cleaner, a radio, an oil drum, a doll, and a set of dishes. Moreover,
the speed of the tape recording was manipulated, further distorting the
sounds being recorded.
The art critic Rosalind Krauss argued that, by 1968, artists such as
Robert Morris, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra had entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist. Sound art found itself in the same condition, but with an added
emphasis on distribution. Anti-form process art became the term used
to describe this post-modern, post-industrial culture and the process
by which it is made. Serious art music responded to this conjuncture in
terms of intense noise, for example the La Monte Young Fluxus composition 89 VI 8 C. 1:42-1:52 AM Paris Encore From Poem For Chairs, Tables,
Benches, Etc. Young's composition Two Sounds (1960) was composed for
amplified percussion and windowpanes, and his Poem for Tables, Chairs
and Benches (1960) used the sounds of furniture scraping across the floor.
In addition, a process of anti-form free noise emerged out of the avantgarde jazz tradition with musicians such as John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra
and the Arkestra, Albert Ayler, Peter Brtzmann, and John Zorn. In the
1970s, the concept of art itself expanded and groups like Survival Research Laboratories, Borbetomagus and Elliott Sharp embraced and extended the most dissonant and least approachable aspects of these musical/spatial concepts.

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 45

Around the same time, the first postmodern wave of industrial noise
music appeared with Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and NON (aka
Boyd Rice). These cassette culture releases often featured zany tape editing, stark percussion and repetitive loops distorted to the point where
they may degrade into harsh noise. In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial
noise groups like Current 93, Hafler Trio, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Laibach, Steven Stapleton, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Smegma, Nurse
with Wound and Einstrzende Neubauten performed industrial noise
music mixing loud metal percussion, guitars and unconventional instruments (such as jackhammers and bones) in elaborate stage performances. These industrial artists experimented with varying degrees of noise
production techniques.
Other postmodern art movements influential to postindustrial noise
art are Conceptual Art and the Neo-Dada use of techniques such as assemblage, montage, bricolage, and appropriation.102 Bands like tant
Donns, Le Syndicat, Test Dept, Clock DVA, Factrix, Autopsia, Nocturnal Emissions, Whitehouse, Severed Heads, Sutcliffe Jgend and SPK
soon followed. For me, their noise stood in defiance of the limits of ordinary perception and representation. Thus it was about the opposition
between the various pleasures of standard music and the transgressive/
ecstatic moment. In a sense, it attempted to set up a stable form of ecstatic transgression where I could go back and forth at will. This is perhaps similar to the tongue-in-cheek idea behind the amusing Excessive
Machine in the film Barbarella.103
The sudden post-industrial affordability of home cassette recording
technology in the 1970s, combined with the simultaneous influence of
punk rock, established the no wave aesthetic, and instigated what is commonly referred to as noise music today.
Lou Reed's double LP album, Metal Machine Music (1975) is an early,
well-known example of commercial studio noise music that the music
critic Lester Bangs has called the greatest album ever made in the history
of the human eardrum. It has also been cited as one of the worst albums
of all time. Reed was well aware of the electronic drone music of La
Monte Young. His Theater of Eternal Music was a seminal minimal music noise group in the mid-1960s with Velvet Underground cohort John
Cale, Marian Zazeela, Henry Flynt, Angus Maclise, Tony Conrad, and
others. The Theater of Eternal Music's discordant sustained notes and

46 Joseph Nechvatal

loud amplification had influenced John Cale's subsequent contribution

to the Velvet Underground in his use of both discordance and feedback.
John Cale and Tony Conrad have released noise music recordings they
made during the mid-sixties, such as Cale's Inside the Dream Syndicate series (The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and
Conrad to their collective work with La Monte Young).
The aptly named noise rock fuses rock to noise, usually with recognizable rock instrumentation, but with greater use of distortion and electronic effects, varying degrees of atonality, improvization, and white noise.
One notable band of this genre is Sonic Youth who took inspiration from
the no wave noise composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham (himself
a student of La Monte Young). Marc Masters, in his book on the no wave,
points out that aggressively innovative early dark noise groups like Mars
and DNA drew on punk rock, avant-garde minimalism and performance
art. Important in this noise trajectory are the nine nights of noise music
called Noise Fest that was organized by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in
the NYC art space White Columns in June 1981, followed by the Speed
Trials noise rock series organized by Live Skull members in May, 1983.
Also notable in this vein is Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, an avantgarde recording by John Lennon and Yoko Ono from 1968 consisting of
repeating tape loops as John Lennon plays on different rock instruments
such as piano, organ and drums along with sound effects (including reverb, delay and distortion), changes tapes and plays other recordings, and
converses with Yoko Ono, who vocalises ad-lib in response to the sounds.
They followed this recording with another noise recording in 1969 entitled Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions.
Since the late 1980s in Japan, there has been a prolific output of
harsh noise music (often referred to as japanoise) by the noise figurehead Merzbow (pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita
who himself was inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitterss Merz art
project of psychological collage). Other Japanese noise artists include
Boredoms, C.C.C.C., Incapacitants, KK Null, Yamazaki Masos Masonna,
Solmania, K2, The Gerogerigegege, and Hanatarash.104
Following in the wake of industrial noise music, noise rock, no wave
and harsh noise, there has been a flood of noise musicians whose ambient, microsound or glitch-based work is often subtler to the ear.105 Kim
Cascone refers to this development as a postdigital movement and de-

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 47

scribes it as an aesthetic of failure.106 Post-industrial noise artists from the

1980s, 1990s and 2000s include Alva Noto, Nicolas Collins, Boyd Rice,
The Psychic Workshop, Signal, Stephen Vitiello, If, Bwana, PBK Phillip
B. Klingler, Aube, Crawling With Tarts, Andrew Deutsch, Randy Grief,
Robin Rimbaud, Minoy, Kim Cascone, Master/slave Relationship, Oval,
Boards of Canada, Maybe Mental, Kenji Siratori, Thanasis Kaproulias
(Novi-Sad), Fennesz, Matthew Underwood, Yasunao Tone, Noise Maker's Fifes, Pole, Arcane Device and Francisco Lpez, among many others.
Richie Hawtin, Jan Jelinek, Ricardo Villalobos, Decomposed Subsonic,
Trentemller and other Minimal techno and Microhouse DJs have been
using noise elements such as buzz, hum and clicks as sonic flavor since
the early 1990s.107
Their noisy view of post-industrial society takes into account the rich
ensemble of possible relations (the diversity, the unexpected links, the
ruptures, the amalgamations, the connected heterogeneity) that Deleuze
and Guattari showed us. Indeed for many artists, myself included, Deleuze and Guattaris vision of post-industrial life re-opened a way for the
production of subjectivity in art108 by affirming the befittingness of multiplicity coupled with the necessary right to dissension typical of art noise.
Tabulating Datamatics [ver. 2.0]
On October 29th, 2007 I attended a concert by the Japanese composer
Ryoji Ikeda at the Centre Pompidou in Paris called Datamatics [ver 2.0].
At the time, Datamatics [ver 2.0] was the latest electronic audio/visual
creation of Ikeda where he mines data mania for both the material and
the theme of his work. The intention is a meditation on the wild relationship between the sound of data and the data of sound today. The effect,
however, is a furious formalism that effectively entices, but flattens and
thins out the longer it goes on. That said, the macabre grandeur of Datamatics [ver 2.0], with its repetitive super-coded/anti-coded rigor, is stunningly beautiful on dbut. A furious rhythm of inscrutable data discord is
established from the beginning, necessarily entailing a process of attraction/repulsion that intimidated me while spawning some sublime ideas.
Ikeda makes speed manifest here, including the various speeds and
slownesses that extend the retinal limit in a way that would be previously
regarded as outside of phenomenological thought. The complex instal-

48 Joseph Nechvatal

lation work of Tatsuo Miyajima came to mind at points. Specifically Miyajimas 1996 installation at La Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, where he made two large installations which dealt with the abstract
constitution of time in the digital age. Both installations consisted of
abundant LED signal-lights that flashed a countless bevy of over-excited
digital numbers in what appeared to be a random order. One installation, Time Go Round, had twenty green and red digital modules spinning
in various circular orbits against an imposing dark wall. One discerned
there a mystifying data constellation in transit, reminiscent of passages
from Mona Lisa Overdrive.109
Time Go Round was an attempt to delineate the crisis of time in relationship to the dispersed ontological self in the information age
(where digital time as the only time has become non-problematic in
computational work environments). Miyajimas artistic sense of time in
crisis served to encourage me to value the freedom of my own interior
sense of time.
By contrast, Ikedas evocation of data time is riding high on speed,
and tempo here took on the implication of a dark temporal pop-cultural
product pit into which my accurate perceptions were pouredeven as I
resisted fragmentation and remained fixed in the logocentric seat of Renaissance three-point-perspective. This principle of hyper speed coupled
to visual overload makes inoperable the usefulness of the term minimal
in association with Ikeda, as Datamatics [ver 2.0] animates a crumbling of
the normal monuments to human difference we construct daily. Ikedas
mixture of technical precision with perceptual overload presented a significant challenge to experiencing interior time. Perhaps it would have
been possible had I been able to divorce the musical experience from the
visual torrent.
Ikedas rapid techno music is created from slight electronic hums and
pops that build into gargantuan sonic textures, sometimes reaching the
noise intensity of Merzbow. Given his cornucopiastic range, Ikeda, quite
scrupulously, defies melodious categorization. This range allows for virtuoso moments that provide the opportunity of exploring the intricacy
of his hard-edged myriad-colored dexterity as he plays back-and-forth
with elaborate but lucid musical aggregates that facilitated mild waves of
aural imbrication. In piercing clouds of cacophony I heard traces of Xenakis, La Monte Young, Boulez, and Aphex Twin.

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 49

But Ikedas primary tool of coherence is what in acoustics is called

duration, the steady-state of a sound at its maximum intensity. My supposition here is that Ryoji Ikeda takes this musical phenomena of duration and extends it into a general spatial intelligence based on petite
bursts of sound. The attraction to such an adjoining structure is strong,
but it wanes quickly. I suppose it must be like doing business with a rather spectacular whore.
Conceptually, Ikedas music reminds me that our once basic Euclidean conception of space has been expanded to include the formation
of many-dimensional space. In Ikedas music, the Euclidean concept of
space is modified via excess by enlarging the number of vectors that may
be constructed within it from three to some much larger number (designated as n). Such n space implies the existence of a higher-dimensional
geometry that mimics Euclidean geometry. Inevitably this approach
shaped me as the viewer/listener into an inert subject. The audio is both
clean, noisy and hardheaded in such a way that the individual's personal
extension into the virtual tends to be blunted.
There is also, however, another proposed spatial reality relevant to
Ikeda, most notably the topological space model of fuzzy space where
there exists only a concept of nearness. In this respect he reminds us that
hearing and seeing is not an activity divorced from consciousness.
But really, any account of Ikedas sonic dexterity as related to consciousness is inadequate to our actual experience of it. Yes, his music
is conceptual in that his sound deprives us of our habitual perceptive
boundaries by surpassing them. Through the excessive, Ikeda makes us
remember that throughout time there have been consensual realities that
have proven to be nothing but vast daydreams. But Ikedas music spectacularly fails to be in opposition to what Donald Lowe in his History of
Bourgeois Perception identifies as the bourgeois perceptual field, a mode
that he characterizes as fundamentally linear, non-reflexive and overtly
objective.110
So, to conclude, Ikedas initially mesmerizing presentation was an experience always about to come. I say about to come as Datamatics [ver
2.0] contains much manic machinic stuttering (full of Nietzschean multiple affirmations and shattered teleological art-historical/art-hysterical
continuums) that never resolve. The stuttering I am addressing here rests,
of course, in the spectral repetitions of his mental-machinic procedures:

50 Joseph Nechvatal

we see and hear a digital/mechanical shifting again and again and again
and again and again and again, but with slight variations full of dazzling
lan. So it is a vigorous abstract stuttering I sensed in the work that took
me down into a deadening sensation of unfathomable data: the data of
anytime-anywhere. Given that implication of mythic indifference, Ikedas
a/v stuttering could be properly aligned with the Dada artistic legacy of
Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. It is a form of digital-dada, post-conceptual
art-music in its absurd machinic indifference.
How does Datamatics [ver 2.0] achieve this meticulous indifferent
stuttering? Ikeda uses the precision of digital technology to fracture data
into tangled networks of beeps and linesinitially delightful and exquisite nihilistic manipulations that tease our mind with their multiple syntactical/semantic gestures of sadism, strenuously massacring the social
source material along the way. But like Op Art111 (which it resembles)
on crack, this stuttering stuttering stuttering turns tedious and cold, shutting down feeling, reflection and contemplation and hence imagination
in my mind. In that sense, Ikeda only created pictographic and aural excavational moments that cannot be sustained, but are instead mental acts
worthy of short but frequent revitalizations: again and again and again
and againa visual/audio whiplash that slashes into the burnt annals
of symbolist romanticism. To follow Ikeda there is to evaporate into
the puzzling archives of some geek heretical doctrine and pop out again
into a dead excess vis--vis ideology writ large as system. In that sense,
he pictures/sounds as an obscene thrashing of, and ongoing onslaught
against, innocence.
Alors? So are these subsequent revelations an abiding labyrinthian
form of abject nothingness? Yes, Datamatics [ver 2.0] is a blustering,
bursting, blatant, banality, but even so I saw/heard in Datamatics [ver 2.0]
the melancholy monstrous traces and dissimilative Dionysian mannerisms of Novalis, Chateaubriand, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Aragon,
Bataille, Lautramont and Roussel. That is hardly farcical nothing (albeit
by way of negation folded upon negation/instrumentalization upon instrumentalization). But what is missing in Datamatics [ver 2.0] for me
is vague imagery and sound that does not depend on induction or deduction, and exists prior to these forms of controlling cognitions. In that
sense, Datamatics [ver 2.0] cries out for access to the libraries of other
peoples subconscious experiences.

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 51

So Ryoji Ikedas Datamatics [ver 2.0] is a stuttering in a hygienic but

deranged tongue within the vernacular of shattered techno signs and
computer music clichs. In that way Datamatics [ver 2.0] is anti-automatismic. We are forced to think creatively and distinctively if we hope to
un-pack and self-interpret its quintessentially dancing chaotic vision par
excellence. And when we do: we finally do comeenigmatic-lithe jouissance. But the jolt has been sadly self-inflicted, lacking, as it does, the
tragic/emphatic psychic dimensions of artificial life (I saw or felt no field
of intensities invoking the inchoate and the savage) and the open multiple model of atmospheric free associations. Thus the event went a bit
lacking, for me, in what Deleuze suggested to us (via Proust): something
real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.
Tabulating Cecil Taylor
Ikedas concert brought back to mind another concert I attended by Cecil
Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York on the 28th of February in 2002.
Given his gigantic musical range, Cecil Taylor quite scrupulously defies
melodious categorization. What we can say is that, with a piano, Taylor
creates gargantuan sonic envelopes to float in. This I eerily experienced
again at his euphonious performance as he exquisitely explored the intricacy of his myriad-colored dexterity by playing back-and-forth with elaborate/lucid musical paradigms and triumphal aggregates like the virtuoso
he is. In clouds of muscularly produced tinkling cacophony were heard
exquisite dashes of Fats Waller, Xenakis, Bud Powell, La Monte Young,
Brahms, John Coltrane, Aphex Twin (drukqs), Sun Ra, John Cage and, of
course, Theolonius Monk. His music, then, is a vigorous paradox where
customary opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect.
Cecil began recording in 1955, working with Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger, and Dennis Charles. (Neidlinger, an experienced symphonic
bassist, once said that no musician he'd ever met, including Stravinsky
and Boulez, had musical abilities that exceeded Taylor's, and that he is
potentially the most important musician in the western world.) The
group had an extended, six-week engagement at the Five Spot Cafe in
New Yorkliterally introducing the concept of modern jazz to a club
that shortly thereafter became one of its legendary venuesand made an
appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, which Verve recorded in 1957.

52 Joseph Nechvatal

In 1958, he recorded with Earl Griffith, Charles and Neidlinger for Contemporary (Looking Ahead), and with John Coltrane for United Artists
(Coltrane Time). Taylor also made his own date for that label in 1959, and
more Candid sessions through to 1961 (Mosaic collected the complete
Candid sessions on a comprehensive four-disc boxed set in 1992).
Taylors primary tool of coherence is what, in acoustics, is called envelope. Envelope, in music, involves the onset, growth, and decay of a
sound. Growth consists of the rate of increase of a sound to steady-state
intensity. Duration refers to the steady-state of a sound at its maximum
intensity, and decay is the rate at which it fades to silence. Envelope is an
important element of timbre, the distinctive quality, or tone color, of a
sound. My supposition here is that Cecil Taylor takes this musical phenomena of envelope and extends it into a more general peripheral spatial intelligence best called holonogic.112 Yes, I think it is sensible to make
use of the holonogic schematic model of Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
(established in his books Beyond Reductionism and The Ghost in the Machine)113 when trying to appreciate the music of Cecil Taylor in that no
set or frame of perceptions may be experienced in isolation or as a single
part of a finite perceptual collection within the holonogic model.
Taylors performance fantastically fits the holonogic paragon starting
with its ritualistic beginning (which suggested deep African ceremonial
consciousness in dialogue with Taylors roots as a tap dance) to its empyrean conclusion.
The concert began with four intense piano solos, with Cecil producing some muffled and deeply eccentric vocalizations. These solos all imploded and exploded with those detailed musical references cited above.
I had to close my eyes to even attempt at hearing all the musical ideas simultaneously present. The acoustics are phenomenal at Alice Tully Hall,
though, and they facilitated mild waves of aural imbrication. This made
for a rather complex musical reckoning.
Taylors music reminds me that our once basic Euclidean conception
of space has been expanded to include the formation of many-dimensional space. In Taylors music, the Euclidean concept of space is modified by enlarging the number of vectors that may be constructed within
it from three to some much larger number. There is also, however, another proposed spatial reality relevant to Taylors music called curvedspaceor curved space/time. Curved-space is approximately Euclidean

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 53

over very small regions, but over large regions all geometrical properties
break down. Curvature is combined with Euclidean geometry with the
increase of dimensions plotted. There are also a number of other generalized spaces that drop the Euclidean geometry completely, most notably
the topological space model and fuzzy space where there is only a concept of nearness.
Part II of the concert consisted of Taylors piano playing with (sometimes within) the dazzling percussion of Jackson Krall. This accomplished performancewhich included him sassily playing the mise-enscne with his stickswould be appropriate to anybody analyzing noise
music and the holonogic principle. The colossal, deep base atmospheric
spectrum was handled by Dominic Duval. Playing concurrently, the
three sensitively roared. At moments I could hear the majestic universe
bellowand then whimper. Everybody who has ever seen Taylor play
livewith or without other musiciansknows this. He does this to the
entire room by unframing our mind and ears and expanding the listeners
sensitivity both to noise and to the most delicate tiny musical moments.
The music then remains beautiful to recall. In this respect he reminds us
that hearing is not an activity divorced from consciousness.
But like with Ikeda, any account of Taylors sonic dexterity as related
to consciousness is again inadequate to our actual experience of it. But
the holonogic model of cognitive-aural processing is useful for a one-ofmany possible accounts of its reverberations. Yes, his music is particularly
holonogic as his sound deprives us of our habitual perceptive boundaries by surpassing them. Through excessive deprivation, Taylor makes us
remember that throughout time there have been consensual realities that
have proven to be nothing but vast daydreams, such as the conviction
that the earth is at the center of the universe. Yes, the holonogic model
befits Taylors adroitness because according to Koestler's holon concept,
instead of cutting up immersive perceptual wholes into discrete focal
parts, noise immersion should be scrutinized and understood using synthetic sub-whole sets found within ambient space.114 And Taylors music
deserves this level of attendant complex scrutiny.
Such an approach to Taylors music is consistent with, and indeed
epitomises, the ideals of hermeneutics, insofar as in hermeneutics the
central notion is that we cannot grasp the meaning of a portion of a work
until we understand the whole, even though one cannot understand the

54 Joseph Nechvatal

whole until one understands the parts that make it up. However, hermeneutics is not merely a paradox, since hermeneutics indicates that any
act of interpretation occurs through time, with adjustments and modifications being made to one's comprehension of both the parts and the
whole in a circular manner, until some type of resolution is attained.
Such an extensively engrossed holonogic/hermeneutic approach towards the music of Cecil Taylor is noise in opposition to the bourgeois
perceptual field. Insofar as our adult creativity derives primarily from our
conspicuous potential for abstraction (which characterizes our genus)
and in our craving and manipulation of abstractions, what is at stake for
Cecil Taylor here is our acceptance of our entire atmospheric sensation
as our genuine field of conscious creative interestan abstract field that
calls on our tremendous expansive qualities for which the descriptions of
the scientist and the doctor have not done suitable justice.
Tabulating Power Electronics
My increased involvement in this topic of noise music was launched in
downtown Manhattan during the heyday of no wave music. My enjoyment of the music of Glenn Branca, DNA, Rhys Chatham (with whom I
played music, but more importantly collaborated with on a no wave noise
opera called XS)115 and others, coupled with my growing knowledge of
Fluxus and Minimalist art music as archivist to La Monte Young, led me
to curate two noise issues of Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine:116Power Electronics (1986)117 which led me to meeting Merzbow, and later, Media
Myth (1988).118
The basic premise behind Power Electronics and Media Myth was the
exploration of the introspective world of the ear under the influence of
the eras high-frequency electronic environment. Since it was difficult
making sense of the 1980s swirling media society, the general proposition behind Power Electronics and Media Myth was to look for a paradoxical summation of this uncertainty by looking for artists who took
advantage of the times superficial saturationa saturation so dense
that it failed to communicate anything particular at all upon which we
could concur, except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of ripe
deliriumas the Reaganomic reproduction system pulsed with higher

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 55

Figure 3 XS the Opera: Shakespeare Theater Boston 1986

and higher, faster and faster, flows of senseless info-data to the point of
near hysteria.
Perhaps the result of this ripe information abundance was that the
greater the amount of Reaganomic information that flowed, the greater
the incredulity which it produced, at least for thinking, questioning artists. So, the tremendous load of data produced and reproduced all around
us ultimately seemed to make less, not more, conventional sense. Indeed,
this feeling became the premise of both Power Electronics and Media Myth.
This supposition about noise and noise music, it seems to me, plays
into the history of abstract visual art which teaches us that art may refuse to recognize all thought as existing in the form of representation
and that, by scanning the spread of representation, sound art may formulate an understanding of the laws that provide representation with its
organizational basis. As a result, in my view, as mentioned above, it was
electronic-based sound art's onus to see what unconventional, paradoxical, summational sensein terms of the subjective world of the imaginationart might make based on an appropriately decadent reading of our
times paradoxically material-based (yet electronically activated) media
environment.
Such a basically abstract, artistic, paradoxical/summational fancy
began with the presumption that an information-loaded nuclear weapon had already exploded, showering us with bits of radioactive-like in-

56 Joseph Nechvatal

formational sound bytes, thus drastically changing the way in which we

perceive and act, even in our subconscious dream worlds. It is this internal, subconscious, paradoxical drama of the Reaganomic, 80sthis subconscious contradictory tensionthat I found potentially interesting in
conceiving Power Electronics and Media Myth and as a subject specifically
suitable for electronic-based sound art.
Electronic-based sound art, by virtue of its distinctive electron constitution of fluidity, floats in an extensive stratosphere of virtuality. Hence,
the particular constitution of Power Electronics and Media Myth is best
seen, perhaps today, as an osmotic membrane: a blotter of the 1980s instantaneous ubiquity/proliferation. Consequently, Power Electronics and
Media Myth reflected (and worked with) social power. Power Electronics
and Media Myth, when viewed as shaped by the de-centered electronic
overload of the 80s, is understood today as a flustered code of digital signifiers, a confused collective representation that bewilderingly mutated
the ideology of its own reproduction.
So, the question for these projects was, how could artists symbolically turn these de-centered power codes into artistic abstractions of social merit? Perhaps it was possible because I knew, somewhere, that these
symbolic codeswhich, after all, helter-skelter, make us upare positively phantasmagorical.
This is still, of course, true today. Based on the premises of Power Electronics and Media Myth, perhaps a socially relevant digitally-based audio
noise creativity can be found also in today's electronic-based art's ecstatic
potentialityin that electrons partake (and make up) the all-encompassing phantasmagorical/technological sign-field in which we live and which
defines us (at least in part). Since prevailing representation is made up of
conventional, rigid social signs (and sound art typically of unconventional irresponsible signsthe mode that represents the real arbitrary nature of all signs as it subverts the socially controlled system of meaning),
electronic-based sound art may offer us the opportunity for the creation
of relevant and applicable anti-social phantasmagorical signs (hence,
abstract ecstatic anti-signs) which may continue to mentally move and
multiply us without stop. Yet this fancied aesthetic non-knowledge is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious area of our
current identity, as it is also the phantasmal depths from which all digital
representation emerges in its precarious, but glittering, existence. Indeed

Into Noise: Tabula Rasa vs. Horror Vacui 57

it was this quivering phantasmal cohesion that maintains the sovereign

and secret sway over each and every audio samplethis phantasmal vibratingwhich I found interesting in conceiving both Power Electronics
and Media Myth; a sway beyond reductive minimalist abstraction into an
excessive hybrid abstractionan audio art, which is in theory opposed
to the tabular mental space laid out by classical thought.119
Surely such a hybrid electronica/phantasmal impetus can help release
pent up ecstatic energies in that the more overwhelming and restrictive
the social mechanism, the more exaggerated are the resulting effects
and hence excel the assumed determinism of the technological-based
phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in our post-industrial information
society. Therefore, in this way, I hoped Power Electronics and Media Myth
served as an ecstatic impulse/phenomena that proliferates in proportion
to the technicization of societyas such a nervous electronica-ecstasy
may occur as a result of technological society's obsession with the phantasmal character of electronic speed-proliferation.
My contention is that, as human psychic energies are stifled and/or
bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass technology, such a nervous ecstatic phenomena will increasingly break out in forms of noise art.
Similarly, simulation technologywhen used in the creation of electronica-based artpromotes an indispensable alienation from the socially
constructed self, necessary for the outburst of such nervously ecstatic
experiences/acts. Inversely, electronic technology enables the contemporary artist to express nervous ecstatic reactions in ways never before
possible. Thus, this nervous ecstatic counteraction provides a phantasmal
defiance through transport aimed against the controlling world's blandness and self-destructiveness. This aesthetic noise philosophy provides a
fundamental antithesis to the authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the controlling technical world.
May I just say that the nervous phantasmal play of noises found in
Power Electronics and Media Myth (using strategies of jamming, non-communication, miscommunication, interference and disruption) has urgent
political/social ramifications in our media-saturated society today. The
artists well-founded but ambiguous phantasmal model for noise art indicates the capacity for electronic media to jolt consciousness, as it provides
the explication of the nervous phantasmal links that abet communications. Hence, excessive and noisy audio abstractions, such as those found

58 Joseph Nechvatal

here, can be (in a sense) the representation of all representation when

they attempt to represent the unlimited field of representation via noise,
a noise which non-utilitarian phantasmal ideology attempts to scrutinize
in accordance with a non-discursive method. An unlimited field of representation that now appears as an abstract din of nerve-noise where excessive abstraction helps us to step outside of representations to posit us
outside of the mechanics of uniform and anthropomorphic dogmatism.
With this art of noise as an unlimited field of representation in mind,
we will now open our eyes.

Chapter 2

Noise Vision
...'consciousness' in the function of self-reflexivity
should be operating within the elements of
the work (proposition) of art itself.
Joseph Kosuth, Within the Context: Modernism and Critical Practice

Lascaux is the passage from the work world to the play world,
which is the passage from the Homo Faber to the Homo Sapien.
Georges Bataille, Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art

The transition from audio noise to visual noise based on ideas of an unlimited field of representation requires, I believe, the judicious use of the
process of Deleuzian/Guattarian nomadic thinking. Accordingly, Deleuzian/Guattarian noise descriptions would be composed of variously
formed segments, stratas, and lines of flight that involve territorializing as
well as deterritorializing spacio/psychic activities.120 Even so, I acknowledge in advance that all methods, explanations, and theories (including
the nomadic) inevitably distance consciousness from its first sense of full
and total participation. This acknowledgement will remain a particularly
important point of consideration here, as ideas of spacio/psychic critical distance and non-distanced (non-spatial) disembodied fusion rub up
against each other and influence the psychic space required for reflection
on the thorny concept of aesthetic immersion into noise (which entails a
lack of distance) as the atmospheric gulf between the immersant and the
immersive aesthetic environment is ideally dissolved.
In this light, it might be possible to define noise art as conditions and
orders of conscious awareness in which perception-cognition (i.e., awareness
linked to the process of forming intelligence) is found to consist of more than
everyday (non-conceptual) vision or hearing typically reveals, by merging it
with some manifestation suggestive of a magnificent more. This condition

60 Joseph Nechvatal

may be thought of as a bypassing of habitual processes of art through an

assiduously expanded macro-intelligence based on conditions of excess
that provide us with an unfilled sense of internal union with unrealizable
breadth through noise.
When I use the terminology expanded here I am referring to the rich
meaning given to it by Gene Youngblood in his book Expanded Cinema,
as that which transgresses and exceeds the customary boundaries of our
optic encounters. When Youngblood discusses what he calls expanded
cinema, he refers it to an expanded consciousness.121
By noise consciousness I mean, then, our miscellaneous neurological/
ontological sense of the gradient unity of sentient self in internal discord122 with its surrounding milieu, that mental property of atmospheric
self-attentive awareness, cognisance and feeling that allows us to experience a sense of nexus with our ostensibly unified surroundings, albeit
laced with vicissitudes.123 I have observed (in myself) that noise in art
tends towards unconstrainment while being based on a routine sense
of shifting-self within the ambient scene which is experienced when
self-attentive.
From a philosophical perspective, synthesis is the procedure by which,
once thought, separate elements of a system are assembled into a union
of an undivided whole, so that the consequent unity is something more
than the mere sum of its unmitigated parts. Synthesis proceeds from the
stand-alone, separate elements discerned by analysis, but it supersedes
analysis by raising the particulars to the point of being conscious of their
larger comprehensive framework.
According to Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory, art and aesthetics must not try to erase fractures through integration but rather
preserve in the aesthetic whole the traces of those elements which may
have resisted integration.124 Noise as art does just that. However, an understanding of this noisy, self-attentive shifting-self through listening requires a surpassing of the limiting tropes of logical positivist empiricism
(typical in indexical thought), as noise consciousness starts in the nondelineating darkness of closed (but debonair) eyes. That is where the
beginnings of idiosyncratic human imagination seems to dwellin the
dark. But a consideration of this self-attentive, immersed, shifting-self is
also post-logical positivist in that it accepts various theories of consciousness that discuss consciousness as being emergent rather than represen-

Noise Vision 61

tational. Sigmund Freud (who we must remember was a theorist who

rooted his theories in anecdotal evidence and whose writing was literary)
identified an artist as one who offers insights into such an emergent consciousness as it emerged from within the unconscious realm. Moreover,
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) maintained that being is the most unconscious of concepts because we are thoroughly immersed in it.
The terminology consciousness means verbatim with knowingness and
stems from the Latin verb scire (which means to know), as does the word
science. But this is not all there is to it as applied to art. For consciousness in art seems to be ultimately like a web woven in the mind/body,
of various silken-strands spun forth from interlacing states of unconscious desire which semi-automatically control the paradigmatic creation
and reception of art. This definition coincides with R. G. Collingwood's
definition of consciousness, in paradigmatic art terms, as that which is
a kind of thought which stands closest to sensation or mere feeling
as transformed into imagination.125 Paradigmatic consciousness has
emerged in the 20th century largely due to the philosophical work of the
American philosopher Thomas Kuhn who argued that scientific progress does not simply occur in stages based on neutral observations but
that all observation is theory-laden. For Kuhn, the history of science (and
I would argue art as well) is characterized by revolutions in outlook.126
Indeed, unconscious desires shape the paradigms that contour intentional expressions in art through the subtle powers of sublimation when the
sexual desires of the libido are turned into cultural ones via the mediation
of the artist's ego. The question of how Freudian unconscious desires are
manifest in conscious cultural noise production and interpretation will
be one of our minor themes throughout. This is a non-problematic working assumption in that even those who maintain that art is fundamentally
a materialistic, social, and conscious product127 acknowledge that the role
and function of art is located in its power to change consciousness.128

62 Joseph Nechvatal

Nerve Noise Visualization

In the realm of the affective imponderable, the image provided
by my nerves takes the form of the highest intellectuality,
which I refuse to strip of its quality of intellectuality.
Antonin Artaud, Manifesto In Clear Language

One way to apprehend an ambient field's felt scopic atmosphere is to think

of it in terms of a study of cognitive-visual acoustics. This is equitable in
that sight itself is nothing other than a continuous pattern of perpetually changing light-data recorded on the retina which we humans process
through the aggregated internal acts of discerning. To understand noise
vision as being non-inflected with subtle properties akin to the acoustic
properties of echo, range, pitch, timbre, and tone is to discern all visual
moments as being indiscriminately equal, and as flat. Cognitive-perceiving is continuously allocated by tones of recognition, ranges of totality,
and distributed visual echoes as humans produce a full interpretation
of the plethoric information which hits their retinas in order to assign it
cultural meaning. More precisely, such an acoustic-like cognitive-visuality would involve the equivalent of what in acoustics is called envelope
(previously explained) as visual attention has characteristics of attack,
growth, duration, and decay in terms of peripheral spatial intelligence
(when self-attended to). Such attention calls for the viewers active and
self-conscious engagement with art.
By studying such an envelope noise vision in terms of immersion, in a
sense this book participates in the recent investigations of visuality into
what Martin Jay has called the ocular character of all Western culture
and the Cartesian perspectivalism that dominates the modern era129
a Cartesian perspectivalism which, according to Hal Foster, separates
subject from object, rendering the first transcendental and the second
inert.130 Such investigations include Guy Debord's (1931-1994) critique
of the Society of the Spectacle,131 Jacqueline Rose's investigation into the
sexuality of the objectifying, male, patriarchal gaze,132 and Michel Foucault's (1926-1984) analysis of the panopticon paradigm.133
When talking about noise vision, it must be remembered that, in philosophy, synthetic statements are those statements judged to be true or
false in relationship to the world (but which are not necessary ones), as
opposed to analytical truths, which are necessary, and hence cannot be

Noise Vision 63

otherwise. In philosophy, it is important to make this distinction between

synthetic and analytical statements. Only when we acknowledge that this
investigation of noise vision partakes in synthetic activity might we enter
the concept into consideration, and only if we understand noise vision to
be a synthetic psychological thought-vision without any one particular vector but rather a plethora of them united into one void of the suppositional
central vanishing-point which the horizon-line had previously established.
The synthetic notion being pursued here, then, is of an atmospheric
noise vision constituted by what goes on in and behind the head as much
as by what is in front of it.
As Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) tells us in Ancient Art and Ritual,
art is not mimesis, but rather mimesis comes from art's emotional expressions.134 We must additionally recognize that cognitive noise vision takes
place not only over time but within the emotional brain and that much of
noise consciousness is supra-sensible. Particularly germane to our inquiry into noise vision is the fact that most aesthetic theories argue that art
is not a matter of simple embellishment considering its diverse appeals
to the various cognitive faculties of the eye/mind complex. The critical
capacity of art is that it advances conjoined expectations along with cultivated appraisals through discriminating semi-withdrawal. So considered,
assumptions concerning noise vision in sacred zones (and their distinguished semi-removed status) in regard to immersively spawned states of
aesthetic consciousness will be addressed historically in this section, as
it is common for ideal sacred zones to supply acute information on the
human race's apparently insatiable desire for transcendence through immersive aesthetics.
In this respect, I go along with Georges Bataille as he argued that the
sacred springs from the same sources as those things we conventionally
find repugnant, such as noise, ritual sacrifice and bodily mutilation, and
that within sacred zones sublime transmissions are meant to transpire,
thus provoking attachments between the unconscious mind and its conscious active comportment. The marvellous abstract character of such
supposed sublime transmissions in terms of noise vision will be explored
in this section. But, to begin to do so, we must keep in mind that all reputed sacred propositions occur within configuring theories of culture.
All that we apprehend as sacredly significant resides in cultural symbol,

64 Joseph Nechvatal

which is the gist of art. It is exclusively by our encounters with theories of

culture that we style omitted or grasp upheld sacred abstractions.
With this in mind, we shall now turn our attention to what I perceive
as the genesis of immersive noise vision: the adorned prehistoric cave.
We shall approach the resplendent prehistoric cave by keeping in mind
that, according to Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), form determines the
action of mediation which determines meaning.
A prehistoric painted cave is all that, enhanced moreover through the
emotional defamiliarizational powers of art. Over 200 late-Stone Age
caves bearing wall paintings, engravings, bas-relief decorations and sculptures have been found in south-western Europe alone. Life, in the form
of tiny blue algae, emerged on Earth 2 billion years ago, or what is called
BP (Before Present). The first people who made tools, the basis of technology, were the Homo Habilis, a people who lived in Africa 2 million
years ago. People have inhabited the Prigord region of France for about
200,000 years and indeed the cave at Lascaux was discovered by Cro-Magnon people.135
Gradually during the Gravettian Period (approximately 20,000 to
25,000 years ago), people began to embellish the walls and ceilings of a
few small shallow caves.136 Subsequently, prehistoric painted caves became the sites of these humans' first topographical imagings, images that
celebrated mortal terror and love of the animal and its world, as well as
the passionate and jubilant triumph over that terror/love through the organized hunt and the strategic, co-ordinated, co-operative group adhesion which the hunt necessitated.
However, it is important to remember at all times that the animals depicted in the caves were not generally those animals that were hunted and
eaten. The Magdalenian people hunted and ate primarily reindeer and a
reindeer is only represented once in the cave of Lascaux out of over 2,100
legible imagesin the Apse.137 The significance of this will be pondered
and discussed shortly. But, at the outset, we can surmise that the animals
represented here were depicted in order to serve as spiritual intermediaries or as ideal aspirations. In the terms of noise vision, the Magdalenians' depicted events can be interpreted as disassociated (in their lack of
depicting context) and conflicting (in their superimpositionality) while
being immersed underneath at the implicate frequency level, as these
scenes depict all things and events as ultimately intangible and connected

Noise Vision 65

into one total singularity. It is for this reason that the prehistoric painted
cave must be addressed as a place of active immersive cognisance and not
as a mere receptacle of discrete utilitarian (magical) images in service of
the hunt in any simplistic one-to-one fashion, though some sort of indirect connection to their hunting culture is hard to repudiate, especially
after the discovery in Lascaux of a large number of broken spearheads,
all of which were engraved, often with a double interlocked herring bone
pattern and a star with six rays.138
Most prehistorians agree that visual communications came into being
somewhere around 40,000 years ago, about the time when Cro-Magnons
reached Ice Age Europe and began decorating their tools and bodies with
symbols. Living in small groups, they constructed tents from skins and
huts from branches; however, (evidently) they possessed an incredible
yearning for deep immersive experiences within the dark places of caves.
Thus, in the caves they embellished, it is possible to see an immersive presentation in a collective space, a space which was not the property of any
individual. This expansion from the decoration of the body to the cave
is in itself an extraordinary act of immersive intelligence. The period between the invention of drawing, when animal forms and human genitals
were engraved in rock 35,000 to 40,000 years ago by the Cro-Magnon
on the banks of the Vzre, and the creation of Lascaux, is as long as the
period of time separating us from the civilization of Lascaux. As much
time elapsed between the first ornamental body and the cave paintings
of Lascaux (about 17 millennia) as separates Lascaux from the first TV
broadcasts. Nevertheless, Stacey Spiegel sees the Lascaux cave as being
the first total art,139 and Howard Rheingold speaks of Lascaux as the
first virtual reality.140
The physical and psychic risks involved in such a seemingly non-essential activity as painting inside a cave indicates that it was done, and
indeed savoured, for some perhaps sacred antediluvian reason deemed
essential enough to fashion an immersive space where human consciousness could plunge into extraordinary immersive experiences. The real
threat implicit in the dangerous passage that must be made to enter a
painted cave, with its usual remoteness from human habitation, suggests
that these are sites of ritualistic loss and re-finding typical of intense love
and tragedy. Thus the entrance into an immersive cave is always a movement towards self-interiority. To enter a cave is to move into it and, as

66 Joseph Nechvatal

such, initially involves a directedness away from the periphery and toward depth, toward noisy density, and away from dispersion.
Thus, far away from the light of the sun and stars, far from the daylight world of accustomed life, prehistoric people must have entered the
depths of the immersive darkness of a cave to contemplate both the beginning and end of their life. Indeed the cave's lack of light is an insubstantial force whose intensity around the immersant must be carefully
considered. The first occurrence we must contemplate in this regard is
the dilation of the eye's pupil as entree to a dim cave is achieved. Noticeable is that in terms of vision and light and sex, the pupil's dilation indicates sexual attraction and facilitates it.141
Salient here is that the retina registers a field of 160 million points of
light. The remarkable richness of natural light is due to the fact that it is a
unification of focused and diffused light. Issues of light are issues of clarity and obscurity, issues which constantly vie with one another with an
exacting power. The sun, which is roughly 57 million kilometers (about
93 million miles) from the earth, functions as the source of all light of
course, but we must recollect that its effects are invariably qualified to
a greater or lesser degree by the earth's atmospheric envelope through
which the light must penetrate. The regular waxing and waning of light
is often dramatically altered in its character and intensity by the apparent
vicissitudes of changing atmospheric conditions. In order to realize how
essential this combination of direct and diffused light is to our sense of
well-being, one need only recall the deadening aftermath of a heavy overcast day when the whole world seems to be enshrouded in a pervasive
melancholy.
The early-Upper Paleolithic period142 saw significant innovation in
stone tool technology and weapon systems by the early members of our
species. Their invention of sharpened flint blades made the creation of
almost all of their art possible, via carving and engraving. In painterly
terms, the principal techniques of Cro-Magnon art involved brushes
made of vegetable fiber or animal hair, tufts of fur, and the use of fingers,
along with a blowing of pigment dissolved in saliva onto the wall.143 The
European predecessors to the Cro-Magnons were the strapping Neanderthals who successfully occupied Western Eurasia from about 200,000 BP
up until they were superseded by the Cro-Magnons, sometime around
40,000 BP. Neanderthal culture, known as Mousterian, shows scant in-

Noise Vision 67

klings of visual representation. However, there are traces of immersive

symbolism in their burial sites as the corpses were surrounded by pebbles and bones with fragmentary patterns scratched onto them. Sometime after 40,000 years ago, at a time when the remaining Neanderthals
shared the European landscape with the first Cro-Magnons, there was a
relative explosion of ornament and graphic imagery among the earliest
Cro-Magnons.
By the Upper Paleolithic period, Homo Sapiens had firmly established
their existence based on hunting, fishing and the gathering of plants. In
terms of art, the Cro-Magnons left behind dozens of sculpted ivory animals, moulded and fired clay statuettes, hundreds of engraved images on
limestone blocks and cave walls, thousands of scrupulously decorated
personal body ornaments consisting of ivory, shell, soapstone and animal
teeth, along with the numerous and widely distributed female (so-called
Venus) figurines. The earliest substantial body of surviving material relating to human sexual culture is the art of the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic,
including its paintings of half-bestial males with erections, rock-cut vulvas, carved phallic batons, and the previously mentioned super-endowed
nude Venus female figurines. These sculptural miniature statuettes of extraordinarily big-breasted human females are understood as contemplations on sex and fecundity144 and a longing for oceanic unity and totality.
The Venus figurines are entirely in the round and unconstrained from any
physical site, thus hand-holdable and portable. Wonderful examples are
the ivory Vnus de Lespuge from Lespuge, France (circa 27,000 BC) and
the eyeless and bulbous stone Venus of Willendorf (circa 30,000 BC)
which was found in Austria.
Evidently there was adequate time for spiritual-artistic acumen in the
hunter-gatherer society, as case studies from various parts of the world
show that sufficient food can be obtained with an average adult hunting,
fishing and gathering (in common cause with others) in only three to five
hours per day, less than people generally work now in our (so-called) advanced western civilization. The leisure time of many hunter-gatherers
seems to have been abundant, affording adequate time for the fashioning of the immersive artistic/spiritual cave spaces which concern us here.
Indeed, Andr Leroi-Gourhan in his book, The Dawn of European Art: An
Introduction to Paleolithic Cave Painting, maintains that the generations of

68 Joseph Nechvatal

artists who executed Lascaux were very probably released from even this
minimum burden of daily work by other members of the group.
Although Paleolithic cave art is often discovered deep inside caves
quite remote from the cave entrance, it is a mistake to suppose that Upper Paleolithic human communities usually lived in such dark, and inherently hazardous, sites. Customarily, they lived in the open air, enjoying
the sun and breeze, under skin tents or in the mouths of caves or beneath
rock overhangs where they could find refuge from the elements but have
the benefit of daylight. The inaccessibility of the painted chambers and
the lack of detected debris therein suggests that deep caves were penetrated only occasionally. Nobody lived in the painted areas of the cave, as
analyses of painted caves' contents have yielded no signs of human habitation beyond the traces of animal-fat lamps and torches used by brief
visitors, and some mounds of pigmented-earth left behind. These painted caves were presumably meant to be seen by few human beings under
conditions of extreme difficulty and apprehension, as many are entered
only by crawling on the belly through a hole in the earth down into dark
passages in the earth's womb. These are the archaic conditions that, one
may surmise, produced an array of immersive ideals connected to sex and
death which became deeply implanted in human immersive instincts and
which subsequently became assimilated into Pre-Classical culture (such
as the narrative of the mythical Cretan labyrinth in whose belly the deadly Minotaur resided).
Bearing in mind the threat implicit in the hazardous passage that must
be made by prehistoric people on entering a painted cave (potentially inhabited by massive carnivores), its remoteness from human habitat, and
the expressiveness of the transparently stacked images placed there, I
shall suggest that these painted immersive spaces were sites of hypothetical trans-presence. Removed from the illumination of the sun, moon and
stars, removed from the daylight realm of accustomed existence, early humans entered into the painted cave's dimness (consequently with maximized retinal dilation) as if returning to the sacred dilated female source
of themselvesand simultaneously, to a place of anxious potentiality.
The social function of art within the early formative epoch of human
history necessitated, and necessitates, a shared conception of a larger
amiable whole, thus the basis of human love and reproduction. With
art, people are fastened together by aesthetics into a free-flowing com-

Noise Vision 69

pound-total in the interests of their improved survival, pleasure and replication. As stated, prehistoric art has been discovered at various points
inside passages, in niches, and sometimes near cave mouths, but it is in
the cave, generally deep within, where prehistoric immersive art attained
maximum intensity with its field-of-view encompassing painted murals.
These murals will set the precedent for immersive noise art's penchant
for constructing overall aesthetic enveloping hyper-totalities which appear continuous by way of their exceeding the normal field-of-view with
visual interest.
At first glance, many of the most lavishly adorned murals seem like a
noisy chaos of lines and colors. Animals of miscellaneous species emerge
at disparate scales and in divergent colors. Also, they are oriented in
various directions, even vertically or upside down, some complete, others without heads or extremities. Many are superimposed and thus appear transparent and ephemeral. At some caves, such as Tito Bustillo,
though different phases of painting are evident, a corresponding style is
used throughout lending it a stylistic consistency typical of the Gesamtkunstwerk.145
The vast bulk of the remarkably embellished chambers in deep, dark,
isolated areas date from the centuries approximately 15,000 BP, the conclusive (but prolonged) phase of the Ice Age. Commonly the walls, which
warp and bend overhead (wrapping the immersant in an enveloping total
space) are painted and occasionally the floor is also put to use. Always the
most immersive salons contain paintings on the walls and, importantly,
the ceilings, such as at Altamira, Lascaux and Rouffignac. At Altamira,
there are sections of the painted salon little more than one meter (3.28
feet) high, assuring a compressed, close-up, immersive experience. At the
Homos de la Pefiahe cave, the immersant must lay on his or her back and
slither into low hollows to behold drawings.
With prehistoric painted caves, people penetrated deeply into the
womb of dark caves to paint and scratch transparent images of untamed
animals on every surface of the roughly rounded space, including the
floor. As a consequence, we have come to appreciate the sophistication
of the noise vision perceptual dynamism which this immersive art utilizes in the transformation of consciousness at a period in time far earlier than the first written words. Hence a feeling for and knowledge of
the cave art of Western Europe is essential to a mature awareness of noise

70 Joseph Nechvatal

aesthetics even though it is conceivable that the majority of readers will

not have entered any painted caves, as I have had the privilege of doing.
However, as is also the case with noise vision, a personal, experiential
understanding of the spatial properties of embellished caves is essential
to the development of a comprehensive immersive noise theory, as their
enfolding shape and enclosed feel is indispensable to the power of the
art. Sadly, these are features which are impossible to convey through flat
rectilinear photos.
The 2 kilometer (1.24 mile) long Niaux cave system146 in the French
Pyrenees, 5 kilometer (3.1 miles) south-west of Tarascon-sur-Arige in
the department of Midi-Pyrndes in central/southern France is a good
place to start on-site explorations of noise vision as this ashen limestone
painted cave is owned by the French State and accessible to the public.
There is no electrical lighting system inside and if it were not for the
torches provided by the guide, the immersant would be in absolute darkness and silence with the exception of faint, reverberating, promiscuous
drippings. The ambience is dankly cool, as the cave maintains itself at a
habitual temperature of 12C which markedly contrasts with the tepid air
and fervent sunlight left outside. Stagnant water, like a pestiferous dark
reflecting pool, covers most of the 50 meter long (164 foot) floor of the
first antechamber, which is nearly 30 meters wide (98.4 feet). This chamber leads upward into a high-vaulted, sparsely stalagmited corridor.
One must proceed nimbly and with care so as not to skid on the slimy
floor which has been coated by calcite. Pools of tranquil water hinder the
path from time to time. There are 700 meters (2,296 feet) between the
entrance and the first major change of direction of the long cave, yet the
only human markings of the walls are relatively contemporary graffiti,
some dating from the Baroque. Deeper inside, some 450 representations
await discovery within a complex of chambers, the most celebrated being
the Salon Noir (Black Salon). This deep chamber is unforgettable because
of the distance of the Salon Noir from the cave's entrance. The entry to
the Salon Noir is signalled by a smooth stone surface only 1.5 meters high
(4.9 feet) from the floor which is scattered with maroon and ebony blots
of coloring. Beyond that point, three walls 15 by 20 meters (4.9 by 65.6
feet) are scattered with bestial drawings rendered with jet black contour
lines. Moreover, horses, bison and ibex have been etched into the floor at
the closure of the space. The subtlety of the 14,000 year old accomplish-

Noise Vision 71

ment is astonishing. For example, in 1974, two engraved bison and an

arrow-like sign were detected in a small alcove on the right-hand wall of
the Salon Noir despite repeated detailed surveys which began in 1906.
The stupendous richness of the paintings and etchings of this chamber
construct one of the most spectacular achievements in archaic environmental immersive creation.
In one sense, the Salon Noir is typical of the prehistoric immersive
arrangement in that, like most painted caverns, it is entered only after a
prolonged and precarious trip, bypassing far more accessible spaces. This
journey of course takes committed time, up to as much as three hours
at Montespan. Through the moist darkness, prehistoric people passed
through unfamiliar spaces (there are no signs of frequent engagement)
so as to produce and experience art, even requiring passageway through
subterranean lakes at some sites. Also we must remember that caves provided asylum for fierce human predators such as the great prehistoric
cave bears, lions, and panthers.147 Clearly their presence was a dominant
factor when we consider that Grotte Chauvet, for example, was found
to harbour the remains of around 100 bears. Indeed, certain bear skulls
were repositioned to privileged locations in the cave, in one case onto a
rock in the center of a circular hall.
Verily, such creatures were puissant foes to be feared and assuaged
by primordial people, and in this sense caves were not solely sanctuary
spaces but also exploratory spaces of fear and sacred trepidation. Indeed
Bataille says that the painted cave of Lascaux, for example, was a place
of anguish and religious horror.148 The death risk involved in penetrating many of these openings is attested to by the cave bear-tracks which
have been left in the mud floors and along tight trestles. As the risk of
death was real, by passing through the mouth of a cave into its admissible
swell, the immersant encountered (via dilated retinas) a wide field-ofview artistic phenomenon both sacred and fearful through the prismatic
intensity of an adrenaline driven consciousness. Certainly the potential
risk encountered, which prehistoric people assumed by traversing such
labyrinthine passages, must have been palpable in its production of enzymes. One assumes a highly emotionally engaging level of alert immersive
consciousness was experienced.
In her book, Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age and Their Influence
on European Thought, Rachel Levy maintains that such immersive Paleo-

72 Joseph Nechvatal

lithic cave feelings have become encoded into subsequent archetypes of

beliefs which persist in contouring Euro-American thought and which
now, I surmise, continue to move in our regimented grooves of sensibility. If I may conjecture here, perhaps this attainment of such an adrenalinized cognizant sensation was the point of the venture, its objective and
raison d'tre, and as such necessitated the descent into the frightful deep
pit so as to prepare a stuttering conscious arrival into the adorned chambers rich with depictions of intricately wafting, disembodied forms. If
granted, then the opulently noise painted cavern can be said to be a site of
glitch transporting capacity.
Nerve Noise Visualization in the Grotte de Lascaux
Consequently, prehistoric caves can be seen as places in which consciousness became self-consciously expanded into a larger field of virtual noise. This
seems well illustrated by the noisy image-shower found in the Grotte de
Lascaux with its marks of animal transit intermingled with a sense of
death and fertility. The most widely known, and arguably the most splendid (looped, as it is in places, with dynamic feral sashes which wind and
twist imposingly over its intricate interior shape), is the Grotte de Lascaux149 located atop an ancient headland in the Prigord, France, which I
attained the uncommon privilege of visiting.
As Georges Bataille says, we cannot know the full meaning of Lascaux but we can sense its maker's desire to impress by stunning our senses.150 And indeed, in coming into the immersive space of Lascaux, my
first impression was of being stunned and disconnected from the norm
in favor of a psychic space where sex, art, and death meet in an aesthetic discharge.
Lascaux cave was discovered on the 12th of September in 1940 by
four local children and a dog, and shortly thereafter was thought by some
to have had served magical imaging functions deemed useful in rousing the psyche in preparation for the hunt. In relationship to immersive
noise consciousness, it is necessary to survey what we can ascertain today
(given our highly culture-bound predilections) of visualization practices
which, it is surmised, were utilized in accordance with the prolifically
decorated galleries of Lascaux. We can hypothesize that an ability to visually fashion that which is non-visual (or not yet in existence) by allowing

Noise Vision 73

unexpected configurations optically to emerge is essential to life, then as

now. This symbolic concentration is a sort of idealized schematization
which can be further characterized as a product of a priori imagination
through which ideas and actions become imaginable. And truly the creative act of visualization is immediately obvious on entering Lascaux's
initial salon, as the painters of Lascaux took into full consideration the
environmental characteristics and qualities of the physical cavern, first by
utilizing both the encasing ceiling and walls, and then by using the physical bulges and bosses of the stone enclosure to meat out the forms of the
animals' rumps and bellies.
The painters, evidently, wished to create a total aesthetic ambience
that would convey the all-over presence of animals in close proximity to
the human visitor (and to each other) as the depicted beasts merge into
each other with no respect for the relative size of the different species and
with no obvious connection outside of their splendid over-all compositional ornateness. This particular voluptuously painted cave is the most
superbly adorned of the prehistoric caves, festooned as it is in a wraparound overhead garland of overpowering bestiality, with even its ceiling painted (with the use of temporary wooden scaffolding). It is not the
oldest151 nor the largest prehistoric cave, but simply the most artistically
achieved and thus the most alluring, from our point of view, as in Lascaux
most upper-walls and ceilings are resplendently surfaced with sumptuous
immersive paintings depicting the quivering apparitions of semi-transparent animals. Mario Ruspoli characterized these paintings as depicting
the spirits of divine animals.152 Furthermore, with the RotundaSalle des
Taureaux (Bull's Chamber), Lascaux holds the distinction of housing the
most colossal Paleolithic frieze (with the largest painted figures) known
to us and this fact alone merits our rapt immersive attention. One of the
Bulls which festoons the cloud-like Rotunda frieze is almost 5.4 meters
(18 feet) in length. Others in the same gallery are 3 meters (10 feet), 3.6
meters (12 feet), and 4.2 meters (14 feet) in length, whereas the largest
figures at Altamira are only 2.1 meters (7 feet) long and those at Niaux
average about .9 meter (3 feet) in length.
Verily, the leitmotiv of the cave is huge groupings of horses in and
around large semi-transparent dominating bulls. But what is particularly noteworthy is that this tangle of animal forms exists in a groundless
(virtual) atmosphere where the bodies are not anchored to anything sug-

74 Joseph Nechvatal

gesting land. Rather, what is suggested is a 360 non-Euclidean space is

precisely the arrangement of the ideal range of virtuality. There is no attempt at depicting non-virtual Euclidean ground or defining a landscape,
and there are no plants, trees or rocks depicted. Moreover, the dominating figures here are not simply bulls, but rather bull-apparitions, hung
with and interposed by a dainty petticoat made up of smaller animals
(stags, horses and bison) all organized in crescents and cruseiforms in
and around them in interpenetrating and profuse fashion. Furthermore,
the mural in the Salle des Taureaux struck me as aesthetically deluxe in
its capacity to evoke intelligence through the management of line and its
unification of the semi-sculptural with the graphic.
Because the walls of the cavern have been coated with crystallized calcite due to flooding long long ago, the paintings glimmer with a subtle
sparkle which is enchanting to noise vision.153 Thankfully, the congealed
calcite served as well as a protective sealing and safeguarding varnish-coat
which has kept the paintings' color remarkably fresh and well preserved.
This glimmering effect was heightened further when my Ministre de la
Culture guide dowsed all the electrical lights (designed to reproduce the
tallow lamp originals which burned animal fat with Juniper wicks) and
lit a cigarette lighter to better convey an idea of the original visual effect
of tallow and burning wicks which provided an unsteady twinkling light
(as a candle flame does). At that point the calcite twinkle burst into a fullblown flicker.
More than one hundred burned tallow lamps were discovered inside
Lascaux154 and even if they were all in use at the same time, which is unlikely, one must visualize how faintly dim the light is inside the cave, and
how lovely a warmly soft, etiolate-fat incandescence illuminated its walls,
and how this flaxen dimness suggests to the mind a semi-dream state,
reminiscent, for me, of how invariably exciting it is to go to sleep in an unaccustomed bedroom where the unfamiliar wallpaper and pictures, faultily grasped in the obscurity of night, are only faintly perceptible and thus
open to imaginative interpretations.
What is significant to this study of noise vision are the psychic effects produced by the dim seductiveness of the cave's friezes. What
I felt when caught up in the supernatural ambience of the spacedue
to the dim glint of the calculate, the smell of the dank earth, the slightly
overhead majestic size and sense of transparent movement of the wrap-

Noise Vision 75

around painted beasts which were strewn throughoutwas a sense of

deliriously (and vicariously) identifying with them, even as they burst
over the edges of my visual cone without restraint, and of euphorically
running among them as a half-horse/half-man silene (centaur), that
jocular classical Greek woodland spirit similar to satyrs (who were halfgoat/half-man). This totemistic state of consciousness155 is what John C.
Lilly (1915-2001) calls species-jumping-thinking.156 Deleuze/Guattari's term for experiences of this nature is becoming-animal. For them,
to become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path
of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum
of intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations,
signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs.157 Along with this experience of
feeling imbricated in a becoming-animal panorama158 by self-fashioning
a map of intensities,159 I felt enveloped and tangled inside the passion
sensation of sacred/sexual noise as the fertile abundance of animal spirits covered and absorbed me in a generalized sense of fertility (a fertility
which would help ensure the success of any hunt through a plenitude/
excess of the hunted).
This silene sensitivity was particularly acute in the Axial gallery, the
gallery that follows the vast Bull's Chamber, as here the cavern tapers
to form a more compressed overhead ceiling display. Here one finds a
tremendous stag 1.38 meters high (4.6 feet), with an enormous rack of
entangled antlers flanked by three horses and an abstract door-like form
and rows of dots. Here, particularly, I had this feeling of being included in
frolicsome animality. A sense of tragedy was conveyed there too, though,
by an apparently wounded and fallen horse which concluded the gallery.
Soon, however, my frail humanity gratified me and I felt very remote indeed from the tragic animality of my surroundings, almost as if I were a
miniature silene carved out of silver and ivory. As I slipped out of the previously keen feral feeling, I felt the flagrant beasts running over me and
exploding me, along with a hundred other things.
Lascaux's friezes, I must assume, had similar psychic/symbolic meaning to those who rendered them and looked upon them, and that they
supplied a noise vision framework in which an expanded immersive consciousness could be expressed sociably. Noise vision is present here in

76 Joseph Nechvatal

various degrees of enfoldments and unfoldments; dividing space up into

ostensibly exterior and interior distance has no real significance.
One thing that is unusual about Lascaux is that access to its galleries is
far easier than in most other caves (such as at Niaux), with the exception
of the gallery called The Chamber of Felines which I was not permitted to
see due to its remoteness deep within the cave. As previously established,
the majority of entrances to prehistoric caves are far from the painted
inner sanctuaries160 and require an eventful, hazardous journey which
heightens the emotional intensity. Those that are not difficult to reach
physically, like Lascaux, start their gallery/sanctuary at the point where
light diminishes, creating a transitional emotional and dilational retinal
passage adjustment in preparation for a sacred experience (according to
Leroi-Gourhan).161
The other gallery inaccessible to me was the Shaft or Pit, which was
considered too difficult and dangerous to visit. The Shaft is a 6 meter (20
foot) deep hole, just wide enough for one person to fit in comfortably,
halfway along the Passageway toward the Chamber of Felines. It contains
the famous scene of the wounded bison who is literally spilling his guts
and the bird-headed reclining man with an erection (the sole human-narrative scene in Lascaux). However, I was not allowed to see this.
Nevertheless, just prior to the Shaft/Pit is the Abside (Apse), a roundish, semi-spherical, penumbra-like chamber (like those adjacent to Romanesque basiliques) approximately 4.5 meters in diameter (about 5
yards) covered on every wall surface (including the ceiling) with thousands of entangled, overlapping, engraved drawings162 that, on request, I
received the additional unique privilege of seeing.
The ceiling of the Apse (which ranges from 1.6 up to 2.7 meters high
(about 5.2 to 8.9 feet) as measured from the original floor height) is so
completely and richly bedecked with such engravings that it indicates
that the prehistoric people who executed them first constructed a scaffold to do so.163 To me, this indicates that the Apse was an important and
sacred part of the cave and indeed Ruspoli calls it the strongest, most
richly symbolic, most mysterious and most sacred of all the inner spaces
making up Lascaux.164
Generally the Apse, however, has been ignored by art theoreticians
(there is only one widely published scholarly investigation of it per se,
by Denis Vialou in Arlette Leroi-Gourhan's Lascaux Inconnu even though

Noise Vision 77

Abb Glory spent several years trying to decipher this inextricable chamber) as nowhere is the eye permitted to linger over any detail (despite
holding an immense 2.5 meter engraving (8.2 foot) in its midst). Rather,

Figure 4 Enhanced detail image from the Abside

of the Grotte deLascaux, Dordogne (France)

the gaze is urged on by an all-inclusive flood of sublimated optic information in need of visual stamina. Nevertheless, the Apse contains a semilegible comprehensive index of all of the forms of representation found
scattered throughout the entire cave, thus making up what Mario Ruspoli
calls Lascaux's vritable corpus (real body).165 My assessment, though,
is that it is Lascaux's veritable noise vision center.

78 Joseph Nechvatal

Describing it, Bataille said that it was one of the most remarkable
chambers in the cave but that one is ultimately disappointed by it.166 I
was not disappointed, however. Indeed, what pleased and fascinated me
about the Apse was precisely its cryptic and foreboding, overall hypertotalizing, iconographic character granted by its boundless, palimpsestesque, wall-paper-like image explosion (what Bataille called its fouillis)
of overlapping, near non-photo-reproducible stockpiled drawings from
which, when sustained visual attention is maintained, unexpected configurations visually emerge. Here animals are superimposed in chaotic
discourse, some fully and carefully rendered, others unfulfilled and left
open to penetration by the environment, all commingled with an extraordinary confused jumble167 of lines including, remarkably, the sole
claviform sign in the Prigord and, even more remarkably, Lascaux's only
reindeer, an animal that existed plentifully in the period of the adornment of Lascaux. Its extensive use of superimposed multiple-operative
optic perception (optic perception unifies objects in a spatial continuum)
presents the viewer with noise vision par excellence: no single point of
reference, no orientation, no top, no bottom, no left, no right, and no
separate parts to its whole. Such visual-thought is homospatial noise vision, then, as according to Albert Rothenberg in The Emerging Goddess,
homospatial thought is visual-thought outside of space or spatiality
which transcends differentiation.168 This homospatial quality is deeply
suggestive of the non-spatial character of consciousness itself.
As a result of this homospatial noise vision of the Apse, I had the
peculiar feeling of being flooded by a cloud-like image cesspool of deep
meanings I could not uncode, as if I were in the midst of a model of the
Bohm/Pribram universe as implicate pattern. As such, it seemed an imposition onto Paleolithic culture of the very thing that should destabilize it: nihilism. Nihilism, in that it is no longer a matter of heterogeneous
figuration, but of scanning a homospatial criss-crossing and oscillating
battle scene between interwoven figures, immersed in their ideational
ground with which they have merged in a deliberate process of constitutional defigurization. There is no longer any space outside of the figures
to define them and, hence, in a mental reversal, space is immersed in the
overlapping figures. The nihilistic cancellation at work here, then, seemed
to be an attempt to deny the validity of subject/object understanding and

Noise Vision 79

to deny that any visual erudition of anything whatsoever is possible, in

the interests of omnijective introspection.
Bataille claimed that what was curious about the Apse was that the
artists abandoned their oeuvre to the next to come after them in an antlike activity, yet they did not engrave their figures with less conviction
or care.169 Obviously the artists here did not work from a life model but
from the overlapping introspective depths of their visual memories. In
like manner, the Apse seems to call upon the viewer to construct a mnemonic psychological interpretation of it based on its tightly woven, intricate abundance, that is, its latent excess. But even after introspectively
synthesizing the overlapping imploded individual parts into a mnemonic
coherent whole, the Apse retained for me a provocative discord and irritation which tantalized my mind further towards a withheld (perhaps
forgotten) seemingly encoded signification. But as our subconscious is
energized by sustained desire, that which I sensed to be both obscure and
overabundant about the Apse merged into a hybrid interpretation that
combined conflicting ideas about abundance and nihilism into an grore
complex chunk of noise information which I then viewed as a single metanihilistic mega-symbol.
With this meta-nihilistic mega-symbol's boundlessness, the Apse appeared to me the most sacred of the cave's sacred places. Certainly, easy
conceptions of one beautiful being as distinguished from another (in
specificity) are denied and an aberrant invalidation takes place where
previous concepts of the finite and the infinite implode (as do concepts
of the voluminous and the vacuous) into a unified field of multiple-reproductive disembodied existences.
This, then, is a sacred/sexual place of personal intrascoping and transformation (by reason of its creative noise vision and anticipated selfcancellation) as its beautiful representational anti-depictions are neither
here nor there but overlap. Clearly, what I am saying about the Apse runs
counter to the heart of positivism, a paradigm under which we continue
to toil unconsciously, as the positivist ideal is a search for rational, systematic thought where images can be broken down, explored, understood, and explained. Here, in the Apse, we seem to have encountered an
irrational systematicism that seems to critique reason, a systematic critique that predates (and in some places overlaps) the modern positivist
attitude towards sensation. Here, we are inside a homospatial site of over-

80 Joseph Nechvatal

running flux and of hybridization: a place for the rejection of realism and
its values (or at least a place to save oneself from the futile and finally unreasonable claims of dogmatic realism and rationalism). The Apse, then,
represents a thrusting off of optic and mental boundaries and is thus a
complex mirroring of our own fleeting impressions which constitute the
movement of our consciousness, the perpetual weaving and unweaving
of ourselves. Here, we are not static and have no use for reductive concepts or practices, but are inside a noise space that carries its own nihilistic opposite within itself.
Particularly dense with overlapping noise imagery is the part of the
Apse called the Absidiole, a small, niche-like hollow (like the semi-spherical small niches that house holy relics attached to the apse in Romanesque
basiliques) just in front of the drop into the Pit. Here, the immersant can
ostensibly participate in a play of self-tutored multiple-immersion into
layers of noise as one stands in the Absidiole of the Apse, which is located
inside the groin of the cave, and introspectively view through sublimated
excess an explication of the curved inner-logic of immersion into noise
itself: encased and withheld excess. Assuredly, vision here is no longer the
controlling power over animals in nature but, on the contrary, vision itself is engulfed in nature's womb. The motivational force which quickens
the Apse, then, seems to be a desire to undermine perpetual vision and
replace it with another type of impregnable (immersive noise) vision, or
at least to suggest that there may be other types of vision possible. Its nihilistic excess serves the positive function of questioning the validity of
the customary appearance of things and to make connective understanding inextricably felt.
Indeed, the basic function of the visual turbulence of the Apse, from
the connective perspective, is to precisely shake our conviction that our
visual thinking is sound and to hold any such assured convictions, rather,
in suspension. Hence it is only routine that formal issues (where consciousness may be said to be self-referential and self-sufficient) would
arise over any humanist narrative ethic, as the Apse is more concerned
with a recycling of psychological energy than with optically correct astuteness. Hence, freed from representational obligations, dark chaotic
powers of consciousness are unleashed via the Apse's repressed excessive
exuberance.

Noise Vision 81

When interpreting my immersion into noise in the Apse, we must

remember that even the simplest perceptual activity of viewing discrete
images utilizes higher-level cognitive activity, as perceiving anything involves description and inference. Indeed perception utilizes a plethora
of built-in assumptions and hypotheses as it fills in absent information
and draws conclusions based on (but not reducible to) incoming data
in terms of part/whole regions and figure/ground relations from which
there eventually emerges a preferred percept. Keeping in mind that the
human's natural field-of-vision is roughly 120 vertical by 180 horizontal
and that the Apse's perceptual-field far exceeds these parameters, the resulting flooding-over effect of the Apse (which is significant in creating the
immersive noise effect) accounts for some of the visual chicanery experienced here. However, in the Apse, the level of evasive mono-complexity
(given the uniform shading in which the one sombre value dominates
the complex visual arena) of the fouillis also challenges preconceptions
of legibility based on our ability to identify and locate figures in their
ground, and this made me wonder if the visualization chamber I was in
was not perhaps a training spot for the hunters to improve their discerning vision, so as to aid them in visually discovering animals from within
their tangled natural camouflage.
But also on scanning the systematic, intricate and perplexing inert
spread of the Apse, one cannot but sense that in some way one is looking
at a representation of the metaphysics of orgasm and death, and that by
absorbing its visual code, one was looking sex/death in the face. To be, or
not to be: that is the paradigmatic choice when visualizing form in and
out of existence, when examining the elusive alternatives made manifest
here. Being, beings, or nothingness: all are tentative conditions of resolution (or forestalled resolution) here; all spout their own ontological/
neurological preferences.
In this purging atmosphere of imploded meta-nihilistic sacrilege,
spontaneous reflexes only go so far and reflection necessarily takes over
in search of an expansive meaning. Yes, nihilistic amanuensis, jubilant
noise and catastrophic implosion are here, not only in how this staggering image-dump can be read, but also in terms of how its creation entailed
the task of disrespecting the care with which marks achieve representational artistry in an apparent desire to achieve and contemplate radical
negation. This scouring of assertive vision must have been deemed neces-

82 Joseph Nechvatal

sary precisely here, as in the other galleries, for very often superimposed
images respected the marks previous laid down and sensitively incorporated them into the ensuing hybrid super-impositional compositions. By
ransacking representational vision in this way, the Apse paradoxically
partakes in the category typical of major art (regardless of its marginal
standing within the cave and within Prehistory) as it seemingly rejects
the figurative tradition in order to reinvent it as entrancing meta(or
supra)representation. Thus it is major in the way that John Cage's musical composition/non-composition 4'33" is major, that is, in forcing us
to astutely consider silence as sound. And, as such, it is a meditation on
fullness and emptiness: on the emptiness of fullness and the fullness of
emptiness. This is its key noise vision value.
On further reflection, I found the Apse noise encounter to be in rapport with the philosophy of Hegel where he maintains that our absolute
sense is first a pure being identical with non-being.
Archaeologists are continuously attempting to understand the marks
left here from this inaccessible epoch as they analyse its dishevelled iconography in hopes of ascertaining why this tangled impulse was consummated. Most do not see, however, that the Apse defies the common
assumption that visual art is associative, that it is based on the human
mental capability to make one thing stand for and symbolize another,
in agreement with society. The usual assumption is that art-marks on a
surface denote content, not just to the mark-maker but to others as well.
As an example, the Abb Henri Breuil (1877-1961) (speaking generally
about Lascaux) maintained that some of the mystifying, abstract, geometric marks represented the hunting paraphernalia of traps, snares and
weapons, and Leroi-Gourhan placed these abstract marks into a category
based upon sexual duality where dots and strokes represented male signs,
and ovals, triangles and quadrangles, female. There is mixed agreement
on these two interpretations, but all we know for sure about the abstract
constitution of the Apse is that its dynamic cluster of representational/
anti-representational operations (and the meta-nihilistic/mega-symbol
boundlessness which it contains in its kitty) were reworked over the span
of many centuries. However, by no means do all of the superimposed figures date from different times, thus their overlapping is not a simplistic
function of time nor is it for lack of space. Thus its abstract intentionality
assumes a certain degree of lucidity.

Noise Vision 83

The Abb Glory, who lived in the Lascaux cave for several years while
making an inventory of its contents, discovered that in the Apse there are
several re-engraved figures170 which is again baffling as it cuts against theories of anti-social resistance to figural thought and places us in the functional realm of cognitive dissonance, the psychological term denoting the
mental state in which two or more incompatible or contradictory ideas
are held to be equally sustainable. Hence the Apse's cognitive dissonance
served a virtual function if we remember Brian Massumi's definition of
the virtual as a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist,
coalesce and connect.171
If the Apse functioned as a mnemonic device, or as a site of hegemonic non-being severed from any practical purpose, we shall never know.
But it is my hypothesis that the Apse chamber functioned as a cognitive
dissonance visualization field and de-focal virtualizing area which adjusted-up the expanding and dilating eye/mind to the awareness of conflicting, non-rational omnijective realities involving sex and death through
the use of deeply creative noise visualizations.
We know that most of our cognitive functions and perceptual processes are carried out by the neocortex (the largest part of the human
brain) and that the primary visual cortex is the part of the neocortex that
receives visual input from the retina. What we can conjecture is that the
subterranean aesthetic visualization process at work in the Apse may
have been used to feedback optic stimulus to the neocortex in a foreseeing enterprise, an attempt to look into the future, as this process of feedbacking impartial stimulus to the neocortex is roughly the basis for magical gazing. It is imaginable that such a foreseeing enterprise would also
be deemed of help in prognosticating the existence and movements of
prospective herds of game which would facilitate the success of the hunt,
among other things.
To represent the process of this state of looping neocortical stimulus
and to fasten a noise cluster of spirit-images on a wall (immersed and hidden among a plethora of others) is in some sense to snare and overpower
the image and, ultimately, to have Hegelian power over it.172 It is curious,
however, to note that in the few depictions in Lascaux where animals
have been wounded by spears or have fallen, they do not appear to be in
pain. Perhaps the seers had found a way of passing into a virtual world be-

84 Joseph Nechvatal

yond the wall by penetrating through the crowded palimpsest-like clutter

and joining with the animal's vital spirits.
David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson make the case that, after coming out of a trance, enchanters artistically recreated their visions,
both as memory aids for later ritual travels and as portals through which
they pass into the spirit world. They view cave markings as powerful ritualistic processes, not just as static pictures, and maintain that the abstract
patterns that occur in parallel with the animals found in such prehistoric
caves as Lascaux are representations of the phosphenes that accompany
the meditative and trance states of the seer's practices, particularly those
associated with psychoactive plants. These enchanting practices entailed
trance states, it is surmised, which were in some instances produced (in
part) by natural chemicals ingested by an enchanter in order to induce a
trance for revelatory purposes. Altered states of consciousness induced
by hyperventilation, rhythmic movements or psychoactive drugs universally produce entropic visual image-fields (a phenomenon derived from
the basic structure of the human optic systemanywhere from the eyeball to the visual cortex of the brainwithin vision). In his book, Alchemy
of Culture, Richard Rudgley gathered supporting evidence (based on the
detailed knowledge of local flora and fungi) from several researchers,
that Paleolithic cultures utilized the natural distributions of psychoactive
species in their locale as an early feature of their cultural development.
Cannabis sativa was a known intoxicant in prehistoric Europe and hemp
seeds have been found at a variety of Neolithic sites.173 Trance states, too,
were created and augmented by the utilization of hyperventilation and
almost always in the context of rhythmic repetitive singing, drumming,
dancing and clapping. According to Lewis-Williams/Dowson's adapted
three-stage neuropsychological model, people who hallucinate in the
later stages often experience a sensation of a vortex or rotating tunnel
around them (vortex or tunnel shapes often appear as individuals enter
the deepest stage of a trance fostering a sensation of travelling through a
passageway). At that point subjects come to inhabit (rather than merely
witness) an hallucinatory immersive world.
One may speculate that the Apse served (and/or reflected) such a
surrounding process where the self is experienced as capacity rather than
existential identity, and where the evaluation of self has been revised
from bounded to boundless. Such noise consciousness represents a para-

Noise Vision 85

digm shift which relativizes other recognitions of self-consciousness. It

is pertinent that, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe
this shift towards boundlessness as one's becoming a body without organs
(BwO) in terms of our self-shifting representational planes emerging out
of our field of compositional consistency. According to them, the body
without organs is an insubstantial state of connected being beyond representation which concerns pure becomings and nomadic essences.174 Deleuze and
Guattari go on to say that the body without organs causes intensities to
pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space nor is it in space; it is matter that
occupies space to a given degreeto the degree corresponding to the
intensities produced.175 According to Brian Massumi, the translator of
A Thousand Plateaus the body without organs is an endless weaving together of singular states, each of which is an integration of one or more
impulses. These impulses form the body's various erogenous zone(s)
of condensed vibratory regions, zones of intensity in suspended animation. Hence, the body without organs is the body outside any determinate
state, poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body in terms of its
potential, or virtuality.176
The above scenarios suggest a merging of awareness, first into a more
restricted, and then an expanded, intense statement, which is the principle of entering noise art. Thus, it is possible to say that such states of manifestation are distinguished according to the degree to which potentiality
is energized through restrictional noise. To apply the noise model to consciousness would suggest that a possible criterion for making qualitative
distinctions is the degree to which the potential states of consciousness
are unfolded and experienced as a noisy aggregate.
Support for Lewis-Williams/Dowson's visualization account has
come from the influential archaeologist Jean Clottes, scientific adviser for
prehistoric art at the French Ministre de la Culture. Clottes has joined
Lewis-Williams and Dowson in an investigation of their neuropsychological model in an attempt to fill a need for testable theories of why
people inconvenienced themselves to such an extent as to create these intensive, highly seductive, immersive spaces. I have taken interest in their
work as, from it, we might extract possible immersive art noise intentions
and principles from the prehistoric painted and etched inner spaces.

86 Joseph Nechvatal

The neuropsychological literature teaches us that trance states proceed in their deepening in stages. Shimmering, incandescent, shifting
patterns (referred to in the neuropsychological literature as entropic phenomena) have been shown to be produced early on in the trance process
when syncretistic noise vision takes on an all-over field-like quality. Resulting entoptic form-fields contain grids and lattice designs, dots and
flecks, zigzags, curves, and filigrees or thin meandering lines (all apparent
in the Apse). In deeper trance states, these fields, depending on the state
of mind and cultural penchant of the enchanter, are often, according to
Lewis-Williams & Dowson, experienced as a rotating vortex or tunnel
that seems as if it was completely sealing off and surrounding the subject
in an immersive subjective world. The objective external world is progressively excluded from vision and consideration, and this field of inner
enclosure grows ever more florid.
These researchers hypothesized that the art adorning caves, stone
shelters and tombs delineate trance-induced immersion into noise stimulated by congesting particular natural molecular arrangements, which
produce psychoactive effects in the human brain; these are molecular arrangements which have had a significant cultural history of religious use
in inducing visionary, mystical trance states. Accounts of hunter-gatherer
and foraging groups include descriptions of enchanters who occasionally
conduct rituals that they believe allow them to travel to parallel worlds
set out in local belief systems. In these realms, deceased ancestors, deities, and miscellaneous delicate creatures await the enchanter who deals
with them in ways intended to meet indispensable communal needs. In
preparation for their mysterious interchanges, enchanters typically took
steps to instigate trances through isolation in dark places, by frenzied
dancing, through rapid breathing, and/or through the ingestion of hallucinogenic plants.
The validity of exploring theories of altered states of consciousness
depends on our capacity to overcome that quixoticism which enthrals
the mind and takes it no further. That, in turn, depends on the understanding that the subject experiencing an altered state of consciousness
remains in principle the same; the consciousness is essentially that of the
same person, and the content of consciousness, the ideas and dreams, are
those of the same person also, albeit revealed at a heightened level of intensity by the removal of inhibiting agencies and habits of mind. It is on

Noise Vision 87

this basis that Walter Benjamin demanded that the revelations of ecstatic
visions be made subject to the same criteria of knowledge as those of the
sober state, just as the conventions of conformist ideology must be treated to
the same scepticism as one applies to raptures and dreams.
If one accepts most of what I have said thus far as concerning the
alteration of consciousness in the Apse via noise, we may now surmise
that this altered consciousness177 within the Apse would have at least two
aspects to it. First, similar to the consciousness shift sometimes experienced when engaging in sex, it is an unleashing liberation and a breaking
free from the world's ordinary representational space. This noise domain
is one where not only are narrow conceptual territories transcended, but
where one also frees oneself from all the desires of security that limit the
familiar experience of everyday life. But it is also an enraptured experience which brings noise-fusion-vision into a larger abstract reality, that is,
life's covert implicate order where boundaries making up various territories are transcended by our relation to the desire for entirety.
In seeking to understand early immersive aesthetic noise impulses,
then, I came away from Lascaux's Apse with a trust in its conjectural goal
of serving as a vehicle for inter-special disembodied connectedness. Supporting such a noise theory on my part is the so-called sorcerer panel in the
cave of Trois Frres, also in the French Pyrenees. Deep underground in a
cramped cavern (like the Apse), a rendered half-human/half-animal figure dominates the space. The human/animal figure is staring directly out
of the wall (which is unusual for Upper Paleolithic cave art). Just underneath are several heavily engraved panels, a commotion of animal figures
with no apparent order or pattern (as again in the Apse). In the midst
of this chaos of muddled excess is another human/animal figure and directly in front of this image is a reindeer's hind-legs and rear-end with its
female sex prominently displayed. The sacred/sexual immersive (transspecial) potency is palpable.
This proposed explanation for the dark-noise-excess of the Apse cannot be proven, nor, I think, disproven and thus it remains a moot point,
however fascinating. Though obviously imbued with meaning, we unfortunately are unlikely ever to know the true meaning or function of the
image-space of the Apse (or the other marks of the Magdalenian people
for that matter). What I know though, with certainty, is how the immersive noise amplitude of the Apse operated on me, and what it did was

88 Joseph Nechvatal

Figure 5 Gods of Politics, 1984, 14x11 graphite on paper, Joseph Nechvatal

collapse the inherited meaning of human image, making into a more inclusive and available sense of excessive ebullition, and a dynamic feeling
of wanton sexual climax. Its shrouded noise scattered stirred my desire to
seemingly unfold and deliver forth a sanctioned libidinous pathos where
forms of salacious creative ferment and levels of self-indulgence are concurrent. From this state of floridity, it might be possible to further define
immersive noise states of consciousness as those which contain a condi-

Noise Vision 89

tion in which reality is perceived as consisting of more than that which everyday vision brings to light. Such immersive noise states bypass discursive
counterintuitive processes and confer a greater scope to vision and therefore an enhanced and expanded unanimity.
Bolstering this contention is the fact that, before leaving the Apse, I
had looked around down the Passageway and into a portion of the Salle des Taureaux and I recall these chambers taking on the character of a
moist orifice. At that point I felt like a naughty ravisher about to act out
some unfathomable, risqu, multi-genus sexual act, as if I was emancipated to ford my human anthropocentric sexual frontiers and burst out of
my specific species identity and into that of a bull, horse, peacock or peccadillo just as I have frequently imagined myself doing when engaged in
sexual union. It is this sense of inhabiting a new corporeality in obbligato
that is entirely unnatural, preposterous, and variegated which, as we shall
see, holds importance when uncovering the idealized desires and onastic
qualities of the immersive noise art experience.
What additionally fascinates is that this fine jumble of delicate lines,
some beautifully representational while others not, corresponded to the
prolonged series of greyish drawing with which I began my carreer as
an artist some twenty plus years ago: drawings which had partially been
conceived of as a shadow of our nervous system's meshed neural signals.
Thus the Apse seemed an idealized shred from my own memory and
I nearly felt that from the ceiling angelic divinities would pelt garlands
of roses down on me. We should note that it is common to find prehistoric stones of various sizes that were incized with a jumble of overlapping animal drawings in no apparent order, piled on-top of one another
to the point of illegibility.178 We can say with assurance that the Apse's
brimful-room noise style is almost unprecedented, save for certain panels
in Les Trois Frres and at the cave of Combarelles, a nearby Prigord cavern which I subsequently visited the next day.
On exiting the cave of Lascaux, the sense of psychic openness was
striking as one returns and runs into the light, one's eyes reconstricting
as one passes through the sparsely wooded area and emerges into homogeneous light on top of the hill with a magnificent vista at one's feet.
It was there I spent the night in an auberge in preparation for a visit to
Combarelles.

90 Joseph Nechvatal

The cave of Combarelles, like the Apse, contains an enormously doleful pile-up of almost imperceptibly engraved drawings deep, deep within
the once almost inaccessible wet belly. A prolonged walk inside the cave
preceded any encounter with the art but, once encountered, like in the
Apse, depicted forms start snowballing and overfeeding on themselves.
Here, too, our visual-mental system self-devours the assumed reality
principle, ultimately causing its downfall by absorbing realistic representation into a homospatial noisy dissolution of form. Like the Apse, it too
is colorlessly elaborate, heady, and intricately composed, but here I felt
neither ravished nor aroused nor stretched by the hyper-fastidiousness of
the obscure excess, but rumpled and crushed beneath the cave's monotonous dark and inaccessible logic. Indeed here, as in the Apse of Lascaux,
representation was problematic and the normal linear depiction of figurative assurance failed in favor of a multi-linear non-sequential processing.
Certainly, the etched walls did not have one singular classical point of
view or a fixed position from which it depicted being, and it, too, operated on the dynamic of a supra/meta-dataload. But this operation was
never mitigated by other colors of thought which might have allowed
Combarelles to transcend the limitations of its own pictorial assumptions via a critique of them, as Lascaux had managed to do.
What the open-endedness of the piled-up, noisy, disembodied fabula
at Combarelles suggested to me was the collective abstraction of the production and distribution of every possible representation, along with the
super-human desire for existing pluralisticly in many orbs simultaneously.179 When I thought of the hyper-connectivity of its indistinct veneer of
interlaced lines, I saw Combarelles as a meta-idea cove which functioned
by criticizing the discourse of traditional understanding through measuring the distance and difference180 to which coherence goes, and indicating from whence it has come: the complicated blurriness of noise.
Nymphaea Nerve Noise
Examined through the tradition of communicative symbolic interaction, immersion into noise's prevalent territorializing/deterritorializing
configuration thus far appears to me to be roughly the inscribed parabolic
space as we saw in the Apse of Lascaux. And, as such, noise art begins

Noise Vision 91

to create a cultural domain which is half illusionary and half real, just as
any symbol is.
Rounded noise order seems an attempt to encircle vast shapeless infinity into a symbolically distinct scope and location through parabolic
configuration. Hence, immersive noise consciousness seems thus far to
be primarily a function of a desire to create a convincing illusion of nonself-containment through a semi-enclosed noise space which heralds the
sanctum of the tribal magic circle, the circle which interpiercingly severs a
space of sanctity from the profane. According to Nigel Pennick, the circle
is one of the most ancient symbols used by humanity and is seen through
the history of humanity as the embodiment of the universal whole, representing the perfect totality of the macrocosm.181 It symbolizes the perfection of totality in that the circle is a geometric figure formed with one line
with no beginning or end.
The central spot of the ancient symbolic immersive circle is the omphalos, the pivotal, still, capacity-point within the sacred circle. Inside
the sacred immersive circle, the outside world is dominated and indeed
defined by the omphalos' psychological protectoratship. The conceiving
mentality behind the omphalos was that it marked the fixed point of the
earth around which the spherical spiritual heavens whirled. Thus it represented a central place which remained steady and enduring while all else
moved about it.
Today we know that the earth rotates on its axis once a day, and that it
revolves around the sun once a year. In early times, however, astronomy
was based on an ideal geocentric cosmology according to which the earth
was fixed and immovable. The earth was conceived as being at the center of the universe and everything spun around it. In this cosmology, the
universe itself was imagined as being bounded by a great sphere to which
the stars, arranged in the various constellations, were attached. So while
we today understand that the earth rotates on its axis once every day, in
antiquity it was believed instead that once a day the great sphere of the
stars rotated around the earth. As it spun, the cosmic sphere was believed
to carry the sun along with it, resulting in the apparent movement of the
sun around the earth once a day.
The omphalos' quintessence may have been only a scant central fire
within a circular placement of stones on the ground which carved out
the immersive space of emotional sanctity. However, an interpretation of

92 Joseph Nechvatal

this hoop of stones with centered still-point may be quickly conceived in

terms of recognizing a point of view within the cyclical arrangements to
the surrounding cosmos, as we see with the omphalos' evolution into the
classical Greek maypole. A circle with a marked center and circular design elements emanating out from the central point is almost universally
found in the world and it forms the basis of the floral rosette, one of the
oldest and most widespread of ornamental designs.182
Accordingly, since its Mediterranean origin, western philosophy has
fundamentally presented itself as a theory of the omphalos. And with this
idea of the fixed, sacred, central spot we see the nucleus of the city/state,
as the sacred staff of the seer (which was used to inscribe the perimeter
of the sacred round circle) turned into the phallic obelisk (rather than the
female pudendum) and begins marking the convex power point around
which all is organized.
We shall quickly see in this and the next section how the sacred psychic circle (constructed around a central omphalos) connects to the sanctuary of the encircled sacred grove which itself connects to the origins of
art in the West and to the maturation of the city/state. Thus far we have
established that a parabolic immersive noise site is interiorly and conceptually encircling in aesthetic immersive sites, in order to enable the
swallowed/semi-assimilated subject no avenue of self-protective flight
from its excess of signification. What we have seen with the pudendumlike prehistoric embellished cave is that the prehistory of immersion into
noise is primarily a history of assertively embellished aesthetic space in
service of the virtual, the peripheral and the mercurial. It is for this reason
that we will turn our attention now to certain aspects of the nymph myth
continuum which makes up the enchanted nymphaea garden grotto183
legacy, for the phenomenological awareness which such a lissom simulacra provides this discourse shall be serviceable in flushing out the extensive meaning of immersive expectations.
Nymphaea is the Roman term used to describe temple fountainshelters consecrated to the nymphs which were based on simple Agora
grotto water spots. A nymphaeum, under the Romans, became a formal
temple dedicated to the cult of a nymph. This temple often related to the
source of a stream, but because these structures were based on the Greek
natural grotto grove (with spring), the term later became applicable to
both artificial fountain grottoes and to monumental public fountains.184

Noise Vision 93

Descended from classical and eastern Hellenistic prototypes, grottoes

proliferated in the late 1st century BC and spread further during the Imperial era when they became a common feature in the gardens of wealthy
landholders. A rigorous definition of the term nymphaea would limit its
designation to sacred semi-enterable edifices that served as sanctuaries
of the nymphs, and this is the sense which I am using the term here. Another important distinction to maintain, however, is that between the
public nymphaeum and the private nymphaeum. Two principal types are
evidenced in both cases: the rustic grotto niche, in imitation of the Arcadian cavern, and the architectural fountain-temple type (for example the,
now chiefly collapsed, immense Nymphaeum Hortorum Licinianorum,
or the extant Castell dell'Acqua Marcia, both in Rome). In private hands,
the interior nymphaeum was often located within an architectural apse or
in a large niche comparable to the cavea of the theater. The apse/nymphaeum constitutes the primary feature of the House of the Great Fountain
in Pompeii, for example.185
Clearly, entry into art noise space is not so much an entrance into
earthly expanse as it is a representational passage into non-space ad infinitum. Noise is the space of access/excess we know as part of the instantaneous computer communication world. Noise is also encoded into the
nymphaea origins of the garden grotto with its legacy of immersive exaltation of the feminine and its endorsement of sumptuous love. Thus, it
is upon the garden grotto's roots as a sacred/sexual nymphaeum grove
(based on the sacred omphalos-pudendum) where we shall begin to
build upon the previous section's noise recognitions by continuing to
trace the outgrowth of noise culture as detected in arcane archaeological sources and philos-theological traditions, both of which are open to
interpretation of course. What is stimulating about the noise nymph and
the omphalos-pudendumic nymphaea tradition for our purposes is its
usefulness in tracing the cast-around 360 ideal aspect of noise within an
enclosed, or partially enclosed, container.
The grotto can be seen to embody the bucolic or the idyllic, the sacred or the profane, the mythological or the prescient, and/or simply
be eloquently ornate. In a sense, it is the space of anti-noise. The grotto's
space is the space of tranquillity, coupling, solitude, seclusion, obscurity,
and cool pathos; but most significantly it is traditionally a metaphorical
space symbolizing the human vector within the unbroken universal ma-

94 Joseph Nechvatal

trix.186 But any metaphorical topos for the universe must be in its very
constitution indeterminate, noisy, complex, unified and unsatisfactory in
its denotation. The nymphaeum is that too, as its various definitions and
types are capriciously broad while all sharing an accordant meaning.
We can take the labyrinth as a symbol of immersion itself, as the entire
point of a labyrinth lies in getting lost and searching about,187 along with
the self-discovery encountered through the search. That and their necessarily willed abandonment, all of which is salient to noise consciousness.
Hence, labyrinthine understanding offers an understanding of works of
noise art in that it grants us experience by penetrating space/time and, in
a sense, secures that space/time for us.
The labyrinth is a cultural noise space blending both landscape and
architecture into an intricate search. In ancient times, when pregnant animal carcasses were cut open and disembowelled in preparation for consumption, there inevitably would be a great outpouring of the winding
intestinal tract mixed up with the foetus. Not knowing anatomy as we do,
it is supposed that primordial people took the winding intestines to be
the birth canal. As a result these beliefs became part of Pagan lore.
The earliest surviving labyrinths, all of classical seven-ring design, are
rock carvings and graffiti and patterns on coins, seals and ceramic vessels, rather than full scale forms that could be walked through or upon.
Full-sized labyrinths were too vulnerable to survive thousands of years
against the combination of neglect, erosion and overgrowth. Early surviving labyrinth designs are found carved on part of an ancient dolmen
at Padugula, Nilgiri Hills, in southern India which dates back to 11,000
BC, on a 1,300 BC ceramic vessel found in Syria, and on a 1,200 BC inscribed clay tablet found at Pylos, Peleponnesos, Greece. The labyrinth
carving found inside the Tomba del Labirinto, a Neolithic tomb188 at Luzzanas, Sardinia, could conceivably date to 2,500 BC if it is contemporary
with the tomb, but later burials make this uncertain. There are at least
five labyrinths carved into rock faces above the town of Capo di Ponte,
Val Camonica, in northern Italy, ascribed to the Late Bronze Age or Early
Iron Age (1,000-500 BC).
Crete, considered the place of origin of all of the Greek Gods and
Goddesses, was a highly developed Pagan civilization before its volcanic
destruction in circa 1400 BC, with active trade routes to and from Egypt
and other lands in the Mediterranean. Various Cretan coins between 43

Noise Vision 95

BC and 67 BC bore the classical seven-ring labyrinth design, both in

square and circular forms. This classical labyrinth design is believed to
have originated with the Cretan parable of Theseus and the Minotaur.
According to Greek mythology, King Minos of Crete had a craftsman
(Daedalus) construct the labyrinth in order to conceal the Minotaur; the
half-bull/half-human progeny of Minos's wife Pasiphae and a bull-Zeus.
Queen Paisiphae, evidently sexually unsatisfied by King Minos, had ordered the inventor Daedalus to construct a convincing full-size model of
a cow in which she could conceal herself, exposing only her vagina. Zeus,
greatest of the Gods (who was born inside Idean Cave on the island of
Crete) descended in the form of a bull and mounted and impregnated
her, resulting in the birth of the half-man/half-beast Minotaur.
There are several variations of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but the main story is certain. Crete had won a victory over Athens
and as a cruel tribute required that every nine years seven young men and
seven maidens should be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur,
who was now confined in the labyrinth. The fourteen victims were chosen by lot, bringing terror to every family in Athens whenever the tribute
became due. Finally, Theseus, son of King Aegeus, volunteered to resolve
the matter by slaying the Minotaur. Aided by a ball of golden thread provided by the King's daughter Ariadne, Theseus entered the labyrinth,
slew the Minotaur and exited the complex space by following the golden
thread he had unravelled on his arrival, thus finding his way out and ending the cruel tribute.
This myth was widely known, as Zeus is a central figure in Greek mythology and, hence, became familiar in subsequent Roman culture. At
Pompeii, where I visited, there was a square shaped seven-ring labyrinth
scratched onto a crimson painted pillar in the House of Lucretius some
time before the city was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.
It has around it the cryptic words Labyrinthus, hic habitat Minotaurus.
This demonstrates that the Romans were well aware of the Greek Minotaur's sinuous labyrinth.
Although not in the classical design, the labyrinth motif was used
in mosaic pavements throughout the Roman Empire and these are the
oldest surviving full-sized labyrinths. A significant variation on the classical labyrinth design is the addition of a second entrance (or exit), so
that a procession can enter by one entrance, reach the center, and then

96 Joseph Nechvatal

emerge by a short exit without turning around. The design is still essentially unicursal, however. The most enduring Roman labyrinths were
built in mosaic as such mazes. Other Roman mazes are complicated networks of paths, like a labyrinth. However, unlike a labyrinth, they have
multiple openings and possible directions (not just one as in a labyrinth)
which succeed.
The medium of mosaic offered much in the way of permanency to
labyrinth and maze design. As well as being durable, many Roman mosaics were shielded from subsequent erosion by the collapse of the very
buildings they once adorned, thus many examples have survived. Roman mosaic mazes consisted generally of a rectangular grid for most of
the area which they filled, using the central area for pictorial illustration.
Normally square and the size of a room, the most popular subject was the
slaying of the Minotaur, but some Roman labyrinths simply portrayed
the Minotaur, or other half-human/half-animal creatures such as centaurs. Eventually maze patterns were incorporated into the floors of some
Catholic churches and cathedrals (less the Minotaur) such as in the nave
of Chartres Cathedral which contains a majestic maze 9 meters (30 feet)
in diameter to which penitent Christians peregrinated on their knees.
In my noise vision view, the earth is a kind of wild vibrational arena
in which one omnijectively experiences the pleasures of the flesh while
being cognizant of the fact that one is an expanding noise projection immersed in an amplifying orchestration. The effectiveness of such a noise
aesthetic realization depends upon ones advancements in the area of intellectual and emotional conceptions rooted in noise. Fortunately, the
pudendum-based grotto is possibly a site par excellence in which to scrutinize this obviously thorny province of voluptuous noise vision.
To concentrate on the grotto is to summon all that was said concerning the archaic painted cave. Like in the treated cave, the art of the grotto
uses (and then surpasses) nature to concoct an apparatus deemed suitable for shaping cognitive-vision/consciousness along the lines of the
attributes of the omnijective expanding universe by modelling dilating
connectivity in miniature. The discovery in the late-1920s by American
astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) that the universe was expanding
implies remarkable things for the immersive space of the arcane grotto,
as, like the painted cave, the grotto is a miniature zone of expanding liminality and cognitive crossing. It is a space of escape from the world of

Noise Vision 97

naive naturalism (for example, that proposed by the Italian theologian/

philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)) and a zone of entry into the
fluid, rhizomatic, and elfin world of connectivism where the spatial restrictions of conventional realism (think of the paintings of Jean-Franois
Millet (1814-1875), Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) or Winslow Homer
(1836-1910)) need not apply, even while biological nature remains the
grotto's starting point. Withdrawn into this zone of fay interchange, the
immersant joins consciousness, not so much with the world outside, but
with the classical Arcadian inner world of unconscious preterhuman existence, with its mantric cerulean rites of birth, pubescent passage, coupling, incantation and death.
Porphyry (circa AD 233-303), the neo-Platonic and Neo-Pagan author of De Antro Nympharum,189 tells us in the French translation that,
even in the earliest times, certain caves and natural grottoes were consecrated to the gods and goddesses, long before temples were conceived of
and built (citing the cave of Lycean Pan in Arcadia, among others).190 By
way of preparation for the grotto, archaeological evidence has indicated
that there are traces of a 15th century BC Egyptian sacred garden grove
in the temple complex at Karnak. I visited that old garden spot, which is
tucked away deep inside the complex behind the sacred sanctuary temple
of Amun (the hidden one), and found it barren but most immersively
suggestive with its inner placement and diminutive scale.
It was from the Assyrian civilization in northern Mesopotamia that
we find sacred groves within which modest shrines were contrived for
supplication. Moreover, archaeological evidence shows that some Mesopotamian structures had pits positioned into their rooftops which were
planted with a variety of sprouted ferns and flowers that constituted a
minute garden site for contemplation connected with the cult of Tammuz
and/or Dummuzi. These sacred cults were later imported into Greece
where similar sacred groves were claimed in the wild, but now based on
dissimilar female divinities called nymphs.191 The grotto's noise poetics
can particularly be traced to the coves dotting the coasts of Greece, such
as the dazzling caverns in the Peloponnesus along the bay of Diros192 or
the one I swam in daily in Siros for a week in 2008.
Exactly where the Greek concept of the abounding sacred sexual
nymph stemmed from is not known. I assume it is a descendent of the

98 Joseph Nechvatal

cult of Hathor from North Africa, but why this concept arose in North
Africa, we do not know.
Ostensibly, in ceremonial observance of this long fertile tradition,
there emerged the previously mentioned pudendumic nymphaeum, an
ancient Greek secluded area dedicated to the nymphs which typically included an extemporaneous grotto with waterfall or spring, nestled in a
grove of trees (or sea cove) with a central devotional arena. This reminds
us again of the Greek temenos, the spot removed from the common land,
dedicated, in this case, to nymph Goddesses. The pudendum provides
the nymph worshiper a full or semi-encircled sacred immersive space in
which to enter into communications with the nymphs, for example with
Syrinx, an Arcadian nymph who turned herself into a reed to escape the
advances of the shepherd God Pan.193 Pan, who lived in caves, was son
of the nymph Penelope and is thought of as the God of fertility and unbridled male sexuality, known for engaging in sexual activity with various
nymphs in the form of a goat. No cave dedicated to Pan and the nymphs
is more renown than the Corcyrian Cave on Mount Parnassus which
is celebrated as the site of numerous Bacchic orgies.194 Yet Pan is not to
be confused with satyrs, who were Greek woodland spirits. Satyrs had a
human upper body and the lower body of a goat and were generally depicted as having dishevelled hair with goat horns and ears, and with an
exacerbated erect penis (ithyphallic). In early Greek art they were portrayed as offensive in appearance, but later they were represented as being
handsome and sexy. Greek vases occasionally depict post-coital sleeping
or sexually active nymphs such as Thetis (who attempted to make Achilles, her son, invulnerable by dipping him in the waters of the river Styx).
Few places testify more vividly to the development of the grotto than
the cavern rich Bay of Naples. Insofar as the sea-based nymphaeum was
incorporated by Roman culture into Italian gardens in the form of small
grottoes with fountains or limpid pools of water, it advanced an eventually widespread European garden tradition (as Italy set the model for all
early sophisticated European gardens). Grottoes in the Italian style generally present a pastoral, semi-nude nymph from Pagan fables (frequently
Venus, the Roman adaptation of the Greek Hathor-based Goddess of
love and beauty Aphrodite, whose myths she took over) tucked into a
niche and accompanied by ferns and spouting or bubbling water. Venus,
it must be remembered, was the Roman Goddess of love, originally as-

Noise Vision 99

sociated with the biological fecundity of vegetal gardens. Amor, Roman

God of love (the equivalent to the Greek Eros) was the son of Venus. Venus's cultural importance rose with the political fortunes of the clan of
Julius Caesar (circa 100-44 BC) who claimed descent from Venus via Aeneas and Julia. Indeed Caesar instituted the cult of Venus and proclaimed
her the Goddess of marriage and motherhood, Venus Genetrix, under
which name he constructed a temple at the Forum in her honor. Her festival, Veneralia, is celebrated on April 1st. Most people today know of her
from the 2nd century BC Hellenistic sculpture Venus de Milo, which was
purchased by France and brought to the Muse du Louvre after her discovery in 1820 on the island of Melos or from Tiziano Vecellio Titian's
(1485-1576) 1519 painting Worship of Venus at the Museo del Prado.
Dionysos is Back
What is also important to an immersive noise vision theory is that classical Greek chorus drew its associative power from the character of the
thrice sacred impulse of the ancient agricultural Springtime Spree of
drinking, planting and encountering ghosts. The Greek chorus is a remnant left over from the above mentioned ritual forms, in which all male
community members participated freely and for which Jane Harrison
uses the terminology dromenon (the thing done).195 This ritual-action
turned-communicative-presentation is consistent with what Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), in Totality and Infinity, says is the basis of the
social relations: free gift-giving (so that referents can be held in joint
to crystallize their communicative reciprocity).196 But what is most significant to noise theory is the circular orchestra, the space on which the
chorus noisily sang and danced. The relationship of that circle to eventual spectators shall illuminate just how noise art arose out of ecstatic
ritual. One must remember that the tragic dramas of the poets Aeschylus
(525-456 BC), Sophocles (495-406 BC), and even Euripides (480-406
BC), it is thought, were played not upon the theater stage but within the
circular orchestra, one which marked out the sacred patch of the gods
and goddesses.
Originally, tragic drama in Greece consisted of a single actor and a
large chorus, suggesting that tragic drama began as a choral celebration
in memory of a dead hero (a replacement for the fawn or goat) in which

100 Joseph Nechvatal

someone, probably the leader of the chorus, at some point began to act
out the exploits of the person being celebrated (after being symbolically
eaten). In roughly 550 BC, the Greek Classical age began with Aeschylus,
a notable participant in Athens' major dramatic competition, the Great
Dionysia (a part of the festival of Dionysos). Aeschylus's influence on the
development of tragedy was fundamental in that previously Greek drama
was limited to this one actor and the chorus. Aristotle tells us that Aeschylus was the first to introduce a second actor. Aeschylus's tragedic production work was followed by that of Sophocles, work typified by tragic
reasoned thought and polished phrasing. Aristotle tells us that Sophocles
was the first to introduce a third actor into the tragedy. Sophocles' work
was followed by Euripides, the tragic poet who is most responsible for
severing the chorus from the action of the play. Aristotle tells us that, by
Euripides' time, it is clear that the number of main actors has increased
and the importance of the chorus decreased. Euripides' work also interests us in that he was predominantly an investigator of intense viractual197
conceptions. A relevant example of Euripides' work, which was brought
to my attention for its noise importance by Miranda Aldhouse Green,
was the play The Bacchae, the last and greatest work of Euripides. Through
briefly looking at this play I hope to show something of the noise nature
of Greek tragic dramas as they were experienced by the Athenians at the
Great Festival of Tragic Drama, an annual religious festival in honor of
the God Dionysius.
The Bacchae, which is narrated by the chorus (consisting in this case
of female worshipersplayed by masked menof Dionysius called Bacchae, a name derived from Bacchus, the Lydian name for Dionysius) tells
the story of Dionysius, the Greek God of wine, revelry and of nature in
all of its organic and bestial prodigality. The Bacchae refers to a group of
maenads caught in Dionysius's Bacchic frenzy, whipped up by the exacerbating attractive enchantments of Dionysius.
In The Bacchae, Dionysian ritual is consistently connected with exultation and liberation as the chorus sings of the raptures of Dionysian
bliss. Such Dionysian worship was only one of the mystery cults that
flourished in ancient Greece, however, the most widely known being
Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The word mystery here refers to the
fact that these cults required that their rites be kept secret from outsiders.
Most scholars believe, on the basis of testimony from Clement of Alex-

Noise Vision 101

andria and Tertullian, that the Greek Mysteries were comprised of three
main components: the deiknymena (things shown), the legomena (things
said), and the dromena (things done).
In the play, by enflaming the Bacchae, Dionysius deliberately rouses
the anger of the disrespectful but authoritative, youthful King of Thebes,
Pentheus, who vows to put a halt to the Dionysian orgies (the Greeks
called the rites of mystery cults orgia (i.e., orgies)). Enraged by Pentheus's
refusal to accept his ecstatic authority, Dionysius whips the women of
Thebes into a deranged and furious delirium as to castigate Pentheus's
impertinence.
The play's course covers Pentheuss attempts to dissolve the tenacity
of Dionysius's necromancy and his eventual humiliating demise at the
hands of Dionysius when the disguised Dionysius shrewdly causes Pentheus to challenge (and ultimately relent on) the full force of his powers.
By so doing, he compels the King towards his own destruction, notwithstanding efforts made by his grandfather, Cadmus, and an eyeless augur,
Tiresias, to discourage Pentheus from his agenda. Dionysius deludes Pentheus by making the King see him as a bull, to think that the palace was in
flames, and believe that a phantom Dionysius, which the King was trying
to stab, was the God himself. Dionysius appears at the end of a tragedy as
a deus ex machina (God from the machine).
The orchestra in which this work, and others, were first played consisted merely of a circular plot beaten flat and sometimes edged by a
stone periphery. This is perhaps best seen today at the Epidaurus Theater
where the circle is now surrounded by a theatron (the spectators place)
which was subsequently added on. The theater, for the Greeks, was simply the place of seeing, (where the spectators sat) and the scene (or skene)
was a hut or tent in which the actors dressed.198 The central focal point of
the whole was the orchestra, the circular dancing/playing/singing arena
where the chorus of men performed their tragic dithyramb. It is from
this active arena where the ideal (an ideal ironically for both the totality of the Gesamtkunstwerk and for non-art) of the non-differentiation
between artist and non-artist, between art and life, between noise and
music, between various art disciplines, and between the final work of art
and the spectators, originated in the West. All these impulses stem from
the group revelry taking place in a noisy sacred circle which sprung from
the hoary shrine. It is this relationship between the space of the chorus

102 Joseph Nechvatal

and the space of the spectator where we can observe, with the shifts of
time, the emergence of art noise from its roots in participatory ritual
the move from dromenon to drama.
The space is circular because its quintessence is the previously mentioned circular arrangement of stones on the ground. It procured a sense
of fervent sanctity in which the undifferentiating dance-rite revolved
around some sacred/sexual focal point at the circles center. As previously outlined, this centering point (omphalos) represented the centered
place where heaven joined with the earth and where communications
with the gods and goddesses were possible. It is from this metaphysical
hoop's omphalos that occult noise perception generally looked inward
at cocooned inner space and outward towards an expanding immersive
space of the vast cosmos. At first this point was marked by bundled stalks
of reaped oats that sat in the center of the circle and only later became a
stylized male phallus or female pudendum or the figure of a homo erectus
god or goddess, and then still later their extra-representational maypole
or altar. This sacred centring point of encircling immersive space reflected
the belief of the centered place of the community member in the cosmos.
In the circular space of the proto-orchestra circle, the entire licit
Greek male society would gather and ardently rotate around the omphalos cum stave.199 There is no division at first between actor and spectator,
as all Greek men participated in the dance-worship with its consolidated
emotion. In all respects, the amphitheater seating, which we know well
today, developed when the Greeks moved the omphalos-based sacred orchestra circle up against the side of a slopping hill so that those excluded,
but watching (the uninitiated, the women and the children), would have
an unobstructed view of the Dionysian festival. The Theater of Dionysos
at the Acropolis is a chief example.
With this new arrangement, more and more uninitiated people would
gather to watch the ceremony and it is precisely at this period where
the Dionysian ritual, the thing actually done, turns into the abstraction
of artand into show. Thus a bulk of western art as it has been conceived
for about 2,400 years begins with the demise of immersive noisy participation and the advent of passive contemplation through the watching of something prepared worthy of attending. Now the noise eye and ear has been
removed from the action of the rite and separated from the whole and

Noise Vision 103

placed at rest, aloof and detached through distance by the mounting

stone seats which semi-circle the spherical omphalos-based orchestra pit.
What an emphasis on aesthetic immersion into noise does, is to place
us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360
noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory (if we fight to
overcome cultural impediments).

Chapter 3

Signal-to-Noise Eye

Anti-Noise Vision of Linear Trompe l'oeil Perspective

The Renaissance is linked with the rediscovery of classical culture. Consequently, with the revived interest in antiquity came a new repertoire of
Pagan subjects for art and this interest in Pagan matters facilitated the reemergence of the grotto within the Renaissance pleasure garden.
Concurrent with the Renaissance pleasure grotto, however, is what
came to dominate the Italian Quattrocento: the development of rational, linear point-perspective, the technical perspective rendering of a
scene from one fixed and tapered eye-point.200 As Robert Romanyshyn
describes in his book, Technology as Symptom and Dream, linear perspective vision achieves a kind of geometrization of the space of the world,
and within that space we become observers of a world which has become
an object of observation.201 This objective rendering, with its emphasis
on the horizon-line and vanishing point, formed the pictorial ideals for
painting and drawing, of course, but also it formed them for the Italian,
French and German Renaissance garden itself. Walking into a Renaissance garden, such as the Ville d'Este, Chteau de Champs at Marne-laValle, the Chteau de St. Germain-en-Laye, or any of the sumptuous
gardens of the chteauxs of the Loire Valley (such as at Chambord, Blois,
or Azay-le-Rideau), one has little question about the key values they
amplified: human reason and power justified by a godly transcendence
in reunion with classical antiquity. These values are articulated by what
Romanyshyn sees as the central function of linear perspective, its celebration of the eye of distance which becomes elevated into a cognitive
methodology.202
By looking over the orderly formal garden through a tightly focused
perspective, a sense of visceral but distant scopic power becomes evident.

Signal-to-Noise Eye 105

Samuel Edgerton, in his The Renaissance Discovery of Linear Perspective,

characterizes this focus as a means for organizing the visible world itself into a geometric composition, structured on evenly spaced grid coordinates.203 Unfortunately, with geometric organization any sense of
intimate sacred/aesthetic noise vision/contemplation is lost in favor of
the metaphysics of scopic power. The strict formal gardens of the Renaissance represent a major step, then, in the domineering, framing and rectilinear boxing-in of noise vision, and a repression of the scope of immersive propensity which we have been exploring thus far. Worse, according
to William Ivins, this repressing framing tendency moved from its discovery or invention as a quasi mechanical procedure to a logical scheme
or grammar of thought.204 Moreover, according to Norman Bryson in
his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, perspective thought followed the logic of the fixed gaze rather than the unstable and shimmering
glance, thus yielding a visuality that was reduced to a settled and single
point of view and in this sense the fabrication of linear perspective was,
and is, anti-immersive and anti-noise in disposition. Romanyshyn supports Bryson's contention.205 Clearly this reduction of our actual wobbly
vision206 into one absolute point of view can only be achieved by negating the beholders peripheral visual attention. Only by establishing the
fiction of the viewer's partial absence and lack of glance can enthralment
by fixed perspectivism be secured.207 The perspectivist viewer is thus
excluded from immersive participation in the art, held at bay as it were,
and excluded in the interests of objectivity through the methods of exclusion and voyeurism. Correspondingly, the noisy world as seen by this
immobile and atemporal gaze becomes stagnant, reified, fixated, inert
and deadened.
In the Renaissance ideal of linear trompe l'oeil perspective, infinity,
mathematics, and theology met on a unified plane whose grandeur and
rational perfection symbolises a faraway, mighty and incomprehensible
God. This perspectivist symbolization is explained in Erwin Panofsky's
Perspective as Symbolic Form as the ideal image of infinite distance. The
theoreticians of the Renaissance went so far in pursuing this ideal as to expurgate Euclid, omitting from their translations his 18th theorem which
was inconvenient to their theory of ocular perspectiva artificials. However,
the theory of perspectiva artificialis not only shored up the Quattrocento
religious ideal of a distant Godly infinity but, as a result, enhanced the de-

106 Joseph Nechvatal

tached spectator, who (like God) exists and observes distance now from
afar by isolating and cutting ambient vision off at its edges and retracting it to a frame. Viewing through the Renaissance intentional window,
the onlooker holds an exclusive singular viewpoint and hence space becomes geometrically isotropic and rectilinear. We now have a detached
transcendental subject constructed by ignoring the optic characteristics
of immersive noise space and by repressing peripheral attention to the
encircling atmosphere.
But not only supposedly transcendental in its ideological origin, this
rectilinear vision also represented a nascent scientific understanding of
the world that motivated the dissecting of optical immersive space.208
The fragmentation of the noisy immersive world is now underway as the
geometric grid divides and subdivides sight and the world into smaller
and smaller manageable portions.209 Of course, the vast majority of
media images (and most visual art) produced today still cleaves to this
horizon-line based Quattrocento framing operation, as opposed to the
immersive noise span where horizon and frame dissolution is desirable.
The invention of photography, and the astounding rapidity with which
it spread, is closely connected to the fact that perspective, and its specific
corresponding intellectual configuration, had pervaded visual habit since
the Renaissance.210 Renaissance linear perspective however, it must be remembered, is only a convention which, as Panofsky argued, is a cultural
attribute comprehensible only for a quite specific sense of space or perception of the world and definitely not an absolute perceptual truth.211
Though Christianity primarily shaped the ideology of the period, no
solitary philosophy or ideology dominated the cerebral liveliness of the
Renaissance. Interest in neo-Platonic theories, the occult, sorcery, and
astrology were widespread even as the authoritatively endorsed subjugation of magic began during the Renaissance. At the same time, Renaissance proto-humanist scholars and critics proclaimed that their age had
progressed beyond the brutality of the past and had found its inspiration,
and its closest parallel, in the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome.
By the 15th century, intensive study of Greek as well as Latin classical
history gave Quattrocento scholars a more sophisticated view of antiquity and eventually Renaissance ideology spread north of the Italian Alps
to all the courts of Europe.

Signal-to-Noise Eye 107

However, we must keep in mind that the high Renaissance style in

art (created by primarily Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Donato Bramante, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphal Sanzio, and Tiziano Vecellio
Titian) endured for only a brief period, from about 1495 to 1520. To periodize, we can say that the High Renaissance ended when Mannerism
began (about 1525) but this is only partly accurate, for all movements
in European art up to J. M. W. Turner,212 Impressionism, and particularly
Paul Czanne (1819-1877) depended on Renaissance spatial ideas,213 a
hegemony maintained for centuries by the widespread institution of the
Art Academy.
One rare aspect of the art of the High Renaissance which has noise
characteristics similar to those we previously saw in the Apse of Lascaux,
is its search for a general, unified effect of sfumato composition, a smoky
technique used for decreasing the separating dramatic force and physical
presence of isolated figures in a work of art through immersing them in a
fumey, semi-imperturbable equilibrium. Sfumato is the subtle, smoothly
imperceptible, gradation of dark colors which approaches a smoggy unity
useful in the creation of psychological atmospheric effects evocative of
the immersive display in the Apse of Lascaux. Through sfumato, complimentary contrasts (contrapposto) find a unity previously absent and
it is this unity that lends Renaissance vision its most significant self-alternative to the soon hegemonic point-perspective. This is so as sfumato
invites and promotes an expanded, diaphanous, dilated focus and necessitates a more expansive field-of-view (which as we have seen is consequential for experiencing immersion into noise). Thus an immersive (anti-perspectivist) characteristic of high Renaissance art was sfumato unity,
particularly because it depended upon a balance achieved as a matter of
intuition and hence was beyond the reach of rational knowledge or technical manoeuvres. With sfumato, we see the seeds of an immersive noise
counter-tradition in opposition to the crisp, detached, geometricized
optics of point-perspective. This oppositional optic practice of sfumato
visualization, which brings receptive vision to a state of sympathetic languor, Leonardo da Vinci taught to his students in his Treatise on Painting.
There he encouraged languid attention to the ambiguous grubbiness of
cracks and smudges on decrepit walls, which may suggest faces and forms
to the viewer in order to aid artistic imaginative and visionary ability.

108 Joseph Nechvatal

Thus sfumato offers another type of management of vision and an expenditure of the incognizant exploration of immersive noise excess.
However, a far more overriding artistic strategy was the pursuit of
the ideal of true point-perspective which developed during the early15th century (the early Quattrocento) in Florence. Filippo Brunelleschi
(1377-1446)214 is traditionally accorded the accolade of being perspective's pragmatic designer, as he created a sense of depth that integrated (by implication) the spectator outside the framed pictorial space.
Brunelleschi was certainly the first to carry out a series of optical experiments that led to a mathematical theory of perspective. Unquestionably,
Brunelleschi in 1425 contrived the first painting in true perspective
when he insisted that his friends stand exactly where he himself had stood
while painting the panel of the Baptistery of St. John in the Piazza del
Duomo of Florence, and directed them to look upon the original scene
he had painted. Then he held the painting up with its backside directly in
front of the viewer's face. A tiny eye-hole was drilled through the middle
of the panel. Gazing through the eye-hole, a viewer simply witnessed the
original scene. But if a mirror was held up in front of the painting, the
viewer now beheld the painting instead, and it was so accurately done in
perspective that it was supposedly indistinguishable from the original.
Moreover, Brunelleschi analyzed human vision mathematically and
by so doing discovered the suppositional central vanishing-point that the
horizon-line passes through (which is also the line on which two-point
perspective is defined by the oblique vanishing points). With this schematization begins the emanation of a perspectivist scheme for envisioning and depicting range that remains paradigmatic to this day. Such a
trompel'oeil, linear perspective casts a system of single-point co-ordinates
over the actual far-reaching manifold sphere, in the fabrication of an illusionism which deceives visible perception. This perspective tradition,
according to Hal Foster, was based upon the premise that the spectator's eye was singular, rather than as double as with normal binocular
vision.215 Hence, it represents vision through geometric perspective by
projecting and holding holonetric 360 vision to a single, fixed-eye point
and it is just these fixed rules of perspective that construct an anti-immersivism and creates and expresses anti-ambient divisions between the subject and the space.

Signal-to-Noise Eye 109

Leon Battista Alberti is avowed as perspective's inaugural theoretical

interpreter with the 1436 publication of his text De Pictura (On Painting). According to Edgerton, from that point on Western artists conceived of their subjects in terms of an imposed spatial homogeneity as determined by the horizon-line and the fixed gaze.216 While it is possible
to indicate the sources for perspective in Euclidean optics and geometry
and in late-medieval/gothic versions of (and commentaries on) Arabic
works on optics, the application of such theoretical material into the creation of a working system, and its transfer from the realm of physiology,
philosophy and theology to that of paintings conceptual window is what
constitutes Alberti's achievement. This achievement, however, also formulated a restricting boundary between the self and the richness of the
noisy sensual world. Indeed this window, which was at first conceived
as being open, eventually closed and became grilled with a grid217 and
it is just this closed and grilled optical perspective which, according to
Romanyshyn, has become the cultural visual hegemony of the modern
world.218 As a result, John Berger summarizes Alberti's window in disparaging terms as a safe let into a wall, a safe into which the visible has been
deposited.219
Curiously, it is interesting to discover that Alberti designed grottoes modelled explicitly after ancient classical ones, which certainly cuts
across any overly simplistic explanations of artistic ideals. However, Panofsky adequately demonstrated that Alberti and Brunelleschi, for the
most part, tried to forget and obliterate the spherical allocentric visual
noise field of the ancients, in favor of an angular-linear perspectivism by
ignoring the bumbling of noise and glance.
So lets turn underground, shall we? When immersed within the sfumato ambience of the fecund and grisly baroque/neo-baroque Cimitero
dei Cappuccini located beneath the chapel Santa Maria della Concezione
in Rome (circa 1626 to 1870)220 , I found myself tipsy with a morose and
peculiar noise vision of death: overwhelmed, engulfed, and supersaturated by an extremely dark lapidary style.221 The mises en scne of this artossuary are arranged from innumerable human bones (the skeletons of
over 4,000 monks) displayed by their survivors, the Alinari Brothers, in
an unashamedly ornamental attack on the simplicity of death. The abominable, dank, subterranean syntax is so rich and evocative as to border on
logorrhea. The style so purple as to spill over into ultraviolet.

110 Joseph Nechvatal

This immersively opulent

cove resonates with a beguiling
virtuosic uneasiness which reaches far beyond its material circumference. And yet, at a time when
our critical abilities have been
systematically bastardized by media saturation and bludgeoned
by decades of commerciality, the
Capuchin monks' convoluted baroque visual style is to most merely disturbingly freakish. More to
the pity, because the Capuchin
crypt spoke to me with an art
noise voice both compelling and
concerted. Indeed the crypt is
Figure 6 Side ossuary in the Cimitero
such a powerful immersive noise
dei Cappuccini located beneath the chapel
space that it thrashed me out of
Santa Maria della Concezione (Rome)
my scepticism about the limits of
eerie fantasy as I felt about me a disembodied, skinless, and offensive silent stillness from where countless skeletons seemed to stir and quiver
and seethe about abhorrently. The elaborate unity and horrid continuity
effect was not one of melodramatic gloom, however, but of comic/tragic
reconciliation formed under the aegis of a totalized noise excess.
The Cimitero dei Cappuccini's flower-arrangement-like nihilism
is another example of the immersive noise dissolution of representation through negative hyper-promiscuity as discussed in relation to the
Apse of Lascaux's occupied sfumato. Here, this promiscuity is further
enhanced by emphasizing our human disintegration anxiety as the crypt
collapses human identity into a construction made up of literally dead
distinctions between selves and signs. This fabrication speaks to the fact
that we are all but schematic information (genetic code) immersed within the millenarian field.
Equally, the crypt made me sense that the precarious glittering life
of today's representations are made up simply of all the previous images they have succeeded in disintegrating and recomposing. The eye
can scan and emotionally identify meaning in the perceptual field of the

Signal-to-Noise Eye 111

Figure 7 Detail of a section of the Parisian Catacombs (Paris)

crypt only because its structure is the sfumato, concave side of our own
personal ego-image. The crypt is in a sense, then, like the Apse, another
noise representation of all representations. And, as such, it is an attempt
to represent the unlimited immersive field of representation. Therefore,
it urged on me the idea of an immersive noise space in which images no
longer have any identity or distinctive place. Rather, here in the crypt's
semi-chaos and ferment, lay great hidden forces. Forces of vital emotional release, where things and bodies are represented only from the madness and ecstasy which animate them. Here all are equally joined in the
great flow of life and death as, in the depths of this compactness, blood,
excrement, and doom join in noise obscurity. Bound now inescapably
and tightly together, human formsand the blank space that usually isolates them and surrounds their outlineinterpenetrate each other in an
immersive folly far more horrific than transcendental. Anything less strident, less terrifying, less crazy, less intoxicated, less contaminating to our
perspectivist gaze would not be able to de/re-compose it, as it must be if
we are to achieve the vacuole basis of noise cognition.
I followed up this dire saturation by visiting the usual early Christian
catacombs in Rome and I found them powerful but entirely too barren
to say more to this noise study. However, after perilously flying back into
Paris in fear for my life through what in France is called a tempte (wind
storm), I immediately went to visit the Catacombs of Paris, which I found

112 Joseph Nechvatal

rich in associative noise material that addressed existential anxieties in

Baroque fashion.
The Parisian Catacombs were begun in 1785 following the decision
to excavate all of the city cemeteries, stemming back to Gallo-Roman
times, and move the remains to one central location, an abandoned Montrouge quarry from which the stones that built Paris were dug. Between
five and six million skeletons were thereupon transferred to this location
and stacked systematically according to body part (seemingly endlessly)
against the walls. The walk through the resulting macabre grandeur, with
its repetitive super-coded/anti-coded rigor, is stunningly beautiful. A
noise rhythm of great discord is established, necessarily entailing a process of intimidating sublime ideas which foresee us in expiration along
with our own minuscule insignificance. This is immersion into noise
incapable of maintaining racial or sexual differences and, as such, is the
animated crumbling of the normal monuments to human differences we
construct daily. The Catacombs' tottering bone-lined promenade works
against the completing, reassuring, mystifying representations of ideology and, as such, it ponderously invites the ultimate integration of form
through an immersively indiscriminate account of human existence,
complete with resultant long, painful, beautiful washes of commingled
feelings and realizations of our ultimate maggot destination.
On returning to the light of day so as to inspect characteristics of baroque metaphysical noise space (clearly the Baroque is an ebullient Catholic art practice rather than a restraining Protestant one), I observed that
the Baroque is saturated with the power of deception, with make-believe
and trompe l'oeil effects. Indeed, it is teeming with the gilded complexities
of ethereal flowers, throbbing stars, false arches, dripping fruit, twisting
leaves, winding columns, floating virgins, spinning clouds, and resplendent angels. In Baroque noise vision, artistic expression was predisposed
to try to break out of bodily place and architectural space by superseding
forms of constraint by over-saturating the norm.
A good example of this noise tendency is the late-Baroque Catholic
church in the tiny Mexican village of Santa Maria Tonantzintla in that it is
an Indian version of Baroque flourish. Here, an all-over excessive decorative web dances around one in unrestrained profusion and forms seem
to explode with pleasure as everywhere foliage glistens, leaves shine, angels hover, and carved fruit exude thick drops of dark honey. Such syn-

Signal-to-Noise Eye 113

cretistic excess is typical of the

Late-Hispanic-Baroque, which is
also called the Churrigueresque,
after the Spanish architect Jos de
Churriguera (1665-1725). This
period has been called an exaggeration of the Baroque to such
an extent that it concluded it.222
Other fine Mexican examples of
this tendency are the altar retablo in the former Jesuit seminary
in Tepotzotln and the Rosary
Chapel in the Church of Santo
Domingo in Puebla. Here a decorative web extends beyond the
retablo through the use of what
Figure 8 Rosario Chapel in Santo
is called yeseria, a type of interior
Domingo Church (Puebla, Mexico)
plaster work which was used to
cover vast areas in ornamental moulded relief. This technique evolved
into what is called argamasa and was utilized widely in the Hispanic
Quertaro style, which was basically Rococo by then. Both yeseria and
argamasa provided a good base for the application of vivid color, a taste
Mexican architects satisfied fully through their use of glazed ceramic
tiles which were used to cover everything from building faades to entire
domes and cupolas.223
As we have already seen, in the absence of previous framing restrictions, the Baroque is fraught with immersive noise challenges which
may produce ecstasy in some or bafflement and mystification in others. Although it tolerated and accepted, even celebrated, the individual
unique aspect of life, it transfigured all of its dispersed elements into a
single unifying will. Hence, the noise world of the Baroque is a diverse
one of contrasts while remaining essentially one unified (Roman Catholic) world. Most importantly, 17th century Baroque art flaunted a prismatic rejection of Protestant visual simplicity, thereby undermining the,
by then, conventional clarity of perspectivism in that perspectivalism, as
previously explained, sequesters the subject from the environment by
constructing the subject as supreme and the space of vision as detached.

114 Joseph Nechvatal

Central to our noise concerns is the baroque niche's format which

links us back up to the grotto and all that it represents in terms of noise
contemplation. Baroque niche-space continues the immersive noise
impulse and the immersive disposition towards filling and overflowing
peripheral ambient vision with noise excess which implicitly returns
perspectivalism to its legitimate province as a narrow and contingent intellectual convention.
What interests in the High Baroque is just this scopic all-over tension, as it emanates a forced, but fine spun grace in a vigorous noise continuum. The High Baroque's multiple, disjunctive strands of meaning are
presented to the spectator simultaneously and it is for the viewers' swift,
sophisticated mind to create a single tissue of meaning from it, even as
the body is engaged in movement and in opposition to the disinterested
static gaze of the dominant but petrified Renaissance beholder. As we
have seen, Renaissance space tended to be torpid and planar, its harmoniousness achieved through a cumulative addition of clearly defined cognate elements, while Baroque totality is achieved (at the expense of clearly defined elements) through the subordination of individual elements
into an activated whole. In the Baroque niche, it is the inter-interpreting
spectator, not solely the artist, who may be regarded as the agent who
affects meaning-laden synthesis on the rhythmically continuous but diverse component parts inextricably interwoven there.
Also among the prevailing characteristics of the Baroque niche relevant to the immersive noise intention are its feelings for a stirring dynamism and a wide gesticulation. Emblematic of that Baroque ideal
is the sensation of theater (involving the motion of the spectator)
which is evoked.
This is the Baroque way to reshape bucolic experience by increasing seductive opulence while at the same time seeking fine and intimate
sensations of diversity in the moving sensuousness of its unified means.
With it, an aspect of the Baroque achieved a partial overthrow of the
dominant Renaissance scopic order and the immersive is elevated to a
position of momentary superiority. It is precisely this pernicious dereification of visual stasis that prepares the way for, and celebrates, the implications of the phantasmagorical aspects of immersion into noise, as in
the Baroque period there existed a characteristic demand for phantasmagorical illusions which required that an interior space, in churches prin-

Signal-to-Noise Eye 115

cipally, consummated a remarkably effulgent sense of Gesamtkunstwerk

totality by blending the elements of architecture, sculpture, painting, ornament and lighting together. The aim of this Gesamtkunstwerk fusing
was to orchestrate an otherworldly consciousness, which was to enhance
the beholder's faith through the creation of an effect of unitary intensity
in opposition to a continuation of consciousness' normal segmenting
function. Consequently, the phantasmagorically affected Baroque atmosphere of indeterminate apparition was considerably concerned with a
seductive noise style which functions best as whole Gestalt composites
which convey a sense of awesome grandeur, spatial complexity, and an
interest in excess.
Though primarily Latin in sensibility (in service of the Roman
Church's parsimonious and authoritative inducements), there are fine
examples of the Baroque taste for unrestrained, phantasmagorically inclined ecclesiastical Gesamtkunstwerks in Germanic countries as well,
including the Abbey Church at Melk, Austria by Jakob Prandtauer (16601726) and the Benedictine Abbey Church at Zwiefalten, Germany by Johann Michael Fischer (1691-1766). Secular architecture, too, aspired to
the ideal of attaining Gesamtkunstwerk union between all of its parts and
the building's surroundings as in the case of Gartenpalast in der Rossau
(1711) which today serves us as the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna.
The patron of the building, the prince of Liechtenstein, planned out
both the building and the gardens with unified Gesamtkunstwerk intent.
However the juiciest noise spaces are the sacred ones, as in the aesthetic
overture of the Baroque, religious doctrine became the modus operandi of
inducement. Hence noise affect was permitted to function through constructed illusions and through the enlargement of artificial inclination.
Previously, Renaissance church architecture had been principally
sympathetic to an orderly architectonic system based upon the aesthetics of gracefulness. Beauty consisted in a prudent adherence to mathematical proportions in all sections of the building. In comparison, the
Baroque church as a medium sought to establish a heightened perceptual
instrumentality between the visualizing subject and that of an entangling
magnum opus. It is this union of apportionment with visually stimulating interchanges that make up the sturdy but fine corpulence of the Baroque's exorbitant proposition. In contrast to the lucid, linear, fixed,
sealed framework of the Renaissance perspective and world-view, in the

116 Joseph Nechvatal

Cinqueccento Baroque we observe a complication of spatial levels so ambiguously interrelated and so multiplied as to leave no one single immutable plane of reference the spectator can grasp.
Philosophically, this Counter-Reformational submission to vertiginous noise experiences of rapture are indicative of the Baroque propensity for self-consciously eschewing the model of intellectual clarity in favor of a language of multiple ambiguities and shifting excess. We must
recall that the Reformation was the reform of the Roman Church in the
early 16th century which came from those who protested against its excesses. The various Protestant churches set up as a result of this reform
ideal profoundly influenced the nature and scope of art where they flourished, and this impacted heavily upon the employment of artists. In reaction against the opulent (and hence expensive) excessive aura of the
Latin (Mediterranean tinged) Church, Protestants favored strict simplicity. Hence church commissions declined. One can see how this would
(or could) break up the artistic employment structure which was capable
of producing immersive installations. Still, as immersive noise art in the
North shrivelled, the Roman Church retaliated with the Counter-Reformation agenda, a vigorous counter-offensive running from about 1560
through 1648 which offered the public a new, even more, energetically
excessive program of immersive abundance. With it, church construction and embellishment boomed, offering artists in Catholic countries a
wealth of work. This counter-offensive initiated a revival of confidence
in immersive noise experience which the Catholic Church, as it was now
called, lavishly funded. Thus artists in Catholic countries worked, albeit
attendant upon the narrow ideological objectives that allowed the art to
exist. Happily, these objectives generally display a wider enchantment
with nebulous noise propositions which it ostensibly attempts to delineate by making the actual physical medium almost nowhere admit to being only what it is, preferring to simulate other media such as tapestry
and/or bas-relief sculpture. Thus, we are presented here with an illusionistic noise experience which shifts itself in a softly focused, multiple and
perforated manner.
Accordingly, the unrestrictedness of the Baroque visual/intellectual
situation goes beyond ideology towards a noise multivalence by way of
a smoothed disjunction that supplies a unity of vision and fills the air
with an attitude where space altogether ceases to be conceived as a void

Signal-to-Noise Eye 117

and becomes nearly palpable in its fused and responsive ether. Thus Baroque spatial composition results in creating not a clear, unproblematic,
ideological art, but rather a dazzling and disorienting deftness by blending a surplus of images and forms into a majestic noise art. This Baroque
dexterity inevitably weds suavity to grandeur through an implied sense
of manifest splendor where elaborate conflicting contrapposta appears
poised in equilibrium. Hence it provides a fluency and fullness to space
which, when conceived of skilfully, becomes lyric and vibrant. As such, it
creates a sensuous impression (though languorous) through an implied
transition from analytic to synthetic comprehension of pictorial form
which fundamentally marks the mentality of the Cinqueccento Baroque
atmosphere: a dtente mood to bind and unify forces. In this synthetic
noise sense, then, the Baroque's rhizomatic visual injunction prepares art
for the re-emergence of the immersive noise formation, in that it weans
art away from the fiction of a true perspectivist visionality and reveals
instead the possibilities which open up for inventing new scopic arrangements (and rediscovering lost ones).
Such a reduction in perspectivist constructs in favor of synthetic noise
ideals comes together most vividly and succinctly in Baroque manifestation in the bel composto (beautiful assemblage) niches of Gian Lorenzo
Bernini (1598-1680) which were constructed in the various baroque chapels he created in Rome in the late-1600s. Giovanni Careri's book, Bernini
Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion, beautifully articulates what I have been
feeling internally when struggling to define precisely what it is I mean by
the instinct for noise in art. Careri analyses the synthesizing character of
three Baroque chapels which Bernini assembled, often in terms of the
montage film technique pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) in
the early part of the 20th century. My main concern, however, is with his
analysis of the Fonseca Chapel within San Lorenzo, Lucina in Rome and
the immersive noise which Bernini articulated through the, at that time
new, bel composto mixed-media technique. If fact, my interest is precisely
located in the upper third portion of this composition, the segment concerning the relationship between the angelic bodies and their position
in and relation to space, weight, and light. The way in which the angels
first depicted in the top third in painting are extended beyond the limits
of the painting into the garland of puttiwhich floats in the vault of the
dome, linking the painted sky with the sculpted one, up into the central

118 Joseph Nechvatal

oculus, which reveals the actual skypresents an interesting progression in the expansion of the frame and invites issues of immersive noise
to come forth.
In order to understand how noise ecstasy is represented in the rippling undulation of the bel composto, we must see how painting, sculpture and architecture are linked together in a fluid ensemble designed to
create the experience of an overall expanding frame of reference based
on inter-relationships assembled between miscellaneous hierarchical
arborescent perceptions224 in correspondence with their position in the
sum synthetic-noise-total, as well as the contingent location of the spectator. These correlations, which guide us through the composto by the
montage of the arts,225 were explicitly announced by Bernini himself on
his pronouncing that things in the Fonseca Chapel do not appear only
as they are, but also in relation to what is near thema relationship that
changes their appearance.
To best understand the noise issues at work here, we need to look
again at the metaphysical underpinnings driving the artistic expression,
specifically, the metaphysical ideology behind conceptions and representations of angels. Far from being the quibblings of cloistered theologians
which bore no relationship to life, these concerns involved the very bedrock of the Church's theological, cosmological, and philosophical structure and teachings, as the figure of the angel was a primary representation
of the human's position concerning relationships between space and matter in expansive/immersive terms. As such, a consideration of the angel's
efficacy in an idealized condition sets down an influential model for human potentiality.
The term angel is derived from the Greek word angelos which means
courier. In that the messages delivered are airborne and move, angels fly
and are winged. When we say that an angel is in a place, we mean that
(s)he has applied virtus (an inherent power and potential) to that place.
Virtus means both the potentiality and the capability to generate special
effects. In the Koran, every angel is the key to a different endless ocean
of knowledge which has no beginning and no end. Yet the exact composition and material quality of angels' bodies and how they relate to the
space of the world and the celestial space of heaven, had remained an
urgent concern and of great debate in the Christian Medieval Ages between Augustinian Franciscans, followers of Saint Augustine (AD 354-

Signal-to-Noise Eye 119

430) and the Aristotelian Dominicans, followers of Thomas Aquinas (the

Italian theologian who largely adopted the neo-Platonic ranking of angels
believed to have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite). Augustinian Franciscan Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274) argued against the Aristotelian Dominicans that no pure form existed in creation and that the
angels were composed of hylomorphic matter, matter bound up with the
principles of otherness and mutability. Thus, since matter contains the
principles of mutability, angels posses a quasi-material body (what to me
seems to be an evocation of the fat-light of white noise). This fat white
noise angelic body cannot be circumscribed by place, however, because
place is a quality whereas quantity is endowed with position, unlike the
quantum nature of light. Following the Bonaventurian model, the angels
portrayed in Bernini's Fonseca Chapel imply in fat-light fashion that their
bodies are constructed from a hyper-sensitive semi-materiality, fabricated of hylomorphic semi-transparent matter.
Primary to the Bonaventurian angelology of the 17th century were
the above distinctions, distinctions which were meant to also counter the
Protestant critique of the Holy Eucharist. Hence, angels became the paradigmatic representation of immaterial hylomorphic substance. The main
point of the Bonaventurian/Augustinian angelologyand what is at the
hub of this reflectionis the idealization of the semi-transparent hylomorphic flesh of the angel and its location and existence in space as being material yet virtually interfacable with immaterial spatiality, in other
words its possession of white noise viractuality.226
The permeable quality of an angel's hylomorphic white noise body
is represented in Bernini's Baroque Fonseca Chapel's bel composto by the
child-like winsome figures' semi-transparent relationship to their painted
background, which conceptually spills over into the painting's sculpted
frame and into the architecturally domed space from which the angelic
figures emerge and return towards a light which constantly re-defines
them with every fluctuation in its intensity. From the painted portion of
the composto (by Giacinto Gimignani (1611-1681)) the garland of hylomorphic angels is transposed into relief sculptures that overflow the
frame and expand the painting as if they were released from it into the
space of the architecture en route to, and from, the circular domed light
source which dominates the composition and both physically clarifies
and luminescently dissolves the depicted hylomorphic forms.

120 Joseph Nechvatal

This conveyance of semi-transparent hylomorphic entering and exiting by preternatural means is the role the angels play in the Annunciation
narrative, which depicts and explains the forecoming pregnancy of the
virgin Mary below. The inference of these hylomorphic childish forms
emerging from and returning to a central radiant hole stresses the narrative of female sexuality and reproduction (just as in the Pagan grotto)
and hence again brings forth immersive noise issues.
On entering the church on a bright Italian day and approaching the
dim Fonseca Chapel, the dilation of the pupil of the eye in reaction to
the abundance, then semi-absence, and then increased presence of light
within the sombre enclave (in parallel with the circular overhead oculus
(reminiscent of the Pantheon) from which the heads and faces of angels
peek) harmonizes spectacularly with the dilation process of the female
sexual aperture that precedes and precludes sex and birth. In the Fonseca Chapel's bel composto, childish figures emerge out of the oculus and
paintings, and float in a gravity-free environment in which their tiny nude
bodies break free from, or are consumed by, light. The individual hylomorphic bodies that construct the spiral of cherubs which leads to and
from the oculus in the dome grow progressively diminutive in relationship to their location near the oculus, creating the impression that their
bodies are penetrating the stucco material creating the dome, as if the architecture had no more physical density than a hylomorphic fat-cloud.
The hylomorphic materialization of the cherubs reaches maximum transport the closer it is situated near the light emitting perforation, and it is
precisely here in the Fonseca Chapel's bel composto where white noise viractuality beckons the flesh to go outside of itself breath-like and for spirit to abandon the sheath of rational flesh in ecstasy. Here the membrane
of ecstatic and swooning flesh is submitted to luminous pressures from
within and infusions from without as it resists not the sacred/orgasmic
passion of expanding and then re-assembling the self in a continual, mobile, dilation-immersion into noise into ex-stasis (which literally means
gone outside itself as standing still) typical of the symbolism of the cave/
grotto. As Careri asserts, in contemplation, the composto tends to go
outside itself, in its own ecstasy becoming the vehicle of an experience that
goes beyond all images.227
This ecstasy of going outside of self (with its breath-like mercurial countenance) defines one important art noise ideal. Aesthetic immersive

Signal-to-Noise Eye 121

noise spaces (as we have seen particularly in the Apse, the grotto, and
now the niche) give license to this particular dynamic dialectic of going
outside of self in a way the perspectivist tradition seems incapable of doing, as the immersant is better arranged in symbolic space to voyage the
unveiling circuits which are employed in the encouragement of ecstasy
than when facing the pictorial. For when positioned within an immersive/expansive noise field, the immersant's ambient vision is already being drawn peripherally outside itself and outside its commonly restricted
(framed) edges.
Hence the Fonseca Chapel's encouragement of floating transference
is the tension of a representation outstripping itself and, as such, it produces a noisy rapturous effect as it continually over-leaps the scope of image and concept and identity and space where one capacity turns against
another in supernatural contradictory fashion, reminiscent of the ecstatic
writings of Saint Theresa of Avila (1515-1582) and her descriptions of
an engaging mystical union with Christ. While Saint Theresa describes
this mystical union as a wave-like experience that cannot be related outside of the terms of incomplete and opposing images, she nevertheless
stresses the experience as being one of a dynamic, intense and convulsive
nature.228 These attributes, as codified in the Carmelite spiritual tradition,
became another semi-transparent model on which Bernini based his
teeming composition's rippling and pulsating operational mechanisms,
including his Cornaro Chapel bel composto sculptural niche in San Maria
della Vittoria which embraces his famous Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1652):
what, frankly, appears to be a woman, tucked into her grotto, in the
throes of orgasm.
Consequently, within Bernini's Cornaro Chapel niche, the boundaries separating the ecstatic noise realm from the unecstatic realm are transgressed convulsively by St. Theresa's semi-transparent relationship to
wave-like space and omnijective-like corporeality. In the Cornaro Chapel
niche, the writhing St. Theresa represents human (quasi-sexual) ecstatic
potential as opposed to our relatively inviolable demeanour. Here, too, by
being able to pierce solid matter in analogy to the way veins web marble,
the angelic cortege is privileged to escape the rules of containment that
matter imposes upon the non-hylomorphic human body. In trespassing
the mortal boundary, Bernini's angels are again unplatitudinously associated with a broad electromagnetic spectrum of fat white noise and hence

122 Joseph Nechvatal

stand in opposition to containment. This makes the hylomorphic angel

the site of hyper-real hyper-planarity and the perfect model to analyse art
in terms of noise and extensions of the subject into an implicit space reminiscent of what in magic is called entry into the imaginable-world. This
imaginable-world is more subtle than the earthly world and yet denser
than the angelic world (thus open to white noise-like interactions) and,
hence, an art noise zone of connections and ecstatic flights of release,
even as the body is clamped to the heavy, round, earth realm which is
holding everything down with its transparent gravity.
Rococo Noise: Between Opulent Habitat and Non-Place
We shall now switch epochal emphasis from the time of the rich fullness
and dynamic noise extravagance of the Counter-Reformationist Baroque
period to that of the Rococo. Even more than with the Baroque, the Rococo spills its vast organized commotion over the viewer, assaulting the
immersant with commands for his or her aesthetic involvement in its artificiality and elaborate unreality. Unfortunately, photography flattens what
in the Rococo is a complex but light application of ornamental splendor
by overemphasizing details that are only part of a whole fluid spatial strategy, which serves to create a sense of amazementa sense which these
spaces still exude today.
Assuredly, amazement is the initial impression. Nevertheless, turgid
or ecstatic noise seem to be the other two ways of interpreting the density
of extensively adorned rococo space, according to taste. What is factually
agreed upon is that the term Rococo came into usage in the closing years
of the 18th century, although it was not acknowledged officially by the
Acadmie Franaise until as late as 1842 when the Acadmie Franaise's
supplement to its dictionary defined it as ornament characteristic of the
reign of Louis XV (1710-1774) and the beginning of that of Louis XVI.
The term was originally a derogatory one, most likely derived from the
term Rocaille, which, as I described in the portion pertaining to the grotto,
was a stylistic extenuation of craggy design used to fabricate interior grottoes and which tended to spread throughout the entire space. Briefly to
recap: the florid sprawl that appears in the classical Greek nymph's sacred
grove developed into the Italian grotto, which developed into the Renaissance interior grotto, which then passed into the fully all-over immersive

Signal-to-Noise Eye 123

noise attributes of the rocaille style. What interests me especially about

the flamboyant vine-like sprawl of the Rocaille/Rococo interior, is how it
suggests the viney rhizomatic shrubbery of the grotto entangled with our
own bodies' thalamo-cortical system (the reticular activating system and
the thalamus which links with the cortex, the basal ganglia, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus), as linear complexity is the motivating principle
leading to the immersive noise effect in the Rococo room.
In majestic Rococo rooms, exuberant linear ostentation pushes visual
logic mercilessly to its limits via opulence in an effectual fusion of intensity with grace. That is their raison d'tre and their oppositional stance in
relation to the coherent monocular geometricalization of the Renaissance point-perspective precedent. In fact, the sumptuousness of Rococo
sensorial space is, one could say, the first mature historical paean of ecstatic noise, as in its architectural interior decoration the Rococo exhibits
a fondness for the expanding all-over. With the ubiquitous asymmetrical
curves of its surface structure, it wraps itself around and transforms an
interior into a noise confection of delicately colored vines and ribbons,
reminiscent of espousal pastry, and, only slightly removed, of the sacred
grove of the nymph.
In 1683, the Premier Architecte du Roi (chief architect to the King
of France) was Jules Hardouin Mansart (1646-1708), the architect who
created the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. It was in his studio and under
his name that the Rococo style began to emerge, most keenly through
specific motifs and innovations of his designers Pierre Lassurance I
(1655-1724) and Pierre Le Pautre (1660-1744). By the beginning of the
18th century, the intermixture of the Baroque with elements of Classicism (which had characterized the royal art of Louis XIV) gave way to
the lighter, more gleeful art of the Rococo, a spatial art which demonstrated a heightened immersive opulence. The spatial conception of Rococo architecture under Mansart began to show fundamental changes
from the assured building of the Baroque. Where Baroque walls, piers
and columns had been massive and forceful and where the space was tenaciously focused while being multifarious, Rococo spatial ideals, envisioned space as delicately unified while being diffused with an abundance
of light. Stylistically, while the Rococo protracted the complexities of Baroque surface arrangement, it treated it as homogeneous ornamentation,
justified only insofar as it charmed the eye. This stylistic shift away from

124 Joseph Nechvatal

the legacy of the rich Italian Baroque interiors of Pietro da Cortona (as
first introduced to Paris by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli in his work of
1644 for Cardinal Jules Mazarin) began to introduce a lighter style (subsequently called Rococo) into the remodelling schemes of some of the
rooms at Versailles. In the last year of Louis XIV's reign, this Rococo style
was adapted in many interiors which involved Le Pautre's leading participation, including Parisian htels particuliers (private mansions) such as
the Htel de Pontchartrain interiors built in 1703 and the chapel at Versailles, finished in 1710.
With Louis XIV's death in 1715, the characteristic phase of Rococo
called Rgence emerged. The all-over rippling watery feel introduced by
Pierre Lassurance I and Pierre Le Pautre under Jules Hardouin Mansart
was coupled with a new flashy plasticity consisting of curvaceous forms,
mirrors, and oval hemicycles mixed with fluttering ribbons and/or acanthus leaves scrolling outward around a chamber. This trait is seen, for
example, at the Htel d'Assy of 1719 which was constructed under the
new Premier Architecte du Roi, Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742).
Another bold rgence style Rococo interior, known for its playful lightness, is the Htel de La Noiseillire (now the Banque (Bank) of France)
constructed by Franois-Antoine Vass (1681-1736) who became the
chief designer on Le Pautre's death in 1716. Further developments in the
style were made by Cond architect Jean Aubert (1719-1785) who remodelled the Grand Chteau at Chantilly. In the Chambre de Monsieur
le Prince and the Salon de Musique, Aubert extended gold filigree across
the expanse of white panelling, along with a spidery scrollwork that
spumed out onto the ceiling above the cornice at the corners and midpoints of the walls, creating a decisively noise effect.
Following the rgence style of Rococo is what is called the Rocaille
(the most extravagant expression of the Rococo) even as this term predates the emergence of the Rococo and suggested to it its name. As stated, Rocaille had originally referred to the shell-work employed in garden
grottoes, but as of 1736 the term began to be used differently to designate a High Rococo, total, over-all design which included complimentary
furniture and porcelain. La Pautre's basic concepts had been little embellished by Jean Aubert until Juste-Aurle Meissonnier (1695-1750) and
Nicolas Pineau (1684-1754) goosed the design concept into an even
finer feathery network of gilt filigree that became ever more total while

Signal-to-Noise Eye 125

remaining light in spirit. Meissonnier, who was trained as a goldsmith,

found his greatest fascination and inspiration in the asymmetrical. Although he produced only a small amount of work (his mark in fact has
been found only on one piece: a gold and lapis lazuli snuff-box (1728)),
his influence was widespread due to the favor of Louis XV and the posthumous publication of his designs in 1751 as the Oeuvre de Juste-Aurle
Meissonnier. In actuality, he had been responsible for only a handful of
interiors: one for Lon de Brethous in Bayonne (1733), the apartment of
Baronne de Bzenval in Paris (circa 1736) and a cabinet for Count Franciszek Bielinski in Dresden (1734).
Nicolas Pineau, on the other hand, was responsible for the more highprofile interiors of the Htel de Rouill (1732), Htel de Villars (1733),
Htel de Roquelaure (1733), and Htel Mazarin (1736) in Paris. Following the publication of Rocaille theoretical treatises, ornamental pattern sheets and suites of engravings by the Augsburgian publishers Martin Engelbrecht (1684-1756) and Johann Georg Hertel (1700-1776), the
Rocaille ideal rapidly diffused throughout Europe and developed into
what amounted to an international style. But by 1740 the Rocaille Rococo had reached its apoge in France and was universally accepted and
hence underwent no further development. The most important works
undertaken in this late phase are interiors by Germain Boffrand (16671754), who executed them late in his life. Notable was his creation of the
Salon Ovale for the Princess at the Htel de Soubise (1739) where he
blended a rhythmic succession of arched mirrors with extending tentacles of filigree with a series of painted panels by Charles-Joseph Natoire
(1700-1777) placed in the spandrels and undulating coving, all spiralling
around a central rosette.
Beginning around 1725, the Rococo held sway in Germany with even
more strongly inscribed noise peculiarities than existed in France. This
Bavarian Rococo is fantastic and more varied in form than its French inspiration, while being less courtly. The first Germanic architects of this
style were Johann Balthazar Neumann (1678-1753) (particularly good
examples are his amazing chapel at the Prince's Residenz at Wrzburg
(1741) and his church in Vierzehnhiligen) and Franois de Cuvillis
(1678-1768) (his odium in the Residenz is outstanding as is his pavilion
at Amalienburg) in Bavaria and Georg Wenzel von Knobelsdorif (16071753) and Carl von Gontard (1738-1802) in Berlin. In Bavaria and Aus-

126 Joseph Nechvatal

Figure 9 Rococo interior of the Ottobeuren Abbey (Bavaria)

tria, the Rococo survived until the end of the century, while in France
it had given way to the new austerity of Neo-Classicism by the 1770s.
Very anti-noise.
A significant theme in Germanic Rococo counter-reformational excess is certainly an extenuation drawn from the Baroque expanse and its
immense trembling flair for the plethoric but now taken to an even finer

Signal-to-Noise Eye 127

sugary spun artiificialia. For example, in the Church of the Assumption

in the unassuming village of Rohr in Bavaria, trompe l'oeil theatrical curtains divide to disclose an absorbed Virgin Mary floating aloft, wanting
any discernible means of support, reminiscent of the thinly veiled grotto
theme of the Fonseca and Cornaro chapel niches. The Bavarian Rococo
offers many such voluptuous grotto scenarios embedded within an architecture where structure melts into a bewildering myriad of curves and illusionistic spaces which give us pause, not just in the elaboration of viractual action, but in the congruent blending, flowing and folding of spatial
pleats which forms an intrinsic part of a realm of experience recognisable
as immersive noise.
Another marvellous example of Bavarian Rococo is the St. Johann
Nepomuk Church in Munich (1746) which is better known as Asamkirche (Asam Church) after its architect Egid Quirin Asam (16921750). With his brother, the painter and architect Cosmas Damian Asam
(1686-1739), he created a masterpiece of sumptuous noise at 32 Sendlinger Strae.
On entering the vestibule of the church, I encountered a consummate
example of Bavarian excess. In this hybrid space, painting, sculpture and
architecture work together in fabricating something between a prodigal
odium, a playhouse, and a quixotic grotto. I was overwhelmed by a devastating folly of munificence and the giddy embellishment of silver and
gold extravagance.
The Asam brothers also worked on the interior of the lush Einsiedeln
Abbey south-east of Zurich. Another fine example of Bavarian rococo
interiors can be seen at the Schloss Nymphenburg, near Munich, which
was designed by Johann Baptist Zimmermann (1680-1758).
Further pertinent insights into immersive visual noise under the Bavarian Rococo are best characterized by the Wieskirche (1746-1754)
designed by Dominikus Zimmermann (1685-1766) with its elaborate
(possibly ostentatious) spectacular interplay of painted and sculpted
forms. This church can stand representative of a dozen such 18th century
whipped-cream ornamental eruptions in obscure villages, deep within
the Bavarian, Swabian, and Franconian countryside: villages such as Ottobeuren, Weingarten, Osterhofen, Wallfahrsirche, Neresheim, Bobingen
and Vierzehnheiligen.

128 Joseph Nechvatal

Figure 10 Interior view of Egid Quirin Asams Asamkirche (Munich)

The Neo-Rococo Noise of the Dream King

Typical of 19th century Neo-Rococo noise vision is the belief that all aspects of a comprehensive architectural schemefrom its landscape setting and the building itself, to the interior decorations, right down to the
utensilsshould be orchestrated as a seamless and homogeneous whole
under the direction of one overriding design. This is the most enduring
legacy of Rocaille style as its all-over objective became preserved and
further elaborated in the Neo-Rococo. As we will see, it is a noise vision
ideal that entwines its way through Fin-de-Sicle (1880-1899) architectural theory into one of the 20th century's driving art objectives. This
complete integration within a constructed space of the broadest concepts
on down to the smallest details (each reinforcing the other) is what is re-

Signal-to-Noise Eye 129

ferred to as the Gesamtkunstwerkkonzept (concept of the total-artwork),

a term adapted from Wagnerian operatic theory. The philosophical understanding of the canon of the Gesamtkunstwerk was the proclivity towards an integration of all related elements into a single aesthetic statement, resulting in a self-contained immersive world of total design.
King Ludwig II of Bavaria was born crown Prince on the morning of
August 25th, 1845, eldest son of King Maximillian II (1811-1864). It is
significant that he was born, and spent some of his early years, in the previously mentioned Nymphenburg Schloss replete with its rococo rooms,
grottoes and frescoed scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1857, at
age 12, Prince Ludwig heard of Lohengrin, the operatic production by
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) which was in production in Munich. That
Christmas, Prince Ludwig received a copy of Wagner's 1851 text Opera
and Drama from one of his tutors and soon after became captivated by
all of the composer's published theories, including Das Kunstwerk der
Zukunft (The Art of the Future) in which Wagner theorized the Gesamtkunstwerk.229 This Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, in one way or another, affected the aesthetics of every one of Wagner's works from The Valkyrie
on; including Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers, and Parsifal. It is this Gesamtkunstwerk desire for what Wagner
saw as total drama230 that was passed on to Prince Ludwig.
In 1861, Prince Ludwig saw his first production of Wagner's opera
Lohengrin which made a profound impression on him (as it did on Wassily Kandinsky231 (1866-1944)) instigating a long and intense admiration
and eventual supportive role for the composer and his Gesamtkunstwerkkonzept ideals.232 When Prince Ludwig was nineteen, his father,
King Maximillian II, died unexpectedly, marking the beginning of the
reign of King Ludwig the II of Bavaria, the Dream King, palace builder
and generous patron to Richard Wagner.
After visiting his creations, it is safe to say, I believe, that King Ludwig desired a noisily decadent art for himself in ways of taste and state
of mind. His aim of creating an inorganic world of excess and luxuriating
in its rarefied artificiality was well articulated in 1884 with the publication of Joris-Karl Huysmans's (1848-1907) decadent novel A Rebours
(Against Nature), a story of a reclusive art worshiper who yearns for new
sensations and perverse pleasures within a transcendental artificial ideal. Decadent French theory, which is almost equivalent to Fin-de-Sicle

130 Joseph Nechvatal

Symbolist theory, aspired to set art free from the materialistic preoccupations of industrial society.
Linderhof, one of King Ludwig's decadent fantasy palaces, was built
in neo-Rococo style by Georg von Dollmann (1830-1895) to resemble
the Petit Trianon of Versailles; Marie-Antoinette's (1755-1793) famous
royal playground that was designed to resemble rural Austria (an impressive immersive work in itself) which included an adjacent Temple
of Love. Linderhof is the only one of Ludwig's palaces that was actually
finished. Of Linderhof, King Ludwig said in a letter: Oh! it is essential to
create such paradises, such poetical sanctuaries where one can forget for
a while the dreadful age in which we live.233 Located close to another of
the King's castles, Neuschwanstein (designed by Eduard Riedel (18131885)), the King often retired to Linderhof to indulge in his decorated
isolation. Linderhof owes a large part of its charged enchantment to the
sublime natural beauty of its mountain setting and to its admirable prim
French gardens. In the middle of its grounds, an embellished fountain
emits a 30 meter high (about 100 foot) water-jet bathing a golden statue
of Flore. The interior of Linderhof is a mele of neo-Rococo ostentation
and mirrors (Bavarian Neo-Rococo is based on Bavarian Late-Rococo, an
already plenteous noise style) and the glitter of gold is prevalent throughout. The King's Throne Room, modelled on an abstract Byzantine basilica, requires brief comment as King Ludwig oversaw every detail of
its conception and execution. Its walls are arcaded on two levels and the
ceiling suggests the immersive umbrella of a star studded cerulean stratosphere, with indigo, porphyry and gold as its predominant colors. Yet the
most dazzling of the rooms are the Mirror Room and the King's bedroom
(which were based on designs by Eugen Drollinger (1858-1930)).
However, it is another extraneous spaceclose by his lavish polyglot palace at Linderhofwhich holds the most noisily significant (and
cheeky) of King Ludwig's decadent dream realizations: the flamboyant
Venus Grotto (a reference which brings us back to sacred nymphaea).
The 9.9 meter high (33 foot) Venus Grotto was designed by Fidelis
Schabet (1813-1889) and fabricated in 1877 of garnished grout.234 It was
equipped with artificial arc-lighting, an ersatz rainbow, a wave machine
and central heating, all set in harmonious action to recreate the phenomenon described in Wagner's first act of Tannhuser.235 The Venus Grotto
was first intended to be built at Neuschwanstein, but due to lack of a suit-

Signal-to-Noise Eye 131

Figure 11 Fidelis Schabets decadent Venus Grotto, 1877 (Linderhof)

able site, it was moved to Linderhof by a December 15th, 1875, Royal decree and the work was carried out in 1876 and 1877. Dr. Michael Petzet,
writing in Wilfrid Blunt's book The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria, describes the grotto's space as one which allows the visitor an encircled mirage where stage and auditorium are blended into one, creating a total
theater as it did not separate the onlooker from the stage.236
The Venus Grotto is furnished lavishly with fake stalactites, giving
the impression that one has entered a Lascaux-like sacred noise space.
According to Naomi Miller, this artificial grotto, compared to all others, most nearly simulates the experience of exploring large cavernous
spaces237 even as garlands of roses are strung throughout its 9.9 meter
(33 foot) high cupola expanse (which extends hundreds of meters/feet
inward). The grotto also contained a cascade and a fully functional artificial moon, and could be illuminated by electric lights colored to suit
the mood of the King. The explicit models for the Venus Grotto were the
Blue Grotto at Capri (Richard Hornig, the King's equerry, was sent twice
to Capri to check the precise shade of blue) and King Maximillian's tiny
grotto at Hohenschwangau, in which Ludwig had played as a prince.
In the Venus Grotto, five distinctive lighting effects could be made to
play for ten minutes in turn by automated means, concluding with the

132 Joseph Nechvatal

appearance of a spectral rainbow just over the Tannhuser set painting.

It was very modern in that it was the first electrically illuminated installation in Bavaria. Of it King Ludwig said, I don't want to know how it
works. I just want to see the effects.238
King Ludwig had installed in his den (a study filled with paintings illustrating the erotic aspects of the Tannhuser fable) a clandestine inlet
which discharged him into his cherished Grotto of Venus. The Grotto
of Venus is entered by a sharply angled antechamber which leads to the
principal chamber. The first entity that one notices is a diminutive lagoon (replete with painted water nymphs, dryads and flying harpies) fed
by a pattering cascade. As mentioned, the lights could be controlled to
change colors, for instance to the cerulean of Capri or crimson to evoke
the Grotto of Venus in the Hrselberg grotto where Tannhuser dallied
with the Goddess of Love. Exit from the grotto is made by way of a prolonged serpentine, stalactite-filled corridor which leads to a dolmen-like
shaft that swings unclosed.
By gliding in the enchanting flamboyant cockle-boat over the face of
the lagoon, King Ludwig could site himself in the midst of the grotto's
ambience and surround himself entirely on every side, even if he was
only experiencing a presentation that incorporated the variance of colored lighting effects. On the lagoon, which could be ruffled by an artificial wave machine, the King kept two swans, symbols of eternal bliss and
immortality, along with his enchanting cockle-boat in which he would be
rowed by a lucky servant.
Wilfrid Blunt, in his book The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria, reports that there was a staging of the first act of Tannhuser in the grotto
but that the sound of the waterfall rendered subliminal the singers voices in a thick din mixture of sound and by an acoustical space described
as freakish.239 This noise concert, however, Blunt mentions, may be
fictitious.

Chapter 4

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes

The Imprudent Immersive Noise of the Fin-de-Sicle

As we saw with the Neo-Rococo, the main point of psychic noise through
decadent design is the concept of space as a unified fuzzy entity. This concept of molding space into a unified whole through all-over noise marks
the beginning of the trend away from eclecticism and towards Art Nouveau Gesamtkunstwerk ideals.
Art Nouveau is the French name of an art movement that took its impulse from the nymphianesque blend of natural forms and women. This
interest in sensual bio-structure was expressed in sinuous Gesamtkunstwerk fashion, touching everything from cutlery to lamps to furniture to
walls to entire building faades to metro-stations. Architects and designers who contributed to the development of this style included Victor
Horta, Henry Van de Velde, Antoni Gaud, and Hector Guimard (discussed below).
Basically, Art Nouveau is a Northern European and North American style of art/architecture which spanned from the 1890s to about the
Neo-Neo-Classicism of the First World War era. It was called Stile Liberty,
Jugendstil, Modernism, Nieuwe Kunst or Sezessionstil respectively in Italy,
Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Austria, but in all cases, artists and
architects wanted to expunge the differentiation between the major and
minor arts in the creation of a total art in Gesamtkunstwerk fashion by
centring them around life. Therefore architecture, which has an immediate immersive sway on human existence, was the prominent art to which
every artistic propensity is thoroughly integrated.
For our concerns, it is especially interesting to note the importance
of Art Nouveau's approach to conceptualizing Gesamtkunstwerk interior
space. As mentioned, the basis of the Art Nouveau interior is a concern

134 Joseph Nechvatal

with nymphian effluvium-feminine forms, and with swirling, tendril-derived patterns that are applied throughout the space in a frivolous spirit.
The forms from nature most popular with Art Nouveau designers were
characterized by flowing curves of the sacred grove: grasses, lilies, vines,
and the sensual curves of women. However, on occasion, other, more unusual natural forms, were also used, such as peacock feathers, butterflies,
and insects, but at all times High Art Nouveau's foremost feature is an emphasis upon ornamental value distributed throughout the entire space.
An Art Nouveau interior is asymmetrical at root, as evident in the tiniest single line or in its approach to the total space, but its typical asymmetricality is always in service of a total design. So what is important to
our concerns, is that Art Nouveau is a noise art concerned with every detail, as every object of or in an Art Nouveau space is ideally related to a
homogeneously noisy whole.
The obscurantist mystification often sensed in circuitous Art Nouveau was part of a widespread cultural reaction against the new social
divisions brought about by the power of the Industrial Revolution and
towards the intractable powers of the nymph/fairies at flippant play in
nature. Its sinuous space provides the immersant with the possibility
for an ebbing of consciousness toward the incomprehensible, a vantage
point from which to breakout of the Renaissance perspective position towards a more supple non-Euclidean noisy awareness. This heightening of
perceptual sensitivity allows for and encourages a heightened consciousness of one's surroundings in general, as the churned-line is found on the
floor and then picked up in the shapes of the furniture and on into the
doors and door frames until it reaches the structural arches which support the ceiling and into the lighting fixtures. As a result, the entire space
is swaying, bending, floating, arching, smoking, curling, throbbing, dripping, melting, aching, writhing.
Baron Victor Horta (1861-1947), a Belgian artist/architect and
teacher at the Brussels Vrije Universiteit and at the academies of Antwerp
and Brussels, is one of the key founders of the Art Nouveau movement,
who, at age 25, fabricated his first domicile in Ghent just after finishing
his studies at the Brussels Academy of Fine Art.
Belgium's extensive industrial development during that period, which
was based on mining, iron and steel industries, led to the emergence of
a new and well-off bourgeoisie that was readily disposed to exhibiting

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 135

its recently acquired wealth and social status by commissioning original

architectural creations. Industrial space had called for the development
of large scale iron and glass constructions for factory use and this new
technology became available for possible applications in creating human
habitations. Grasping upon this new technology, Monsieur Horta broke
the mould of traditional architecture (in search of the all-inclusive Gesamtkunstwerk) by giving his spaces a centralized light well.
The first Art Nouveau building was built in Brussels in 1893 by Horta,
the Htel Tassel. The Htel Tassel, at 6, Rue Janson, was built for Horta's
friend Emile Tassel as manifesto, and in so doing established Brussels as
the capital of Art Nouveau.
Baron Horta's idea to construct lyrically enchanting spaces with
whimsical arabesques (noodles, whiplashes and eels) is particularly evident in his 1900 Maison Personnelle (personal home) which is located
at 23-25, rue Amricaine, in Brussels. It is one of the most exquisite Art
Nouveau buildings in the world and open to the public. Its fully immersive fin-de-sicle noise milieu is achieved through an unfamiliar warped
suppleness of space created through thin, windblown, and whiplashed
lines which lent me to the feelings of sprite underwater hair and, of
course, writhing seaweed.
Baron Horta's creative fervor was enthusiastically received for almost
20 years (from 1893 to 1910) by an ample component of the Brussels'
fin-de-sicle bourgeoisie. However, the Catholic high society rejected Art
Nouveau, considering it dangerously decadent because of its emphatic
use of curved lines. Consequently, in Brussels no church was ever built in
the Art Nouveau style, which made it ipso facto a part of the secular movement of the period. Between 1915 and 1919 Horta stayed in England and
the United States respectively, and there his whiplash noise ideal towards
space became tempered and he turned to straight lines.
Gesamtkunstwerk-inspired designer/architect/theorist Henry Van
de Velde (1863-1957) also was a key figure in the movement as he called
for the unification of art into the space of the whole room (wallpapers,
furniture and paintings). Van de Velde and his Brussels company, the Socit Van de Velde, created all the interior furnishings of his buildings,
including rugs and metalwork and in one case even a matching dress for
its owner in keeping with his theories of totality which he articulated in
Dblaiement d'art (1894) and Aperus en vue d'une synthse d'art (1895).

136 Joseph Nechvatal

Van de Velde advocated in his tracts the unification of all of the arts as
an instrument of social reform and a rejection of historical forms. Living in Germany, he became associated with the rise of the Jugendstil and
became an early member of the Deutsche Werkbund (who invited him to
build a theater for its planned exhibition in Kln in 1914). He is considerably known for his Havana Cigar Shop, a shop he created in Berlin in
1899 in collaboration with the Belgian painter/designer/theoretician
Georges Lemmen (1865-1916). Lemmen was especially recognized for
his carpets, wallpaper, and tiles. Indeed Henry Van de Velde's reappraisal
of the status of the applied arts became a fundamental issue in the Sezessionist movement.
We turn now to the imposing suavity of Antoni Gaud in Catalonia.
At the age of 16, Antoni Gaud (1852-1926) left his hometown Reus to
join the school of architecture in Barcelona where he quickly adapted Islamic, Oriental and Gothic influences. Although he did not travel about
Europe, Gaud was aquainted with fin-de-sicle Belgium/French avantgarde movements because of the intimate relationship between Barcelona and France and with the pre-modernistic movements of Arts and
Crafts, Gothic Revival, and Impressionism which were discussed in the
intellectual proto-modernist circle which he frequented, but it was Horta's Art Nouveau movement that influenced Gaud the most, stimulating
him to experiment with new materials and new fluid shapes. Gaud was
particularly close with Count Gull, who travelled often in Europe and
it was Gull who introduced Gaud to the theories of the architect/theorist who exerted the most persuasive influence over the Art Nouveau architects in regards to the Gesamtkunstwerkkonzept ideal, Viollet-le-Duc
and his book Entretients sur l'Architecture (which influenced both Horta
and Gaud). Noteworthy is the fact that King Ludwig paid a visit in 1867
to Pierrefonds, a restored medieval citadel that underwent restoration by
Viollet-le-Duc.
Like Horta's, Gaud's version of Art Nouveau noise, is characterized by an overwhelming proclivity for the organic nature of women,
beasts, and plants which he translated into immersive utility. The materials utilized by Gaud towards these ends ranged from stone, ceramic,
tile, wrought-iron, glass and brick. He also used broken tiles for financial
and technical reasons, as square tiles could not match the wavy shapes he

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 137

preferred, plus it was cheaper to use free

broken refuse from ceramic factories.
Antoni Gaud is a chief exponent of
Art Nouveau noise precisely with his 1906
building Casa Batll located at 43, Passeig
de Grcia, Barcelona, noticeable for its organic tactility of bones and shells within,
and its external cocked surf faade and
chimerical roof. With Casa Batll, Gaud
accomplished an astute transformation of
an existing building, transforming it into
an enchanting immersive Gesamtkunstwerk as Gaud thoroughly undertook
the design of every single element of the Figure 12 Interior stairway of Victor
building, from the extravagantly protuHortas Htel Tassel (Brussels)
berant faade to all aspects of the interior,
including the gracefully gnarled furniture. On the exterior, Gaud was
able to combine a flamboyantly surging faade (in an ingeniously coolcolor orchestration) while maintaining a dialogue with the neighbouring
Casa Ametller (1900), built by Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1869-1956) four
years earlier. Powerful pillars that resemble the substantiality of mammoth elephant legs accost the visitor at street level, protruding into the
sidewalk, nigh tripping up an unaware pedestrian. These legs are bordered by a craggy vertebrae-like tier and the wavy faade extends upward
between these two biologically evoking forms, culminating at the roof
in a gargoylesque humping crescendo. The faade itself, coated in a layer
of Montjuc stone, shimmers seductively under the sun in multifarious
chameleon-like colors, fraught with a scattering of small roundish plates
resembling fish or reptilian scales. Affixed to this seething mass of swelling construction are a number of small, elegantly curved balconies with
oval shaped portholes.
The entire structure feels unsharpened, flowing and smooth in opposition to the street itself on which the arrangement sits, with the exception of a few square windows up top. Even the walls are gently rounded
in strained undulation and contraction, as if they too have entered into
the oceanic female throws of a fluttering uteral orgasm. The walls appear
to be made of a soft, smooth, supple, leathery material and this illusion

138 Joseph Nechvatal

of softness is carried through by

the roundness of the inside forms
of the building where one has the
feeling of being pleasantly encased in an expanse of hardened
dripped honey. Turning, lunging
stair railings are met, engulfed
and supplemented by softly,
heaving honey-colored walls and
wooden biomorphicly shaped
carved doors and irregularly
shaped windows. There are no
right angled corners or straight
lines, which offers the immersant
an impression of being wrapped
up in one continuous fluid wave
motion, complementary with the
exterior. The number of ceramic
Figure 13 Exterior view of Antoni
tile elements used, that compleGauds Casa Batll (Barcelona)
ment the feeling of inhabiting
a construction produced by organic cells, increases towards the roof,
where the crest of the roofing runs in a protuberant line that traces a zigzag spinal swell. The roof is covered in pallid bluish-pink ceramic tiles on
the side facing the street, almost as if it were blushing due to the pithy
sensuality of its avant-garde stance.
The French focus for Art Nouveau was Paris and the city of Nancy.
In Nancy, one can still encounter a wonderfully complete Art Nouveau
environment intact at the Muse de l'Ecole de Nancy's Salle Manger
(1904) by Eugne Vallin (1856-1936). Art Nouveau came to Paris principally by the celebrated architect Hector Guimard (1867-1942) who,
as most people know, designed the Paris metro entrances, among other
structures. In 1894 Guimard was building the Castel Beranger in a neogothic style when he visited Horta in Brussels. Inspired by what he had
seen of the Htel Tassel, Guimard modified his plans for Castel Beranger,
designing every detail, the wall paper, door handles, floor tiles, and front
door, in Gesamtkunstwerk manner. Another architect who theorized,
designed and built Gesamtkunstwerk-based Art Nouveau in Paris was

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 139

Frantz Jourdain (1847-1935), an influential teacher, theorist and builder

of the 1910 La Samaritaine building.
Painting Modernist Noise
Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated,
strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh
sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises

As initiated (by the students) in the studio of Gabriel-Charles Gleyre

(1808-1874), Impressionist painting restored noise concentration onto
the two-dimensional surface of the canvas while simultaneously suggesting an interregnum of luminous space. As such, it also played a consequential role in modelling fin-de-sicle French aesthetics. One thinks
here of the ephemeral paintings of Claude Monet (1840-1926), particularly his extensive series of paintings, Haystacks (painted between 1890
and 1892) and Rouen Cathedral (painted between 1892 and 1894) and
then Nymphas, the series of 23 large paintings (19 of which were 2 by
4.30 meters (6.56 by 14 feet)) which he created late in life based on his
Giverny garden's Bassin des Nymphas. From 1915 to 1926 Monet exhibited all of these paintings in wall-to-wall installation mode, filling the
three rooms of the l'Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris. But also indicative
of this noise aesthetic are the paintings of Auguste Renoir (1841-1919),
Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) and Jean-Frdric Bazille (1841-1871).
Post-Impressionism extended this noise momentum, for example,
with Georges Seurat's (1859-1891) mammoth 1886 Pointillist canvas
Un Dimanche aprs-midi la Grand Jatte. Here, everything on the canvas
is inexorably locked together in one flowing noise as the composition
(taken as a whole) postulates an uninterrupted enveloping energy devised from the color theory of the chemist Eugne Chenoiseeul (17861889). We can see this continue in the Divisionist paintings of Seurat's
friend Paul Signac (1863-1935), for example in his painting la Voile Jaune
of 1904 which shows a ship disintegrating into its environment. Paul Czanne likewise extends this noise tradition in such a way, that his influence on the 20th century is hard to overstate.

140 Joseph Nechvatal

As Rudolf de Lippe pointed out in his book La Gometrisation de

l'Homme en Europe L'Epoque Moderne, increasingly in the Modern era
the geometricization of human vision became the general methodical
condition in the West, characterized by an analytical sight which decomposes the immersive noise vision sphere into geometricized fragmented
parts. This is a modern technological vision whose effectiveness lies in
its tendency to isolate and decontextualise noise scope. Indeed, modern
technology had an enormous social impact in the 20th century in this,
and other, respects. The automobile and electric power, for instance, radically changed both the scale and the quality of 20th century life, promoting a process of rapid urbanization and a substantial change in lifestyle
through mass production of household goods and appliances. The rapid
development of the aeroplane, the cinema, and the radio made the world
seem suddenly smaller and more accessible. Since 1900, the speed of
travel has increased by a factor of 10 to the 2nd power, known energy
resources by 10 to the 3rd, explosive power of weaponry by 10 to the 6th,
and speed of communication by 10 to the 7th power. Such new ways of
understanding involve a change in perspective, and that change is marked
in the 20th century by an extended propensity for immersion into noise.
An automatic scribble of twisting and interlacing lines permits the
germ of an idea in the unconscious to express, or at least suggest itself
to consciousness. From this mass of procreative shapes, full of fallacy,
a feeble embryo of an idea may be selected and trained by the artist to
full growth and power. By these means, may the profoundest depths of
memory be drawn upon and the springs of spiritual instinct tapped. So
wrote Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) in a short essay called Notes
on Automatic Drawing in 1916 for the British art magazine FORM. This
statement recalls the noise art in the Abside in Lascaux, but who the heck
is Austin Osman Spare?
Spare was a chaos noise artist replete with potentials, but who has
no place in the canon of Modern Art. He is a spiritual noise artist who
concentrated on transforming his libidinal energy into noise art through
the use of automatism almost ten years prior to the Surrealists. In a way,
he is an artist with whom I cannot be satisfied, but with whom I can be
impressed in terms of the art of noise. Why impressed? Because among
the many complexities that have transpired in today's society due to the
delirious effects of information-communication technologyand the

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 141

proliferation of visual information that has resulted from this technologyis the changing nature of artistic definition. And Spares use of automatic instinct in creating his noise art addresses this condition fully. As
you may know, automatism, in the arts, is an act of creation which either
allows chance to play a major role or which draws on the unconscious
mind through free association, states of trance, or dreams. Spare was a
pioneer in this noise practice specifically with his experiments in trance,
which is basically self-initiated work with reflexive feedback loopsthe
basis of cybernetics.
He is impressive, too, in philosophical terms, as contemporary postmodern thought has been concerned with the poststructuralist deliberation on the notion of the subject in order to question (and unlasso)
its traditionally privileged epistemological status. Particularly in respect
to the automatic-assisted techno-artist (an artist whose discourse revolves around networks and rhizomes), there has been a sustained effort
to question the role of the artist/subject as the intending and knowing
autonomous creator of artas its coherent originator. Again Spares automatism informs us here. In fact, for me, the semi-automatic drawings
of A. O. Spare have become emblematic of this question of the rigorous
scrutiny of the subject which Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) has described
of as logocentrism: the once-held distinctions between subjectivity and
objectivity; between public and private; between fantasy and reality, and
between the unconscious and the conscious realms.
Today, we understand that these distinctions are breaking down under the pressure of our speeding and omnipresent computer communications network technologies. We are now part of an automated technologically hallucinogenic culture that functions along the lines of a dream,
free from some of the strictures of time and space; free from some of our
traditional earthly limits that have been broken down by the instantaneous nature of electronic communications.
The modernist existential concept of the singular individual has been
supplanted by the electronic-aided individual, in a way liberating her
from linear time, and vaporously placing her in a technologically stored
eternity (simulacrum-hyperreality). This quality of phantasmagorical and
perverse displacement has for some signified a tightening spiral which
formulates a new vision of existence, a vision which Jean Baudrillard has
called pornographic and which Deleuze and Guattari have called schizoid.

142 Joseph Nechvatal

Both these descriptions apply aptly to the drawings of A.O. Spare in a variety of ways that I will make apparent shortly. For those, and they are numerous, who are not familiar with the work of Spare, let me first provide
some rudimentary background on him.
Austin Osman Spare was born the son of a London policeman. Doom
loomed abundantly in Fin de Sicle England as Spare came of age, thus
his development into what can now be recognized as a late-decadent,
perversely ornamental, graphic dandy in the manner of Felicien Rops
(1833-1898) and/or Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) can be readily contextualized.
As a young man, Spare was for a brief period of time a member of the
Silver Star, Alister Crowley's (1875-1947) magical order. Spare's lifelong
interest in the theory and practice of sorcery was initiated, he recounted, by his sexual relationship at a very young age with an elderly woman
named Paterson. To perform sorcery, for Spare, was a practice meant to
captivate, encircle and ensnare spirits. It is not quite the same thing as
practicing magic, which is the art of casting spells or glamours. For Spare,
as well as for Crowley, Tantricesque sexthe withholding of the orgasmicheld the means of access to their magical systems. However, it is in
Spare's conception of radical and total pan-sexual freedom, consisting in
the unrestricted expression of what he held to be the inherent dream,
where we first detect the seditious and chaotic philosophy which drove
a prong between himself and Crowleyand every other esoteric system
but his own brand of chaos magic/art.240
In 1905, at the tender age of 17, Spare self-published his first collection of drawings in a book of aphorisms entitled EARTH INFERNO. In
it, he lamented the death of what he called the ubiquitous women of unconsciousness (he believed that out of the flesh of our mothers come
dreams and memories of the gods), and castigated what he called the
inferno of the normal. For Spare, and I agree with him here, there are
no levels or layers to consciousness, and no dichotomy between the conscious and the unconscious. There isn't even a clearly definable boundary
between consciousness and the object of consciousness, between subject and
object, between action and situation. There is only a depth or thickness of
consciousness which varies in proportion to our state of self-awareness
from the thinnest film of near being, where we engage in pure desire/instinct driven towards action, to so paralyzingly thick opacity that it in-

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 143

duces catatonia. The point of automatism is that the more spontaneously

we act, the less self-conscious we are.
EARTH INFERNO disparages the world of humdrum banality in favor of an exotic pan-sexual orb which Spare began to reveal in a spate of
non-automatic drawings somewhat reminiscent of the decadent artists
previously mentioned. His intention was pan-sexual, transcendental, and
androgynousin that Spare claimed that he was all sexand that what
he was not, was moral thought: simulating and separating. Moreover, he
wrote that when belief detaches itself from the accessories of convention,
desire stands revealed as the ecstasy of the self, ungoverned by its simulated forms.
In 1907, Spare self-published a second collection of drawings in a
publication named THE BOOK OF SATYRS which contained acute insights into the social order of his day. Then in 1909, Spare began work on
a third book, this time of semi-automatic drawings entitled THE BOOK
OF PLEASURES on which he worked for four years. This book emerged
in 1913, as did another called THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY. In
1914, he held his first one-person exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London. It included many of the semi-automatic sketches he drew while half
asleep or in a self-induced masturbatory trance. Indeed, most of Spare's
semi-automatic works (from 1910 onward) were produced in onanistic
self-induced trances that he claimed were sometimes controlled by intrusive occult intelligences working through him. Here, through masturbatory trance, he said the I becomes atmospheric. This certainly reminds
us of the disembodied state so often encountered in electronic environments (such as virtual reality) where the so-called self is uncoupled from
the body and pseudo projected into computerized space.241 Indeed, Spare
considered his best accomplishments those which he said were produced
through him by disembodied spirits rather than by him, often by the hand
of the phantom spirits of William Blake (1757-1827), Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) and Albrecht Drer (14711528). Not bad virtual company. Spare quite wildly would declare that
his was the automatic hand utilized by these deceased masters. Through
his automatic and delirious technique, Spare claimed to be able to draw
upon the profoundest depths of memory and to tap into the springs of
instinct. These drawings can be found in a book Spare prepared but never
self-published in 1925 that he called A BOOK OF AUTOMATIC DRAW-

144 Joseph Nechvatal

INGS, a book that was posthumously published in 1972. More automatic

drawings were lost when on May 10th, 1941, during the height of the
London bombings, Spare's London flat was obliterated by a bomb.242
It is in his highly extravagant practice of automatic openness and
swank self-denial/self-pleasure that Spare's relevance to the poststructuralist/post-Internet conceptions of the noisily decentered and distributed
subject is found. Specifically, Spare's heterogeneity relevance here lies in
his interests in the loss of subjectivity as experienced in sexual transport
and sexual fantasies, interests which now dovetail into our interests in the
philosophical loss of sovereignty typical of the art of noise. Here, for example, with the loss of body consciousness specific to total-immersion
within a virtual reality environment, one frequently senses a transporting
dissolution moving consciousness away from self-consciousness.243 Also
there is an obvious bearing on aspects of on-line faux self-permutations
what are called avatars. By participating whole-heartedly in his insertion
(and semi-fake disappearance) into the transpersonal symbolic economy
of the sign through the assumed equivalence of life and death (in what
perhaps can be imagined for us as digitized-stored post-existence), Spare
remains truly an individual, if not altogether alone in his time. His was
a radical transcendentally false egoless gesture (what a bogus collaboration!) which he fabricated in order to make semi-automatic art try to do
magical things. In the process, he created an exciting conception of noise
art which focuses on collective and collected selves. Undoubtedly, his is a
view which counters the long-standing western-metaphysical-phallocratic-heroic portrayal of male-selfhooda view which we all know too well.
And yet, doesn't his view of a compiled self, akin to the essence of the
death of the subject, offer just the sort of resistance to the structures of
logocentric civilization that simulationist theory claimed was impossible?
Listen to what Spare wrote on this in a 1916 essay: Let it not be
thought that a person not an artist may by these means become one: but
those artists who are hampered in expression, who feel limited by the
hard conventions of the day and wish for freedom, these may find in automatic drawing a power and a liberty elsewhere undiscoverable.244
Spare's quite early conception of the illusory coherence of the I, renders everyone and every-sex equally phantasmagorical (as disembodied
fabula) akin to the way the speeding electronic-computer network can.
His conception of automatic every-sex was clarified when he wrote, In

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 145

the ecstatic condition the mind elevates all sexual powers towards infinity. And, Speed is the criterion of the genuine automatic. Art becomes,
by this velocity an ecstatic power expressing in a metaphorical language
the desire for joy. But, in effect, his pan-sexual joyful I existed primarily as the construct of a system of male forces which he claimed acted
through him on the creation of a synergistic complex image. This synergistic compounding of the mnemonic threshold encapsulates our current
post-postmodern-networked predicament in that the fabulated digitalself today may feel sublimated by the automatic system in which it operates. It may feel eclipsedbut also freed-up bythe mammoth computer-media-web as phantom information bits flow continuously around
and through us in a vague endless whirl of unverifiablity. This digital-self
unquestionably partakes in a data proliferation which forms, bit by bit,
into an extensive aggregate somewhere deep in the abstruse recesses of
our hard drives, a data proliferation that is awaiting discharge and reformation through noise art.
Perhaps by automatically stirring the viractual-self, Spare can be understood as a precursor of digital fluidity/copy-ability, working as he did,
vis--vis onanistic actions while forestalling the actualization of his orgasmthus maintaining an extended virtual state of self-pleasure. Certainly his remarkable sex/magical method for making noise art suggests
a methodology based on obsession and longed for ecstasy which I have
taken as my digital working method tooa method that plays in the area
of control/non-control with an aim towards constructing a capricious alliance that associates discourses of machinic noise with organic sexuality,
an association which opens up both notions to mental connections that
enlarge them. The digital-noise-self here is impregnated by a sustained
desire that becomes energized by the supposition that deep memory
responds to chaotic longings and can relive original obsessions. In relationship to this method, Spare said, The artist must be trained to work
freely and without control within a continuous line and without afterthoughtthat is, the artists intentions should just escape consciousness.
In time, shapes will be found to evolve, suggesting conceptions, forms
and ultimately style.
So it is extremely relevant, then, to consider Spare's means of becoming courageously individual through his frenzied tranced-groupings. In
effect, he achieved this through the transgression of (and by!) his artis-

146 Joseph Nechvatal

tic masters. In terms of the originals unimportance to our electronic

era's conception of art as simulation, Spare's claim to meta-individuality
in his production (really what he claimed was a co-production achieved
through automatic means) seems prophetic. If a substance-less collective
history of digitized art images and the unseen labor of computer programmers lurks and reverberates internally in each technologically-aided
art work today, and if in each of our computers a data-bank of visual information lingers beyond our personal propensity and (perhaps) dominates us, then an inner freedom from external authority indeed seems futile. We can only act with what authority has passed down to us. But what
if the search for a digitally-assisted noise art in our contemporary context
of the information society is more simply directed towards not repeating what has been learned and collected? Perhaps this possibilityas
achieved through the automatic unconscious actis what I have chiefly
learned from Spares work and writings, as well as his exclusion from the
canon of art history. By way of semi-automatic processes, art can be further problematized, cracked-open, drained and transfigured through the
strange mixture Spare showed us of disinterested rapturea generous
elation where off-beat panoramas and chaotic multiple personalities have
room to emerge.
To achieve this, Spare would first exhaust himself before beginning to
draw in a somber candle-lit room and in a slight trance with no particular idea in mind, thereby, he believed, reaching deeper and more remote
layers of chaotic memory. He did this while continuously abhorring the
accepted values and maudlin conceits of his day. It has been my experience that computer programming that utilizes automatic functions can
achieve similar ends. I learned this through developing in 1991-2 a realtime, operative artificial-life application based on the viral model.245 This
disruptive model, though based upon nature, makes use of automatic
functions of computation to circumvent conscious control. Such a nonrational, unpredictable automation, of course, stands in stark contrast to
the automation of Fordist/Taylorist production, with its legacy of instrumental rationality.
The fact that Spare was a sensual occultist should not misdirect our
appreciation of his artistic and theoretical endeavor. The logic of noise facilitated by the Internet is satiated with a parallel concealment. For most,
there is much mystery attached to the digital hidden codes and routing

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 147

formats that expedite our tele-communications. Moreover, his drowsy

semiautomatic drawings, with their multifarious and allusive search for
something antithetical to the established normand their morbid subversion of the concept of individuality and authorshipplay well on today's desire for excessive noise art that the computer tends to encourage.
Spare's drawings enmesh, hinder, alter and disrupt the mundanity of elementary communications with their inexorably chimerical noise.
Today it is in the hyper-logic of the endlessly duplicable digital noise
and/or sound where we can probe, much as Spare did, for a particular
and personal occult expression. Also, we should remember that, within
the current electronic environment of hypermedia, artistic annihilations
of linear time are now possible. Thus barriers between the deceased and
living become somewhat abolished. This, too, recalls Spares chaotic
methodology. In his own fashion, he created a non-linear noise where
deep-memory threatens the common order of events, thus questioning
both clichd ideas of originality and supplied social codes. Clearly, with
its emphasis on origin, author and finality, his non-linear artfulness subverts the modernistic conception of production, but without merely accepting the artificial, the copy, the simulation, as the end point.
This is how the art of noise functions in our technomediacratic societya hyper-society that deploys the effects of rhizomatic connections
and trance-like repetitions. It is the artists task today, I feel, to disadvantage the digital reproductive technology so as to defeat its attempt at negating our arts mystical significance. But to do this, we must abandon the
Enlightenment baggage of authorizing categories and live non-linearly,
while accepting nothing as flatly given. Here again, Spare inspires as he
explicitly eschewed categorization and instead sought to problematize
the authority of the category through hyper-logic. So Spare compels us
again to take notice of the various ways artistic conventions have molded
our responses and regulated our artistic denotations.
The possibilities of non-linear, complex-entangled-erotic noise configurations springing forth from the digital Id made up of mercurial symbols and pan-sexual concepts in opposition to recycled representations
provides an interesting insight into the way Spare's art (with its convoluted compositions made up of vague confiscations) directs us towards
the conception of the transformative possibilities of technologically-aided noise art.

148 Joseph Nechvatal

Perhaps the hope that Spare's non-linear and semi-automatic noise

art can show us a way to resist art historys drive towards reification is
a fragile hope indeed in our electronically-homogenized cyberage. Honestly, such a hope may be less than we deserve, but it also may be more
than we usually allow ourselves to envision.
What I am certain of is the need for spontaneous, pre-rational actions
in the realm of art and technology so as to pursue spiritual and erotic desires, and here Spare inspires as he indicates ways in which we may escape
the prison of technological logic to encounter intimate realities bound
only by the next thought and driven only by the last. This is the answer to
the question how shall I be free today? and to best express free thought
through noise art without too many tainted preconceptions.
Not to dismiss Austin Osman Spare (and his concept of the collective selfwhich for us can be reconceived of as technological hyperthought) as dilettante folly is to become aware of the fact that underlying everything virtual is a web of hyper-connections upon which we can
exert more manipulative desire than we are normally led to believe by the
society of the spectacle. But to do so, we must actively use noise art and
not be content with merely consuming it. For as Flix Guattari said in his
noteworthy book, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, the work of
art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of
baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment that leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself.
This reinvention of the self occurs through a curious alliance between
the cold impersonality of technology and the flames of personal ecstasy
in the new noise art of our time.
However, modernism in architecture (and then art) rejected such late
Art Nouveau noise ideals by placing emphasis on the unity and similarity of reductivist forms. This reductive urge is called orthodox Modernism, an ideal concerned with essences and abstractions. Charles Jencks
takes the view that the modern movement in architecture is based on a
world-view informed by the Industrial Age with great emphasis on the
mass production of virtually identical goods, and with reducing the design of something to its simplest functional elements. Simultaneously,
profoundly new noise concepts in art began to appear in 1905 with Henri
Matisse (1869-1954) and the Fauves at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In
particular, the Cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and George Braque

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 149

(1882-1963) emerged as a radical departure from the perspectivist representational tradition of the past, as Cubism aimed to restructure representation through a redefinition of realism. Analytic Cubism (1908-1912)
dropped the conventions of Renaissance framing in favor of a multioutlook exploration of many different angles and viewpoints, articulated
through overlapping and interlocking planes, as we see with Picasso's
1910 canvas Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.
In opposition to point-perspective, Analytic Cubism shows that the
viewer synthesizes fragmentary accumulated evidence into an assembled
totality when the viewer's volume of perceptions are detected through
ambient vision in motion. Analytic Cubism re-analyzes and synthesizes
vision's multiple viewpoints concurrently by tenaciously folding them
(simultaneously) into one sweeping but minced formation. As such,
Analytic Cubist consciousness suggests an embedded hermeneutic immersion into noise. Synthetic Cubism emphasises this non-illusionistic
program in a broader way through the incorporation of elements in the
environment, such as fragments of wall-paper, journals and/or photographs. A good example is the 1912 legendary, Nature Morte avec Chaise
Cane (Still-life with Chair Caning) by Pablo Picasso.
The early photomontages by the Dada artist Hannah Hch are particularly relevant to noise vision, for example with her amazing Cut with
the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch
of Germany from 1919-20.
In this work, Hch presents us with a rush of all-over and intermingled visual fragments (like in the abside of Lascaux) that exceeds any attempt at a clean, clear signal reception. As I showed in Lascaux, this form
of visual noise presentational excess offers up the possibility of multiple
interpreations that may be in conflict with each other. Thus the interpreative act seems to have no end here.246
So now we can turn fully to the immersive work of the Dadaist artist/
designer/typographer/poet Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) and his Hannover Merzbau (1923-1937), as stated a large influence on the Japanese
noise master Merzbow. In the early-1920s, Schwitters began working on
a collage/column which he called a Schwitters-Sule which soon grew out
and up over the ceiling of his apartment in Hannover.247 Soon it grew
down across the walls, and niches were made in it to contain mementos from his friends which were later covered over until the work finally

150 Joseph Nechvatal

grew up through the ceiling, down through the floor and onto a small
projected roof. In its entirety it was called Merzbau (Merz-house).248 This
Merzbau was abandoned to the Nazis when Schwitters moved to Norway to escape them. There he began another Merzbau (the Hus am Bakken at Lysaker) which was burnt down by children in 1951. The Hanover
Merzbau, too, had been destroyed in the aerial Allied bombings of 1943,
but in 1947 Schwitters began work on his final piece of what he called
total art249 his Merzbarn. This work was to be made almost entirely of
plaster with found objects embedded in it. Another relevant Schwitters
project from the immersive perspective was his theorization of the Merzbhne, a total-Merz-theater.250 Though this project was never realized, it
paralleled a number of other total theater projects that were developing in
Europe during the 1930s.
In light of Schwitters' achievements, we might now consider Clarence
Schmidt's 1930s noise decor/assemblage creation of a continuous chain
of grottoes and corridors and caves created on O'Hayo Mountain near
Woodstock, New York, that Allan Kaprow wrote about in his 1966 book
Assemblages, Environments, Happenings.251 Schmidt's collage grotto/labyrinth has been hailed by Adrian Henri as possibly the 20th century's finest piece of total art252 a concept of environmental art Henri developed
in his book Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance which,
as we have seen, stems from the Wagnerian terminology Gesamtkunstwerk: a coextensive configuration which sets out to inexorably dominate,
overwhelm, and flood us with sensory impressions.
The key European avant-garde movement with initial immersive art
noise suggestion was Futurism.253 I have already pointed out the crucial
importance of Luigi Russolos work in this respect and his 1913 manifesto L'Arte dei Rumori (translated as The Art of Noises) is seminal. The noise
work of Fortunato Depero is also outstanding, such as his 1915 Edificio
di stile rumorista transformabile (Building of transformablenoise style)in
collaboration with Giacomo Balla254 and his Anihccam del 3000: Canzone rumorista (Machine of 3000: Noise song) (1916-24).
The Cubist ontological embeddedness of the view into a spread of
moving optical fields was amplified in Italian Futurism, as it attempted to
coalesce andcondense scattered/totalized ocular impressions. Umberto
Boccioni's (1882-1916) 1911 painting States of Mind II: Those Who Go is
an admirable example. Responding to the machine age, the Futurists, un-

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 151

der the philosophical leadership of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (18761944), glorified speed and the machine while expressing a rejection of
the past, best exemplified by a famous fist-fight in 1910 between the Futurist painters and poets and the Venetian townspeople who reacted in
anger when 800,000 manifestos, entitled Against Past-Loving Venice, were
scattered upon them.255
Cubo/Futurism achieved a syntheses of the flickering noise optics of
Post-Impressionism with the spread of urban media visual production,
announcing the postulate that reality is discovered through the slant of
drifting involvement as opposed to static detached understanding. This
dematerialized optical noise awareness suggested further supra-visual reconfigurations that are picked up by the radical avant-garde of mid-20th
century, as we will see.
But rather than coming from Cubo/Futurism, art conceived of as
total experience256 stems, according to Henri in his book Tota Art, from
Dada, a reaction against the First World War of 1914-1918.257 It is true
that the Dadaists did not restrict themselves to being painters, writers,
dancers, or musicians, as most of them were involved in several art forms
and in breaking down the boundaries that kept the arts distinct from one
another. In particular, Henri suggests that total experience stems from Max
Ernst's first Kln exhibition in 1920, in which Ernst was joined by other
artists who, like him, were later to become Surrealists. The exhibition was
entered through a men's urinal that was opened by an adolescent girl in a
First Communion dress reciting obscene verses.258
Freud's intrigue with the unconscious was enthusiastically taken up
by the Surrealists who saw his studies of dreams as central to their own
desire to disrupt the norms of conscious perception. As Henri Ellenberger's book, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution
of Dynamic Psychiatry, forcefully demonstrates, Freud did not discover
the unconscious if we can say that anyone did, it would be Jean-Martin
Charcot (1825-1893) and Pierre Janet (1859-1947), the author of De
l'Angoisse l'Extase (Of Anguish and Ecstasy) but Freud, working with
his associate Josef Breuer (1842-1925), might be said to have posited the
general principles and contents of the unconscious mind that gained predominance in the 20th century.
Henri states that the grand Surrealist exhibitions of 1936 in London
and 1938 in Paris are the most direct precursors of total art. In the Paris

152 Joseph Nechvatal

show, under the direction of Marcel Duchamp,259 the ceiling of the main
room was hung with 1,200 coal sacks filled with paper while a gramophone played German military marches, complimented by an ornamental
pool and the smell of roasting coffee-beans. For a later exhibition in 1942
at the New York Reid Mansion, entitled First Papers of Surrealism, Duchamp created an environment out of kilometers of entangled string.260
We must, too, acknowledge and indeed honor an immersive noise
masterpiece and source of immense inspiration to the Surrealist movement itself, the Palais Idal of Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) which, to
my eye, appeared to be one gigantic sprawling noise grotto when I visited
it, as if the stupendous mannerist grotto-faade at villa Borromeo had
been left to grow untrimmed and run amok. It was constructed by Cheval
alone in the Hauterives (Drme) between the years 1879 and 1912, the
result of 93,000 man hours of hard labor.
So a question: why does quietly framed pictorial art become progressively challenged by visual noiseand to a certain extent, eclipsed by
itfollowing the Second World War?261 Evidently there was something
endemic in the barbarous conditions of 20th century modern warfare
that facilitated this noise development at its onset, rather than any more
laudable human aspirations towards the expanding of aesthetic perceptual consciousness. We can find examples of cultural visual noise previous
to the war on occasion, as we have seen, but after it there is an explosion.
I have deduced that something in the consciousness of society was
altered following the war and have further deduced that the bombing of
civilian centers in the course of the war (that is, Kln, London, Tokyo)
culminating with the American atomic bombings of the civilian Japanese
cities, Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 (circa 140,000 victims) and Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945 (circa 70,000 victims), changed the world's
sense of space radically.
The Allies' strategic air offensive against Germany began to attain its
maximum effectiveness in the opening months of 1944. Both the U.S. air
forces concerned, namely the 8th in England and the 15th in Italy, were
increased in numbers and improved in technical proficiency. By the end
of 1943, the 8th Bomber Command alone could mount attacks of 700
planes and, early in 1944, regular 1,000 bomber plane missions became
possible. Even more important was the arrival in Europe of effective longrange fighters, chief of which was the P-51 Mustang.

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 153

Figure 14 Exterior view of the Palais Idal by Facteur Cheval (Hauterives, Drme, France)

However, Paul Virilio, in his esteemed Bunker Archaeology, indirectly suggested the initial date of this spatial consciousness transition
as 1943, with the Nazi preparation for the first operational launching of
the V-2 ballistic missile. Ballistic missiles are rocket-propelled weapons
that travel by momentum in a high, arcing trajectory after they have been
launched into flight by a brief burst of power. Although experiments had
been undertaken before World War II on crude prototypes of the cruise
and ballistic missiles, modern weapons are generally considered to have
their true origins in the V-1 and V-2 missiles launched by Germany in
1944 and 1945. Both of those Vergeltungswaffen (Vengeance Weapons)
defined the problems of propulsion and guidance that have continued
ever since to shape cruise and ballistic missile development. Indeed
strategic missiles represent a logical step in the attempt to attack enemy
forces at a distance. As such, they can be seen as extensions of either artillery (in the case of ballistic missiles) or manned aircraft (in the case of
cruise missiles).
In 1944, at the Peenemnde base on the island of Usedom in the Baltic, Wernher von Braun and his team created the V-2. The V-2 was 14.1
meters long (47 feet) and its payload was about 900 kg of high explosives. The horizontal range was about 350 kilometers (220 miles), and
the peak altitude usually reached was about 100 kilometers (62 miles).

154 Joseph Nechvatal

It was first fired against Paris on September 6th, 1944. Two days later,
the first of more than 1,300 V-2s was fired against Great Britain (the last
on March 27th, 1945). Belgium was bombarded almost as heavily with
them. Reaching a height of more than 160 kilometers (100 miles), the
V-2 marked the beginning of the space age. After the war, both the United
States and the Soviet Union captured large numbers of V-2s and used
them in research that led to the development of their missile programs.
Nevertheless, Pablo Picasso's 1937 monumental 3.51 by 7.52 meter
(11.5 by 24.6 feet) painting Guernica presented into art consciousness an
earlier (the first) civilian air-bombardment of innocent people at home
in their city of Guernica Y Luno during the Spanish Civil War (19361939). Here 1,654 Basque people were killed, at the bequest of Francisco
Franco Bahamonde (1892-1975), and 889 were wounded, including the
elderly, women, and children by Adolf Hitler's (1889-1945) Junker 52
and Heinkel 51 warplanes in the service of Spanish fascism.
Previously, there existed a separation between military and habitational space but, with the bombing of Guernica Y Luno, the swathed
immersive space of the tellurian domain was suddenly deemed defunct
as previous earth/covering frontiers became increasingly porous to airborne invasions. This sense of airborne vulnerability soon extended itself
further and further outwards with the launching of spy and then militarycommunications satellites (Sputnik in 1957), the first manned space
flight of the Soviet military-pilot Yuri Gagarine (1934-1968) on April
12th, 1961 (the first man in space), and then the first manned trip to the
moon of the American Apollo Mission in 1969 which featured Neil Armstrong's televised trek on the moon. Rocket technology enabled military
forces to put nuclear weapons on intercontinental missiles, due largely
to the former work of Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
(1857-1935) (whose visionary ideals came from Nikolai Fedorovich
Fedorov (1828-1903)), the American Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945)
and the German Hermann Oberth (1894-1989). With rocket technology, the space of military interaction clearly expanded and, mirror-like, entered the inner dimensions of the human psyche. Virilio verifies this shift
in consciousness in his book, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception,
where he traces the colonization of the unhurried gaze by military technologies and the introduction of military intelligence into the indoctrination of the non-combatant's perceptions. This rational scopic extension

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 155

of vision is accomplished precisely at the loss of another sort of vision,

the ambient/holonogic, as it involves a heightened ordering and sighting
of linear perspectives and a consequent geometrization of both external
space and the inner human. This new sense of threatening external space
perhaps is most strongly, and most fearfully, exemplified by what has become known as C3I (pronounced as see cubed eye), the electronic military intelligence spatial fusion of control, command, communication and
intelligence that developed as the electronic/digital system of strategic
command over the U.S. military's nuclear arsenal. Herbert York, in his essay Nuclear Deterrence and the Military Uses of Space, provides a fine
short overview of this trend towards militarizing and sighting outer (and
hence inner) space where he outlines the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI) program of the 1980s and its ensuing militarization of outer space.
Indeed, York makes the point that, from the beginning, the use of the
space program has been primarily of a military, not civilian or scientific
nature.262 In 1983, as part of the SDI program, President Ronald Reagan
put forth his vision of what became pejoratively called Star Wars, perhaps the archetype of this oppressive spatial consciousness.
Certainly, it is true that, hidden in the computer, there is something
so strong, so repetitious, so ominous, and so pregnant with the darkness
of infinite noise that it excites and frightens us. This is why the innumerable ramifications of mechanical desire help us to utilize our unconscious
mind. And this is the real answer to why computers are interesting in art.
We admire their inhuman beauty. They return us to the experimental, to
a state of sexual desire and noisy restlessness. The neural processes they
mimic are our own deepest desires and meticulous obsessions. Their repetitions are the fusion repetitions of our sexual acts with their duplication
of eggs, sperm and blood.263
Of course, nuclear weapons derive their enormous explosive force
from either the fission or fusion of atomic nuclei. Their significance may
best be appreciated by the coining of the words kiloton (1,000 tons) and
megaton (one million tons) to describe their blast effect in equivalent
weights of TNT. For example, the first nuclear fission bomb, the one
dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, released energy equalling 15,000
tons (15 kilotons) of chemical explosive from less than 130 pounds (60
kilograms) of uranium. Fusion bombs, on the other hand, have given
yields of up to almost 60 megatons.

156 Joseph Nechvatal

The first nuclear weapons were bombs delivered by aircraft. Warheads for strategic ballistic missiles, however, have become by far the
most important nuclear weapons. The U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons,
which included the hydrogen bomb that was first test exploded in 1952,
reached its peak in 1967 with more than 32,000 warheads of 30 different
types. The Soviet stockpile reached its peak of about 33,000 warheads
in 1988. Throughout the ballistic missile arms race, the United States
tended to streamline its weapons, seeking greater accuracy and lower explosive power, or yield. Most U.S. systems carried warheads of less than
one megaton, with the largest being the nine-megaton Titan II, in service from 1963 through 1987. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, perhaps to
make up for its difficulties in solving guidance problems, concentrated on
larger missiles and higher yields. The Soviet warheads often exceeded five
megatons, with the largest being a 20 to 25-megaton warhead deployed
on the SS-7 Saddler from 1961 to 1980 and a 25-megaton warhead on
the SS-9 Scarp, deployed from 1967 to 1982. Hence at mid-20th century,
space became the range of both humanity's greatest fears (nuclear extinction of life on the planet) and its boldest aspirations (co-operative peaceful space exploration).
What I am proposing here, in agreement with Virilio, is that the sense
of human-enfolded space was radically transformed in 1943 when the
German rocket-launched bombs began to fall on London without warning, shattering the common sense of civilized, non-combatant, protected
space, and that this remade human feelings towards external space thoroughly. As a consequence, I maintain, a consciousness of civilian aerial
bombing, of atomic weapons, of military rocketry and of the eventual
militarization of outer-space has greatly engendered the abandonment of
the horizontal line in art, which for thousands of years had been the basis
of aesthetics and proportion. Of course accompanying this new sense of
noise space was a general post-war urge to position one's artistic activities
and ideas outside of previous contexts; in western art and philosophy's
case, outside of Surrealism and Existentialism.
In terms of a transformation of our sense of internal space, I find it
amazing that Dr. Albert Hofmann (a biochemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical firm in Basel, Switzerland) accidentally discovered LSD (lysergic
acid diethylamide tartrate) the same year that rocket-launched bombs
began to drop from the sky: 1943. LSD was first synthesized in 1938

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 157

Figure 15 Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb, 1945

by Hofmann but he did not know what he had synthesized until 1943
when he accidentally absorbed a small amount of LSD (which is colorless, odorless, and tasteless) and thus discovered its visionary properties.
With this ingestion, Hoffman, after surveying the room he was in, realized that he now formed a nice noise continuum with everything in sight.
The room seemed to shimmer in the sunlight, and he became aware of
the atomic substructure that underlay the visible world of the senses.
The problems of LSD's experiential description are notorious, and
the typology of its effects vary, but the central experience is one where
a new level of consciousness emerges. As this cultural phenomenon did
much to change the art of the 1960s to the 1980s, I shall attempt to describe LSD's salient properties as they apply to the art noise experience.
Foremost in this regard is that, when experiencing the chemical, the
awareness of individual identity somewhat evaporates and subject/object relationships tend to dissolve. The world seems as if it is simply a fluid, shifting extension of mind and it shimmers as if it were charged with
a high-voltage electricity. Additionally, the subject often feels melted into
the environment and somehow contiguous with it and there is an acute
awareness of the atomic substructure of reality which makes it seem that
one could pass through a wall or another person. Most importantly, the
subject is somehow united with a sense of unified ground of being, and that
urge, as we have seen, has driven the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal since the
beginning of time.

158 Joseph Nechvatal

As Bohm and others have shown us, everything in the universe is

made up of, and seen as, part of the seamless unified ground of the holographic total-fabric, and LSD seems to make this visible. Furthermore,
this unified ground paradigm began forcefully entering Western consciousness just following World War II's brutal demonstration of nuclear
destructive power on Japan and, as we will soon see here, began to be
reflected forcefully in vanguard art of the post-war period.
The Noisiness of Jackson Pollock
As reported in the artist Raphael Soyer's (1899-1987) New York Times'
obituary on November 25, 1987, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) said to
Soyer one day: Why do you paint like you do? There are planes flying,
and you paint realistically. You don't belong to our time. From this statement, we know that even though Pollock took his first trip on an airplane
(to Chicago) in 1951, he was obviously acutely aware of the expanding
nature of technological space that was defining the 20th century and its
art. Pollock maintained that paramount concern in a radio interview with
William Wright in 1950 when he said, My opinion is that new needs
need new techniques. The modern painter cannot express his age, the
airplane, the atom bomb, the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance.
According to Pollock, if art is to be contemporary, by definition, it must
address the issues of its time.
The impact of Picasso's Guernica (which arrived in New York City in
1939 at the Museum of Modern Art) with its mural size tied to its noisy
theme of aerial bombardment on a defenseless population had a stirring effect on Pollock. Guernica's inventive formal automatism (which
had been introduced to Picasso via the French Surrealists) and its social
conscience, in conjunction with its exploration of collective unconscious
fear and guilt, served as a dramatic catalyst for Pollock's expanding idea
of art that culminated in the great all-over syncretistic paintings beginning in 1947.
In the late-1940s and early-1950s in New York, certain artists began
to displace the emphasis in painting onto the act of painting itself. Painting became the document of an anxious activity rather than a visual composition. Among them was Jackson Pollock. Influenced by Andr Breton's Surrealist theories and experiments in unconscious creation, Pollock

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 159

produced his consequential drip paintings where, instead of touching the

brush to the canvas, he placed the canvas on the floor, stood over and
on it, and flung/dripped paint onto it, often by making large sweeping
patterns. Pollock, via Cubist and Surrealist theories, integrated the tautness of the ground (the flat picture-plane) with illusionistic figural-depth,
thereby constructing a tightness of picture-plane (through the extent to
which the immediacy of the field is forgrounded) that is at one and the
same time non-illusionistic, while simultaneously tending to disintegrate
into randon noise. The painterly consequences, with their incredibly rich
eidetic depth, are suggestive of further abstract noisy spaces and states of
mind. This proposal of an oppositional counter-tradition to geometrical
perspective places Pollock in a key position to bolster noisy consciousness. The resulting radicalization, as regards their distribution of visual
incident into the optical field, manifests an omni-perspectivalism which is
exemplary of the ambient omni-directional aspects of noise.
As evidence of this trend's beginnings, in 1943 Pollock painted the
engulfing Mural, 1943 for Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) in the dimensions of 2.47 by 6.05 meters (about 8 by 19.8 feet). Pollock had been
inspired to paint grand-scale works by the murals of the Mexican muralist
Jos Orozco (1883-1949), for example his 1939 copula mural Mankind at
the Hospital Cabana at Guadalajara, and by the Mexican muralists Diego
Rivera (1886-1957) and Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). With the Peggy
Guggenheim commission, he transformed the canvas into a whole wall
instead of a small object of contemplation which is visually and physically dominated by the viewer. Mural, 1943 set the precedent for the scale
of Pollock's celebrated all-over drip-paintings (with their even distribution of compositional interest across an entire large surface) and it also
forced the artist onto the floor for the first time, like the American Indian
Navajo sand painters of Arizona and New Mexico whom he admired.
Pollock had seen demonstrations of American Indian sand-painting (the
making of designs and pictures in sand, made with ceremonial connotations) in 1941 at the Natural History Museum in New York and clearly
the ideas behind Navajo sand-painting (its magical and healing aims) influenced Pollock's working method and objectives. By putting the canvas
on the floor, Pollock said he could see the painting from all angles, even
from inside it.

160 Joseph Nechvatal

By late-Spring 1947, with the war over and the rebuilding of Europe
in process, Pollock began a new series of paintings for his new gallerist
Betty Parsons (1900-1982) (as Peggy Guggenheim was moving back
to Europe) which was to open January 5th, 1948, in his new (much expanded) atelier, a renovated barn in The Springs, Long Island. As Landau
reports in Jackson Pollock, we will never know precisely what initiated the
radical breakthrough in procedure that occurred between Pollock's last
exhibition at Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century and the show he
was preparing for Betty Parson's gallery. There are only two documents to
help us towards an understanding of why, just then, Pollock strides into
what I can justifiably call his immersive noise period. One is an application that Pollock prepared in October 1947 as part of a bid for a John
Simon Guggenheim Foundation grant (which he was not awarded). As
Landau suggests, Pollock's application formulation seems to be inspired
by Clement Greenberg's (1909-1994) review in the Nation's art column
of February 1, 1947 of Pollock's previous show at Art of This Century, in
which Greenberg wrote: Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond
the mobile, framed picture, to the mural. In accord with this idea, Pollock wrote in his Guggenheim Fellowship statement; I intend to paint
large movable pictures which function between the easel and the mural...
and I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of
modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural. Pollock went on to
further articulate this artistic intention in Possibilities (Winter 1947-8), a
magazine edited by the artist Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) and the
critic Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978). In Pollock's artist's statement entitled My Painting, he wrote how he preferred to work on the floor for
on the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting,
since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of Indian sand painters
of the West.
Following the Peggy Guggenheim commission, Pollock desired to
paint larger and larger surfaces (almost total environments), especially
during the years 1947 and 1948 when he began preparing himself to
break with the tradition of European easel painting. Pollock's ensuing appeal for mural commissions increased and in a 1949 letter to his dealer,
Betty Parsons, he wrote, I want to mention that I am going to try to get
some mural commissions through an agent. I feel it is important for me

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 161

to broaden my possibilities in this line of development. The same year

Pollock told an interviewer, The direction that painting seems to be taking is away from the easel, into some sort of wall painting. Some of my
canvases are an impractical size ... 9 by 18 feet! But I enjoy working big
and whenever I have a chance I do it whether it's practical or not. With
the increased size of his canvases, Pollock started to work on them unstretched and to paint them horizontally, laying them flat on the floor at
his feet. Then he felt in the painting. By working directly on the floor, Pollock was able not only to use gravity to facilitate his radical method of
paint application, he was also able to walk around and on the composition, reaching into every part by literally stepping into them.
The viewer of one of Pollock's vast paintings is enticed to recreate
mentally (and viscerally) the introscopic noise space Pollock seemed
to call upon in the creation of his paintings. Lee Krasner (1908-1984),
Pollock's companion and peer, spoke of this space as Pollock's intuitive
pursuit of unframed space which Pollock sought in order to create a spatial continuousness that no longer distinguished between the pictorial
space and the area in which the viewer stood. As such, Pollock's imposing paintings demand that the observer relinquish intellectual control
(as the beholder is now torn free of unyielding Renaissance perspective)
and dive into the energetic noise (through the eye being drawn into the
excessive aspect of the painting) and therein dissolve into the dazzling
chaos of the individual lines which are also, at the same time, creating a
uniformly structured whole-field.
I am reminded here of Wassily Kandinsky (who was a major influence on Pollock) and his book Text Arista (that Pollock owned). In it,
Kandinsky writes about learning to look at a picture not only from the
outside, but to enter it and to move around in it. With Pollock's all-over,
syncretistic noise composition, this hypothetical entrance is facilitated
as there is no point of reference, no orientation, no parts to its whole264
(as in Lascaux's Apse). In contrast with the devices of European Renaissance perspective, Pollock sought to draw the viewer into the canvas, not
by establishing a distant vanishing-point, but by conceptually eliminating the frame so as to permit the eye to follow the curvilinear patterns
beyond the canvas and into the implied surrounding noise space without
being stopped by the edges. Here the intention was to create paintings
without beginning or end, as the vastly increased size of the canvas and its

162 Joseph Nechvatal

elimination of the traditional frame produced an effect suggesting the

ideal immersive 360 noise bubble.265 This is the unrestrained space of
ideal noise, a space where a harmony with the irrationality of noise is encountered. For this, Pollock's work from the late-1940s is an art historical
noise watershed.
Relevant also to these concerns are the semi-pejorative statements
made by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) (author of the famous account of
a psychedelic encounter with a Belle Portugal rose under the guidance
of the Canadian psychiatrist and LSD researcher Humphry Osmond
(1917-2004)) concerning Pollock's painting, Cathedral, from a 1948
Parsons exhibition. Huxley made these remarks as a participant in the
Roundtable on Modern Art, a panel discussion held at the Museum of
Modern Art from which excerpts were reproduced in Life magazine's issue of October 11, 1948. In it, Huxley points out Cathedral's lack of focus
due to its all-over compositional approach, saying It raises the question
of why it stops when it does. The artist could go on forever. (Laughter) I
don't know. It seems like a panel for a wallpaper which is repeated indefinitely around the wall.
Taking this wallpaper (...) repeated indefinitely around the wall
aspect seriously, the architect Peter Blake (1920-2006), in planning the
architectural strategy for what was proposed as the Jackson Pollock Museum, had the idea (with Pollock) to extend the paintings indefinitely
around the space. In an article concerned with the project named Unframed Space: A Museum for Jackson Pollock's Paintings in Interiors
magazine, Arthur Drexler (1925-1987) wrote that Pollock's paintings
seem as though they might very well be extended indefinitely, and it is
precisely this quality that has been emphasized in the central unit of the
plan. About the continuous rhythms of Pollock's paintings, Drexler goes
on to describe how, in the model of the museum, a painting 17 feet long
constitutes an entire wall. It is terminated on both ends not by a frame or
a solid partition, but by mirrors. The painting is thus extended into miles
of reflected space, and leaves no doubt in the observer's mind as to this
particular aspect of Pollock's work. In another immersive noise application of Pollock's implied infinity, the artist/architect Tony Smith (19121980) designed a hexagonal Catholic church which was to be decorated
by stained glass windows executed by Pollock, though the project never
went beyond the formulation stage.

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 163

It is pleasing to recall that Pollock had written in his Guggenheim Fellowship statement that I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the
future, without arriving there completely. This direction of the future
was indeed picked up by the generation of artists that ensued Pollock.
The written testimony concerning Pollock's influence derives mainly
from the two-part series run in Art News in 1967 entitled Jackson Pollock: An Artists' Symposium (which included statements by Allan
Kaprow (1927-2006), Alfred Otto Wofgang Schulze Wols (1913-1951)
and Claes Oldenburg) and Allan Kaprow's Legacy of Jackson Pollock,
also published by Art News in 1958, the year that saw Kaprow's first informal Happening.
For the artists of the next generation, the generation of the 1960s,
Pollock generally represented a liberation of the artwork from traditional means and the inclusion of the artist's life and actions into the work,
which lead to other implicit noise conclusions, that is, a freedom from
confining structures and the inclusion of movement, gesture, and bodily
motion into the realm of visual art. As Kaprow saw it, Pollock destroyed
painting and freed the painter from working solely in two dimensions.
Instead of a 'painter,' one became an 'artist'capable of working in all
and any media.
Noise Event Happening
In his seminal A Primer of Happenings and Space/Time Art, Al Hansen
states that the idea of the Happening is that of the artwork enclosing the
observer, of art that overlaps and interpenetrates different art forms [...]
these performances engulf the spectator: the environment is a work of art
that the observer goes into and walks around in and in some cases actually participates in.266 Generally speaking then, Happenings bombard the
participant with an excess of sensations which the viewer has to order in
his or her mind to give the overall quality of the continuous commotion
(noisily structured like a Cubist assemblage) cohesion. But also Happenings emphasized extemporaneous and migratory elements while manipulating performers, props and audience in ways designed to break down
barriers between performance and audience. A Happening was neither

164 Joseph Nechvatal

an art exhibit nor a theatrical event but an immersive noise site for experimentation in perception.
The prime source of the Happening's central noise concept is that of
collage, the juxtaposition of unrelated real-life elements in relationships
contrived by the artistthat innovation by which Synthetic Cubism
had ravaged the Renaissance window-in-the-wall conception of pictorial space. Most often, Happenings placed art inside an ideal banal sphere
which was imagined less separated from everyday experience, thus challenging the previously established elite hierarchy of values. Towards this
end, Happenings were sited in parking-lots, factories or on the street, and
involved materials with no fine-art associations. By its emphasis on transient effects and materials, Happenings challenged notions of the permanence of art and the permanence of aesthetic values, hence the Happening became one of the most visible forms of artistic expression of the
revolutionary aspect of the 1960s.267
Allan Kaprow, in the aforementioned Art News article Jackson Pollock: An Artists' Symposium, explained Pollock's role as progenitor of
the Happening thus: When his all-over canvases were shown at Betty
Parsons's gallery around 1950, with four windowless walls nearly covered, the effect was that of an overwhelming environment, the paintings'
skin rising towards the middle of the room, drenching and assaulting the
visitor in waves of attacking and retreating pulsations. [...]. The expanding scale of Pollock's work, their reiterative configurations prompting the
marvellous thought that they could go on forever in any direction including out, soon made the gallery as useless as the canvas, and choices of
wider and wider fields of environmental reference followed. In process,
the Happening was developed. However, in Pollock Painting: The Photographs of Hans Namuth, Barbara Rose proposes that it was the publication of Hans Namuth's photographs and his film of Pollock painting that
are responsible for the development of Happenings (as well as anti-form,
distributional, conceptual, performance, and body art). But whatever
the specific rationale, the implications of Pollock's work were vast, exerting even a persuasive impact on avant-garde dance, as it has been often
noted that the dance choreography of Merce Cunningham is closely related to Pollock's painting. Cunningham essentially fused noise ideas extrapolated from Pollock with those of Marcel Duchamp, as understood
and practised by his collaborating composer, John Cage. This tendency

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 165

in dance was explored in the early-1960s by Jill Johnston, Yvonne Rainer

and Ann Halprin.
The feeling/concept of space in which anything can happen seems
to summarize Pollock's general significance to the artists he inspired. As
an example, Claes Oldenburg, self-described as a Post-Pollock painter
in the 1967 Art News article, conceived of himself as standing on the canvas that became his surroundings, and which stretched as far as he could
see or hear. This suggests the idea of a new theme of distribution where the
city's many signs are no longer depicted but included in the work, hence
immersing the artist (and viewer's attention) in a new (Pop) art based on
reproduction.
Certainly by the mid-1950s, media (print, radio, and television) influenced almost everything everywhere in post-industrialized countries,
including members of the Gutai Group of Osaka Japan, an art-theater
group made up of painters (including Akira Kanayama, Sadamasa Motonaga, Shuso Mukai, Saburo Mirakami, Atsuko Tanaka, Shozo Shinamoto and Kazua Shiraga). They had seen photographs of the theatrical
French theoretician and action painter Georges Mathieu in Life Magazine
decked out in an elaborate costume painting before television cameras at
the Sarah Bernhardt Thtre in Paris in 1956. These photos inspired their
own live painting performances in which they threw balls of paint at the
canvas or, in another instance, where an artist ran and leaped through a
series of sequential canvases.
Moreover, Kazua Shiraga, a member of the Gutai Group, adapted
and exaggerated Pollock's painting techniques and Mathieu's theatrical presentation of the painting-action with his Making a Work with His
Own Body (1955), where the artist wallowed in the paint medium with
his entire body, and again at the Festival di Osaka's Painting Performance
(1959). Hanging from a rope, Shiraga threw himself, in a kind of overwrought psychic automatism, on the canvas and spread lumps of color
with his feet around while swinging on the rope. Here the artist is literally inside the painting in a way which we will see again with the Vienna
Actionists. Shiraga's work predates and reminds us of Yves Klein's well
known 1960 Symphonie Monotone (Monotone Symphony) painting/
music performance at the Galerie International d'Art Contemporain
in Paris, especially when we consider it from the immersive position of

166 Joseph Nechvatal

the three female models themselves (one of whom I met and discussed
this with).268
Another earlier moment leading to the program of the Happening
can be traced to an evening in 1952 organized by John Cage at Black
Mountain College. For the performance, an audience was seated in four
inward-facing blocks as Cage delivered a lecture, punctuated by silences,
from the top of a ladder. Poet Charles Olsen (1910-1970) and others
read poems from another ladder while David Tudor played a piano and
Robert Rauschenberg played a wind-up gramophone. Through this rich
conflicting event, Merce Cunningham and other dancers moved about
through the space where some of Rauschenberg's early white-on-white
White Paintings were suspended as a sort of false ceiling overhead.269
In the mid-1980s, I obtained one of Rauschenbergs black and white
silkscreens from his Current and Surface Series (1970). Living with this
work, I discovered the best of Rauschenbergs noise work I thinkwork
that contains rhizomatic layered image sequences where the viewer interprets the progression of images as though reading a ruined communication system arranged in multiple, simultaneous combinations.
Rauschenberg here dissolves away the paradigmatic model of media as
communications and replaces it with one of failed pageant that leads to
both a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between
media and myth. In Rauschenbergs media noise society, I saw through
the numerous saturating media messages, so that information and meaning imploded into pure effect, without content or meaning. In fact, here
content becomes decorative and ornate.
This noisy rhizomatic Rauschenberg demands a different kind of
lookingakin to the aggregated viewpoints of Cubism compared by
John Cage to watching many television sets working simultaneously all
tuned in differently.270 In my piece from his Current and Surface Series,
there is no obvious hierarchy of images to scan. The trajectory of visual
exploration for it is of our own choosinga dysfunctional situation that
no longer communicates purposeful messages but rather proposes noise
pattern. Here we have a rhizomatic visual pleasure, where everything
equally connects to everything else and so replaces visual purpose. This
is a noise art that demands of society an active visualizing participation in
private interpretationsand thus is a legitimate metaphor for contemporary art as a form of simulation-shattering engagement. It functions by

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 167

overloading representation to a point where it becomes non-representational noise.271

John Cage's strict musical development does not concern us here, except for his ideaderived from the work of Edgard Varse and the Zen
philosophy of Daisety Taitaro Suzuki (1870-1966)of treating all forms
of noise as sound to be used by the composer, together with the corollary
that silence is just as important. This led him ultimately to the nec plus
ultra of noise music, 4' 33", perhaps the musical equivalent of the whiteon-white canvases of Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935). 4' 33" consists
of silence performed for this duration of time. In 4' 3", the fortuitous
immersive noises in the room, usually unnoticed, and the hearers' own
thoughts, become the content of the piece.
In terms of one's own thoughts becoming the content of a piece, we
must note that in 1954, Dr. John C. Lilly, a pioneer in brain and behavioral research studies, began experimenting with the concept of restricting
the amount of external sensory stimuli to the brain in a kind of anti-noise
research project. When Lilly built his first isolation environment (what
came to be known as isolation float tanks) he was determined to prove
that the brain, without environmental input, would simply go to sleep.
Using his own being for experiments, he learned the opposite is true.
By removing all visual, acoustical, tactile and temperature stimuli, Lilly
found that the brain continues to function independently and at an even
higher level than normal. I have had this experience myself, so I know
it to be true.
But the artist most identified with the external noise Happening and
perhaps its chief exponent is John Cage's composition class student, Allan Kaprow. Kaprow began as a painter and his paintings moved from
Abstract Expressionism into increasingly complex action-collage assemblages, like Pentiy Arcade (1956), Wall (1959) and Kiosk (1959), which
were developed following his interest in the work of Jackson Pollock. The
action-collages became bigger and projected further and further from the
walls and into the room and included more and more audible elements.
A person entering an action-collaged-noise space would become lost in
an excessive labyrinthine atmosphere. Kaprow eventually thought how
much better it would be if a visitor could just go out of doors. Thus in
Kaprow's form of the Happening, ordinary people, ordinary time, and the
everyday spaces of street and supermarket noise, were frequently merged.

168 Joseph Nechvatal

Kaprow became a professor of art history, and this academic side of

his activities made him a fluent and perceptive theorist, enabling him
to elucidate how Happenings evolved from the action-collage environment idea of opening up the mind and the eye to the world of the street.
In his book, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, Kaprow explains
the fusion of the concepts behind Pollock's gestural paintings and the
junk-assemblage sculpture movement as culminated in this aspect of the
Happening. Kaprow also wrote in his famous 1958 essay The Legacy of
Jackson Pollock that Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we
must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life.
By 1957, Kaprow's work became exclusively environmental involving
lights, odors, electronic sounds and unusual materials. His environment
at the Hansa Gallery in 1958 contained no art objects as such, but initiated a conception that art was experienced as a surrounding rather than a
picture or sculpture to be looked at, a surrounding that engaged the visitor with things to do. However, Kaprow's first mature noise Happening,
which involved Dada provocation, assemblage, and action painting, was
18 Happenings in 6 Parts that took place at the Reuban Gallery in October 1959 in New York City. It was tightly scripted and drilled.272 After
18 Happenings, Kaprow did a number of similar pieces, including CocaCola, Shirley Cannonball? and A Spring Happening, the latter taking place
in the new downstairs premises of the Reuben Gallery in March 1961.
After waiting in a curtained-off lobby, the audience was shown into a dark
tunnel, made of wood and hardboard painted black, and with a slit running along both sides at eye-level where they remained for the duration
of the piece.
For the next seven years, Kaprow expanded the potential of the environment in a gallery setting, but gradually the showroom space was
abandoned for more informal and natural settings such as vacant breweries, open fields, and woods. By 1969, Kaprow's work had evolved so
distinctly into new phases that he gave up the designation Happening and
adopted Michael Kirby's (1931-1997) term Activity.
By the early-1960s, artists noise actions performed in front of audiences and or cameras became more and more familiar as the Happening
movement gained momentum. Two types of Happenings emerged: one
involving a more or less static audience, and the other a walk-around en-

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 169

vironment (like Kaprow's Words, which was installed at the Smolin Gallery in 1962). Words was an arrangement of audience-participation devices, rolls of words to move, words on cards hung on strings, words to
pin up and rubber-stamps to make phrases with. Garage,An Apple Shrine
and Yard (which filled the Martha Jackson Gallery with car tires) also utilized such an approach.
In Paris during the late-1950s, a Marcel Duchamp-inspired renewed
interest in Dada noise gave rise to various actions, d-collages, and
performances by artists such as Robert Filliou (1926-1987) and JeanJacques Lebel, the most active member of the group of younger artists to
emerge from the Nouveaux Ralistes precepts. As an example of the first
approach to the Happening, in an early 1960 Happening Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Process conducted in Venice, Italy, Lebel invited the audience to attend a ceremony in formal dress. In a decorated room within
a grand residence, a draped 'cadaver' rested on a plinth which was then
ritually stabbed by an 'executioner' while a 'service' was read consisting
of extracts from the previously mentioned French decadent writer JorisKarl Huysmans and the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). Then, pall-bearers carried the coffin out into a gondola and the 'body,' which was in fact
a mechanical noise music sculpture by Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), was
ceremonially slid into the canal.
Conspicuous, too, in this regard was the fascinating technologicallyaided presentation of Mark Boyle, the performance Son et Lumire for
Body Fluids (1966), where he presented a heterosexual couple making
love with their encephalograms projected and enlarged on a screen above
them.273 Boyle went on to create light-shows for the psychedelic rock
group, Soft Machine, and was involved in an early British experimental
night-club called UFO.
Another important early noise Happening artist is Carolee Schneemann, particularly with her highly immersive (for the participants) and
spectacular Happening bacchanal called Meat Joy, performed at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in 1964 and in various locations
in Europe (including the Festival de la libre expression at the American
Center in Paris in 1964).
The Dionysian mystical impact of Schneemann's Meat Joy was heightened by the sexual implications of voluptuous, scantily clad people wallowing provocatively in paint and meat, somewhat beyond the truism

170 Joseph Nechvatal

that all sexual activity is about the mixing of gametes. Schneemann's environmental noise performance (performed in what she characterized as a
sensory arena), Illinois Central, utilized a 360 visual environment contrived with film and slides that shifted over time.274 Schneemann's grottolike niche entitled Up To and Including Her Limits (Trackings), which she
built for herself at the Basel Art Fair in 1976 also impresses, as the work
addresses noise as liberation from confine. So, too, does David Tudor's
Rainforest IV of 1973 (realized by Composers Inside Electronics), as the
viewer is an integral part of the work. Rainforest extended the implications of Erik Satie's ambient Furniture Music of 1920. Like Satie (whom
Tudor admired) Rainforest IV overturned the traditional view that music
is performed at a specific time in a proscenium space in which the performers and audience are separate.
This relates to Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, first performed in Tokyo in 1964,
in which she invited the audience to cut her clothes off, and deserves
reference in terms of an artist putting herself in a visceral environment
with a high-resonance of associative connotations. The same holds true
for Yayoi Kusama, whose theoretical polemic concerning the distributed,
scattered, multiplied, and obliterated self is best established, as she herself
states, as an obliteration of everything (including myself and others)
into a beguiling and excessive artifice which gives birth to an opalescent
non-existence.275 In explanation of her installation work, Yayoi Kusama
said, One day, I was looking at a table cloth covered in red flowers, which
was spread out on the table. Then I looked up toward the ceiling. There,
on the windows and even on the pillars, I could see the same red flowers.
They were all over the place in the room, my body, and entire universe.
I finally came to a self-obliteration and returned to be restored to the
infinity of eternal time and the absoluteness of space.276 Paradoxically,
Kusama tried to achieve an expression of this idea of the obliterated self
by exposing herself (and others) fully nude and painted with polka-dots
in various Happenings at high-profile New York City locations. Kusama
staged several public demonstrations of painted polka-dotted nakedness
entitled Anatomic Explosion, most notably on Wall Street, in the sculpture
garden at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1968 at the statue of Alice
in Wonderland in Central Park.
Certainly, we must also briefly recall the Happenings of Jim Dine,
most notably Car Crash (1960) and those of Wolf Vostell, for example

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 171

his You (1964). Important, too, were the Happenings of Al Hansen, Dick
Higgins (1938-1998), Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman,
Meredith Monk, Jeff Nuttall, John Latham and later the group improvisations of the Movement Collective.
But the Abstract Expressionist ancestry of noise as aesthetic experience is not confined to post-Pollock aesthetics. In this respect it is significant to note that a motion-picture immersive environment called Impressions of Speed appeared at the 1958 Brussels World Fair which seated 25
people at a time in the cab of a simulated railroad-engine. On view via
wide screens was a color landscape in the front and on the two sides as
well; a continuous, all-encompassing image projected on the simulated windows in an attempt to duplicate the total impression of actual peripheral
noise experience.
To review the history of painting in relation to aspects of noise, I
would be remiss to neglect to mention Post-Abstract Expressionist applications as practised by Robert Ryman. The 'pure' opticality of the color
white embraced by Ryman is a prime example of subtle noise, as in his
white paintings he addresses the problems arising from the tension created from the opposition between surface materiality and opticality in
relationship to the edge of the painting and its relationship to the wall
on which it is hung. This ambiguity of the painting's boundary in relation to the wall that contains it draws attention into an expanded subtle
noise field which we will see will come to define the immersive art of the
1960s and 70s. Ryman does this by extending the optical white shimmering-field of color/light out from the painting onto the white gallery walls
which present it. Now it is really the wall that provides the painter with his
ground which Ryman himself clarifies when he writes the wall plane is
actually part of the painting and it extends out three or four feet.... Hence
Ryman presents his paintings as part of the white cube that has come to
represent modernist ideals of purity and neutrality. The whiteness of the
paintings require the whiteness of the walls, as the white-painted optical
field spills out over the confining edge of the painting to fill, theoretically,
the entire wall and room, thus texture, surface-plane, color and wall are
unified. As Ryman himself says: The wall becomes very much a part of
the work, and so by blurring the difference between painting and wall,
Ryman extends our consciousness of painting into an expanded, immersive, subtle, visual noise environment. Of course, this liberation of color

172 Joseph Nechvatal

from form in the service of filling a room can also be seen in the neontube installations of Dan Flavin, where color spills out over the walls of
the gallery in which the piece is installed, expanding its presence dramatically and soaking the visitor to the space in its soft, vibrating light.
So in the Viennese Actionist disposition, to move away from Abstract
Expressionist action painting in the 1960s and towards the performanceoriented tendency of Actionism, was for the Viennese Actionists, very
much in stride with the significant art of their era, impelled, as they were,
by a Herculean sense of nosiy idealism based on a felt necessity for emancipation from what they saw as the repressive constraints of church and
state power. Consequently, their Actions were intentionally and noisily
inciting: deliberately exhibitionist, abhorrent, sexist and/or sacrilegious.
In a sense, Actionism can be seen in retrospect as a logical extenuation of the heroic male individuality of the Abstract Expressionist generation and their idealistic attempt to create a new post-war world based
on an intimate subjectivity in pursuit of societal freedoms by turning
their back on ideological traditions and engaging in the supposed nonideological material world of the immediate. Though this seems an overly
nave belief to us now, it did provide the idealistic engine to what became
a body of incredible noise work. In the early 1960s, the Actionists Gnter Brus, Otto Mhl, Alfons Schilling and Rudolf Schwarzkogler began
sensing their late connection with the Abstract Expressionist movement
when already the arbitrary nature of personal subjective expression was
beginning to become apparent in the repetitions of what became the Abstract Expressionist gestural formula. By the time the Actionists engaged
in it, what was originally hailed as a new common language, gestural abstraction, began to degenerate into a self-indulgent, dipsomaniac activity in the hands of the more recent Abstract Expressionist neophytes. To
their credit, the Actionist artists began to see that the total reliance on
Abstract Expressionism's subjective feeling of personal assertion (which
surprisingly began to look ever more and more similar) meant that Abstract Expressionism's message of immediacy and physicality was arbitrary. To counterbalance this, the Actionists, in a peculiarly comparative
manner to the Pop and especially the Fluxus artists, aimed to produce
art closer to real life and to re-mix aspects of reality into their art.277 Thus
they moved away from Abstract Expressionist ideology and eventually
towards a greater objectivity of real life, which in turn led to the urge

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 173

to challenge the power structures of church and state. Therefore, the Actionists moved art away from represented conflict (as recorded on the
Abstract Expressionist canvas) and towards political conflicts and social
associations in life between people.
In the Viennese studio, Gnter Brus had been drawn towards Abstract Expressionist type informel painting and, following Pollock's lead,
began identifying himself as working from inside of nature. Early on, he
exemplified this ideology in his Labyrinth Paintings which he executed
through the means of disorientation in immersive space. In the autumn
of 1960, Brus almost entirely cleaned out his 2.5 by 6 meter (roughly 8.2
by 19.6 feet) painting studio and placed white-painted paper over all the
available walls and began making use of the entire room (from floor to
ceiling) in the unfettered splattering application of black paint, utilizing
all three of the available surfaces simultaneously in an attempt to fracture
the domination of the compositional mid-point and to penetrate into a
much fuller sensation of immersive space. By doing so, Brus developed
the ideal of the all-pervasive sphere in which the artist would be enclosed
and in which the artist would then paint thoroughly in three-dimensions,
using both feet and both hands.
Gnter Brus's close painter friend at the time was Alfons Schilling, an
artist who went on to utilize a mechanical machine in the creation of his
paintings and who still later developed a brilliant series of consequential
FOV modifying viewer head-pieces.
As documentation of the ideals under pursuit in the Actionist circle,
Schilling left us some interesting extracts from his notebook from early-1961, which also shed light on the issue of immersive thinking in postAbstract Expressionist painting. In them he wrote, I can only feel infinity if I break out and reach beyond the closed composition and the frame.
[...]. One must be able to enter my pictures from all sides and be able
to leave it from all sides; the picture then continues like a tone that has
been struck. [...]. The possibility of a limitless, never-ending painting can
only be represented by means of a section. How can I possibly perceive
'infinity' in a picture, as long as the possibility of seeing pictures as something complete in themselves, is still not removed. Every barrier must be
removed from one's vision (even if it is only the edge of the picture). A
picture must offer no opportunity of beginning or ending anywhere. [...].

174 Joseph Nechvatal

Getting inside, being inside, and having achieved unity I experience everything in a state of transformation.
In 1963, Gnter Brus received 5000 schillings from the Institut zur
Frderung der Knste to assist him in the creation of a series of largescale paintings. To do these large paintings, he stretched string backwards
and forwards across empty gallery rooms and hung molino (a cheap substitute for canvas) and paper so that they reached the floor in order to
create a labyrinth which would help prevent him from preconceiving a
compositional idea too quickly. He then painted all the surfaces as if it
were one large painting that completely surrounded him. Few people saw
the painted labyrinth, however.
Subsequently, in the autumn of 1964, Brus carried out his first real
Action titled Ana which took place in Otto Mhl's studio, a fellow artist
and friend. In preparation for Ana, Brus painted Mhl's studio and several objects in the room (typical of a Viennese bourgeois apartment) a
stark white. In effect, he began his Action with the classic white canvas,
now extended out into the third-dimension. Hence he begins in an enveloping, immersive, unified, total-space. On starting the work, he emphasized this enveloping further by rolling across the floor of the room
with his body completely wrapped in pieces of white cloth. The pieces
of cloth unwound as a result of the motion and he remained motionless
for a long period of time. Then Brus began to stream black paint over the
white objects and over his wife who also participated (passively) in the
action, with the aim of making a living painting. He then burst into a bout
of painting and besmeared the walls until exhausted.
After Ana, Brus decides to produce the action called Self-Painting in
which his own physique was to serve as a painting surface with the intent
of binding himself into the picture-plane in order to become one with
the picture and to thereby disappear into the picture. words which remind us of Yayoi Kusama's avowed ideal of doing likewise. As mentioned,
Kusama has described the emergence of this perception/ideal by recounting a moment when she was watching a red pattern of a tablecloth
coat everything around her and then swallow her up this way; When I
looked up, I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and
the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as
if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time
and absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.278 With appar-

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 175

ently similar aims, Brus designed Self-Painting as a soundless action separated into three separate tableaux in which Brus placed together different parts of his painted white body with disparate objects that were also
painted milky white. A jet black streak is painted vertically over Brus's
face by himself and along his forearm as if his body had been ripped open
by one of Barnett Newman's majestic zips.
In January 1965, Brus went on to perform painting actions Silver, SelfPainting II and Self-Mutilation for a film-maker and photographer and, on
July 6th, 1965, he performed a Self-Painting at the Galerie Junge Generation in Vienna. The day before, on July 5th, he painted himself as in the
Self-Painting Actions and proceeded to stride across Vienna as a living
painting, but was stopped and arrested by a policeman for causing a civic
disturbance.
Brus's peer Otto Mhl, too, was coming from the process-oriented
matire side of Art Informel and the related assemblage movement of the
Nouveaux Ralistes (for example Arman's accumulations of everyday rubbish) and the American junk sculpture movement. The term assemblage
was coined in 1953 by Jean Dubuffet (1901-1983) to refer to works that
supposedly went beyond the collage of Synthetic Cubism. In junk/assemblage sculpture of the late-1950s (and with Robert Rauschenberg's
combines) art further challenged the boundary between everyday objects
and High Art and the entire world opened up and became the raw material for the creation of art.
Mhl had met Brus in early December of 1960 at the famed Gesamtkunstwerk-oriented Sezession building and they shortly thereafter became engaged in an artistic discourse which eventually indelibly shaped
both men's work. Otto Mhl wrote in Weg aus dem Sumpf in 1977
of Brus that Brus painted in psychomotoric expressionist style, a wild
criss-cross of lines hurled onto the paper. The paint sometimes exploded like a bomb when it hit the picture. That was total creative excess. I
understood right away and was full of enthusiasm. The pictures were often 5 meters long by 3 meters high. The whole room was covered with
splatters of paint, on the floor there was a centimeter thick layer of paint
ooze that had dried up. In 1961, Mhl gave up traditionally-scaled easel
painting and began a series of Actions in which he poured paint and pigment onto paper and then wallowed in it, bringing structure to the pools
of color. In a letter to his friend Erika Stocker dated January 8th, 1961,

176 Joseph Nechvatal

Mhl writes, I have, so to speak, produced my first tachiste picture. To do

it I have developed an original technique. I painted it by laying it on the
floor. It doesn't work on the easel anymore. And on March 23rd, 1961 he
writes her again saying, I wallowed in paint [...]. I slid from one end to
the other, turning over once. In the process I worked the surface with my
hands... . Taking this sense of wallowing further, in May of 1961, Mhl
created a full room installation in his studio called The Overcoming of the
Easel Picture by the Representation of its Destruction Process by nailing or
tying together his paintings into a unified Gesamtkunstwerk. Following
this installation, Mhl moved increasingly towards creating three-dimensional assemblages and from there deeper into performance Actions.
Disappearance of the Noisy Art Object into the System
In retrospect, the shift in art in the 1960s and 1970s towards an open,
more immersively inviting noise dominion of self-attentiveness, with its
emphasis on recontextualization and release from the framing apparatus,
can be seen as an anticipation of and desire for omni-directional ambient noise consciousness, with its ideal 360 bubble-like vista. This optic,
which is located radiating out in all virtual directions at once, can be seen
as a further extenuation of the expanded field that cybernetic-influenced
art instigated.279
The disappearance of the objet d'art in roughly 1965 marked the
emergence indicative of post-modernist immersive noise experimentation, which was postulated on the assumption that the art experience
needed broadening. Frank Popper's seminal book Art-Action and Participation is an important reference to this development, as is Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture. Burnham arrived at the conclusion
that cybernetic sculpture, or rather the cybernetically-informed sculptor,
is not simply adopting new materials and new standards of fabrication,
but evolving a new aesthetic, now synchronized with technical ideals.
Cybernetics had demonstrated that the configuration of a system is an index of the performance that may be expected from it, hence cybernetics'
extremely circular-state yields an extended aesthetic noise consciousness
on the basis of connected self-attentiveness, and it is within this elastic
self-attentive aesthetic framework where we will expect to find new noise
attitudes emerging in art.

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 177

The recontextualization of the objet d'art into the global envelopment of the noise environment (where the viewer is pulled away from
the constraining aperture of the picture frame and more and more from
the gallery frame) is indicative of the immersive qualities of the era under
investigation here. This radical deframing opened up the viewing cone of
the 1950s' post-cubist/post-war painting space towards a more thorough
literalization of the imagined (or implied) non-partial field of universal
noise surroundings/conceptualizations of abstract space. Here, framed
areas of noise may not be singled out and made to represent the totality of range.
This noise immersive space, where partial framed and arranged views
may not be cut out of the total surround, finds a very real literalization
in the open field of art in the 1960s and 1970s, and the broad holonogic gaze which it provokes is a huge step in the direction of escaping the
limits of narrow representation in the interests of hyper-noise consciousness. From this point on, only a technique that fully undermines the proscenium and window-like frame can stand in for the abstract, all-over, intemperate 360 bubble-noise which the frame cuts and excludes. In this
drift towards anti-representationalism, noise art begins leaving the orbit
of the framing apparatus and of the tunnel vision that fixed a segment of
the objective world at one end and the viewer at the other. What had enabled that narrow cone of vision to simulate the entire visual atmospheric
field previously, was possible precisely with the enclosure of that framing
cone (tangent tunnel). But once that framing cone has dissolved through
Kant's indeterminate supersensible, noises distributed spatiality, expansion, dematerialization, excess and/or any other number of Op, Cybernetic or Conceptualist artistic strategies, that narrow cone of representation is found wanting and a much more encompassing, atmospheric,
scopic hyper-noise art is conceivable.
Art in the 1960s' open arena, then, is generally conceived of as a noise
cluster of optical vectors which suggest a hyper-total, enveloping, nonvectored space that creates unaccustomed situations and sensations for
the enthusiastic in an attempt to shift the political/social vortex away
from outdated symbolic allegiances and towards sensate dynamic forces
of change. As such, it stands in contrast to the standard histories and doctrines and ideas that were being propagated in the mass media at the time.

178 Joseph Nechvatal

Here I will review some pertinent noise examples concerning the

semi-disappearance of the objet d'art which occurred in the late-1960s
that to a great extent set the tone for vanguard art on through to the
late-1970s when a revival of painting occurred under the designation of
post-modernist appropriation/simulation. Of course, artists continued
to paint and sculpt throughout the period of the 1960s and 1970s, and
still up to this day, but they do so from a derrire-garde position, as traditionalists. This is so because a change in art occurred in the late-1960s
when art typically lost its artisanal materiality (as discrete paintings and
sculptures) and became increasingly time-based and ambient as a repercussion (primarily) of the legacy of painterly abstraction in the early and
mid-20th century. In terms of the immersive noise inclination, this expansion away from the two-dimensional canvas freed the spectator from
stasis and encouraged an active atmosphere of contemplative reception
within the work of art which was essentially attained through the compliant motion of the immersant in contact with the strategic liberties exacted in the expanded art. Artists increasingly aimed in this era to evoke
noise possibilities within the imagination of their audience, to engage
their active participation and to release art from its previous obligatory
fidelities to the hypothetical and material status quo. Underlying this aim
is a miasmatic noise idea which questions linear and hierarchical structures and seeks to replace them with atmospheric loose structures, keyed
to a penetrable, reciprocal flow of events. This inclination might be further characterized as the deposit of hyper-noise within the immersant
that will manifest at a later date as a personal and private inner art: the
creation of future noise artists, in other words.
Much of the disappearance, de-definition and de-materialization of
the art object that went beyond Modernism in the search for a total art of
noise developed out of the visual spectator's participation that was called
for in viewing Op Art: a hard-edge geometrical movement that flourished in the early-1960s (largely inspired by various optical experiments
of Marcel Duchamp) in the work of Jesus-Rafael Soto, Bridget Riley, the
GRAV group, Yayoi Kusama, Yaacov Agam, Pol Bury, Josef Albers, Marian Zazeela and Victor Vasarely, among others. Op Art called attention
to the spectator's individual, constructive and changing perceptions,
and thus called upon the attitude of the spectator to transfer the creative
act increasingly upon him or herself. This ideal, in turn, beckons forth a

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 179

consideration of the enlargement of the audience's normal participation,

both in regard to the spectators ocular aptitude to instigate variations in
the perceived optic, and to his or her capability to produce kinetic and
aggregate exchanges on or within the work of art itself.
Indeed, Kinetic Art also played an important part in pioneering the
unambiguous use of optical movement and in fashioning links between
science, technology and art relating to the notion of the environment.
Simply stated, the term kinetic means the study of the relationship between moving bodies, hence the term Kinetic Art is usually used to describe either three-dimensional mobiles or constructions that move in
either foreordained or unplanned ways. With Op Art (which is kinetic
in that Op situations employ optical illusion that effect an appearance of
motion) and Kinetic Art (both conceptual descendants of the shifting
noise perceptions initiated in 20th century painting with Impressionism,
Cubism and Futurism), the artwork under consideration is no longer
merely a categorical system but increasingly an invocation to noise perception. The cognitive noise encounter that a spectator may undergo in an
Op situation, perhaps best exemplified by Bridget Riley's projected circular Op environment done for the 1960 exhibition Situations in London,
was instigated by the certitude that the spectator was obliged to take up
consecutive positions in front of the display, in order to detect the series
of shifting patterns and lines that were offering themselves to the onlooker from contrary and incompatible angles. Thus the element of personal
choice and physical motion by the beholder is emphasized, resulting in
a decline in the art object's sequestered, fetishistic standing as an objet
d'art. This is well exemplified, too, by Jesus-Rafael Soto's process-based
walk-through Op environments called Penetrables, which incorporated a
tactile immersion into visual noise (with occasional sonorous elements)
notable for their immersive noise attributes (given their realization on an
architectural scale). The work increasingly becomes a co-operative production of the operation between the former objet d'art and me, as I am
projecting my selfhood into the noise form and am thereby enabled to sense
the various spatial possibilities the shifting hyper-noise suggests.
Many sensory noise projects, installations and environmental events
produced by the Brazilian artist Hlio Oiticica (1937-1980) excellently
exemplify this trend. In Oiticica's work, the once established correlations
between the spectator, the objet d'art and the artist is radically modified.

180 Joseph Nechvatal

With Oiticica, the emphasis is no longer on the objet d'art created by the
artist, and certainly not solely on the personal fancy of the immersant,
but on a third dramatizing maneuver similar to what Brion Gysin (19161986) and William S. Burroughs call the third mind. The third mind is
based on Brion Gysin's rediscovery of Tristan Tzara's (1896-1963) Dada
cut-up writing method which he encountered while cutting through a
newspaper he was using to trim floor mats. Gysin did several experiments
with cut-ups while living in Tangiers and shared them with his friend William S. Burroughs. Thereafter Burroughs used cut-ups in his books Nova
Express, The Ticket That Exploded, and others. Gysin, too, was responsible
for the absolutely noise-immersive optical Dream Machine that he invented based on the sparkling and flickering of the sun through the trees.
The principle behind the Dream Machine is that it generates wave-like
patterns which strobe at around 10 Hz, the frequency of the alpha waves
sometimes present in the part of the brainstem responsible for determining states of creative consciousness. As one sits (relaxed) in a room filled
with the machine-generated flickering light, spectacular hyper-noise visualizations may occur due to the optical twinkle at work.
When I saw the The Third Mind exhibition in the fall of 2007 at Le
Palais de Tokyo in Paris (curated by Ugo Rondinone) many noise issues
arose in my mind. The show contained work from: Ronald Bladen, Lee
Bontecou, Martin, Boyce, Joe Brainard, Valentin Carron, Vija Celmins,
Bruce Conner, Verne Dawson, Jay Defeo, Trisha Donnelly, Urs Fischer,
Bruno Gironcoli, Robert Gober, Nancy Grossman, Hans Josephsohn,
Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, Toba Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik,
Emma Kunz, Andrew Lord, Sarah Lucas, Hugo Markl, Cady Noland,
Laurie Parsons, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, Josh Smith, Paul Thek, Andy
Warhol, Rebecca Warren, and Sue Williams.
What is interesting about this disquieting show is to look at how this
group show differs in its conjoining (or not) from other group shows by
pinning it to the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs from the early 1960s known as The Third Mind. Moreover, can we
place this Third Mind in the context of wider noise connections and ponder at what point does homage turn into exploitation?
Burroughs and Gysin, known predominantly, as mentioned, for the
rediscovery of the Dada master Tristan Tzara's cut-up technique and
for co-inventing the flickering Dream Machine device, worked together

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 181

in the early 1960s on a publishing project that used a chance-based cutup method. A cut-up method consists of cutting up and randomly reassembling various fragments of something to give them a completely new
and unexpected meaning: 1+1=3. In the recent biography of Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Celebrate Myself, Ginsbergs archivist, Bill Morgan,
recounts some of the geneses of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs
forays into radical Dada cut-up technique and collaboration based on
Ginsbergs diary entries.
In the mid-1950s, Gysin pointed out to Burroughs that collage technique has been a regular tool in painting and graphics since half a century. This came as late news to the young Beat writers of that time, so it is
perhaps not surprising that Ginsbergs first exposure to Burroughss use
of the cut-up was met with disdainGinsberg considered it something
along the lines of a parlor trick.280 Even more, Ginsberg speculated from
NYC that Burroughs had lost his mind through lack of sex.281 As a joke,
Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky cut up some of their own poems and rearranged them and sent them to Burroughs with the note, Just having a little fun mother.282 However, Burroughs was so dedicated to the random
cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique. When
Ginsberg and Orlovsky arrived in Tangiers in 1961, Burroughs was working on an even more advanced use of the cut-up; he and Ian Sommerville
(1940-1976) were cutting and splicing audiotapes and Burroughs was
making collages from newspapers and photographs while proclaiming
that poetry and words were dead.283
Burroughs, however, soon began work on a cut-up novel, the Soft Machine, drawing material from his The Word Hoard. The Word Hoard is a
collection of Burroughss manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, and London that all together created the mother-load manuscript that served as
the basis for much of Burroughs cut-up writings: The Soft Machine, Nova
Express, The Ticket That Exploded, (together referred to as The Nova Trilogy or Nova Epic). Even Naked Lunch was taken from sections of The Word
Hoard. A text was also produced called Dead Fingers Talk in 1963, which
contains excerpts from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket
That Exploded combined together to create a new narrative. Also, via Burroughss artistic collaborations with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville,
the cut-up technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and
sound, via Somerville's tape recorders.

182 Joseph Nechvatal

The Soft Machine manuscript was soon being assembled and edited by
Ian Sommerville and Michael Portman, Burroughss companions. Sommerville was regularly speaking of building electrical cut-up machines.
Shortly thereafter, Burroughs would begin collaborating on a book project with Brion Gysin using the cut-up method, cutting up and reassembling various fragments of sentences and images to give them a new and
unexpected meaning. The Third Mind is the title of the book they devised
together following this method, and they were so overwhelmed by the
results that they felt it had been composed by a third person; a third author (mind) made of a synthesis of their two personalities. Ginsberg remained highly skeptical for some time, but following his travels in India
came to appreciate the cut-up technique, even while never employing it.
Now for The Third Mind show. Many artworks found here advance
Rondinones thesis of the third mind. Of course, foremost is the Brion
Gysin and William S. Burroughs collaboration, The Third Mind. An entire gallery is devoted to the maquettes for this unpublished book from
the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Artand it does
not disillusion the fourth mind: that of the viewer/reader. It is a golden
hodgepodge feast and serves as the noise underpinnings of the exhibit.
Then there is the glamorous video installation/accumulation of Andy
Warhols (1928-1987) Screen Tests from 1964-1966: a group of silent
black & white three-minute films in which visitors to the Warhol factory try to sit still. Here we see an interlaced presentation that visually
connects the youthful faces of Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971), Susan Sontag (1933-2004), Nico (1938-1988), John Giorno, Jonas Mekas, Gerard
Malanga, Jack Smith (1932-1989), Paul Thek (1933-1988), Lou Reed
and the distinguished Marcel Duchamp. The presentation is structurally
connectivist given its four-directional presentation as a low laying sculpture. It is incredibly enjoyable. Plus the room is ringed with black haunting photograms called Angels by the fascinating Bruce Conner (19332008) from 1973-75.
In terms of a more traditional, synthetic, associational, curatorial
fission, the strongest effect was achieved for me in the Ronald Bladen,
Nancy Grossman, Cady Noland gallery. Everything here was screaming
power, sex and violence. The entire space felt hard as nailsmost all of it
a macho silver and black. Bracketing the huge gallery were long rows of
Nancy Grossmans famous black-leathered heads, aggressively sprouting

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 183

phallic shapes like picks and horns. Bladens 1969 minimal masterwork,
The Cathedral Evening, aggressively dominated the interior space with a
mammoth triangle breach. This was backed up by his famous work, Three
Elements (1965). Then, giving the gallery a sense of an almost palpably
Oedipal contest284 was a large group of superb black-on-silver Cady Noland anthropological silk-screens on metal.285
The other room that really collectively worked for me held Paul Thek
and the mysterious yet suave Emma Kunz (1892-1963). Three wonderful Paul Thek Meat Piece are there; marvellous, weird post-minimal sculptures that sickly encase flayed body sections in wax in long yellow transparent plexiglas shrines that literally shinesuggesting an odd passion
for eccentric alternation between lassitude and enthusiasm. This meatmachine mix is counter-pointed with the healing magnetic-field ephemerality of Emma Kunzs geometric drawings, done with lead and colored
pencils (or chalk) on graph paper. It was easy to envision some fierce spiritual forces zapping each other without inhibition throughout that room.
Other rooms brought the link-up to a jolting halt. I simply admired
Martin Boyces huge neon sculpture (Boyce channeling the matres, Dan
Flavin), but it produced no associative noise effects with what else was
in the room. Worst of all was a room entirely devoted to the work of Joe
Brainard. What was that doing there? One strains to see (or imagine)
even a second mind in that space. So the unavoidable thought arises, well,
Rondinone must like this stuffso that is at least two minds in synch.
But does Rondinone think there is anything still interesting or perturbing
in a Gober sink? His The Split-up Conflicted Sink from 1985 also played
a huge flat note for me in this supposed visual noise symphony, as did
the overly unembellished black crosses of Valentin Carron, the stupid car
bashed installation by Sarah Lucas, and the cloying faux-nave canvases
of Karen Kilimnik. How to connect this boring, stupid and nave work to
the third mind connectivity theme then?
Nevertheless, I will. On thinking about the show on my way home,
I concluded that the shows thwarted relationship to connectivity is
gravely nave and pass (if pleasant in a quaint, charming way) in lieu
of the multi-networked world in which we now reside. By now, various
theories of complexity have established an undeniable influence on cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and collaborative adaptability.
One ponders if Rondinone has ever even heard of the theories of Tiz-

184 Joseph Nechvatal

iana Terranova,286 Eugene Thacker or other cultural workers involved in

the issues of human-machine symbiosis as interface within our inter-networked media ecology. So yes, part of the pleasure for me was bathing
in this old-fashioned navety, having just spent some serious time reading and writing on the topics of conspiratorial shadow activities and viral software logic based on complex inter-connectionism. Placed against
issues of avant-garde cybernetics, the coupling of nature and biology via
code, media ecologies, distributed management teams, Internet mash-up
music, artificial life swarms, the political herd mind, and Negri/Hardts
multitudes, The Third Mind played in my mind like a romp through a kindergarten playpen. Nice infant noise. It felt good to forget about that pervasive nagging political/cultural feeling of stalemate created by the resilience of our current reality in that it assimilates everything.
But no, Ugo Rondinone did not randomly cut and reassemble art to
create a new third meaning. He did not cut up anything. Just like every
dj, fashion designer, and group show curator, he remixed contemporary
expression from recent decades to permit new meanings to emerge. The
ideas in the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs
were not needed to achieve this endand perhaps they were poorly intellectually served here (even though it was great to see the work). There
was no use of chance or randomness evident here (even the re-shuffled
catalogue pages I heard were rather suspiciously non-random) that is
necessary for a really unexpectedand perhaps disastrousresult. This
show did not go that far. There was no random reassembling of various
fragments of something to give them a completely new and unexpected
meaning (like I saw in the show Rolywholyover: A Composition for Museum by John Cage at the Guggenheim Museum in Soho, NYC in 1994).
The Third Mind is just a standard, but good, heterogeneous art show
where the whole is greater than its parts. Which is as it must be.
Anyway, to get back to my main point: as the blending between the
artist and spectator took on greater and greater emphasis in the late1960s, new forms of aesthetic immersion into noise opened up. It is precisely in this third mind blending that the question of art as noise ambience arises. Indeed, ambience as art is a fruitful domain in which to find the
art of noise aesthetic in all of its varieties and forms of manifestation.
The term ambience used here follows Frank Popper's definition of the
artistic environment as a meeting ground of physical and psychological

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 185

factors, which implicate the spectator's inherent participation in the art's

fulfilment in a delicate, atmospheric way.287 This is indeed the case with
La Monte Young's and Marian Zazeela's Dream House: a fully immersive
light and subtle sound environment in which the visitor may move about
and thereby participate in the formation of the noise-sounds and optical
effects encountered. An artistic ambient environment is a key concept for
aesthetic immersion into noise and we shall return to it.
In Art, Action and Participation, Frank Popper showed (with particular reference to post-kinetic research) the convergence and specificity of
the notions of environment and creative participation which combined
to form the principal direction of art research in the theoretical and practical domains. In Art, Action and Participation, a source book from which
I drew many examples from this period, Popper found that mixed-media
expressions that involve all the senses are conducive to the more complete involvement of the spectator, and that science and technology can
act as creative stimulants. In terms of artists of the 1960s working in this
new expanded-field, a good example is GRAV (Groupe de Recherche
d'Art Visuels), created by Jean-Pierre Vasarely aka Yvaral, son of Victor
Vasarelya group of eleven artists who picked up on Victor Vasarely's
concept that the sole artist was outdated. GRAV was active in Paris from
1960 to 1968. Their main aim was to merge the individual identities
of the members into a collective and individually anonymous activity
linked to the scientific and technological disciplines based around collective events called Labyrinths.
Their ideals incited them to investigate a wide spectrum of kinetic
and optical effects by using various types of artificial light and mechanical movement. In their first Labyrinth, held in 1963 at the Paris Biennale,
they presented three years work based on optical and kinetic devices.
Thereafter they discovered that their effort to engage the human eye had
shifted their concerns towards those of spectator participation, a foreshadow of interactivity. On April 19th, 1966, GRAV created Une Journe
Dans la Rue (Day in the Street) in Paris where they invited passing participants to involve themselves in various kinetic activities such as having them walk on uneven blocks of wood and/or experience a distorted
world by wearing elaborate distorting spectacles. Their agreed dissolution in November 1968 was based on their recognition that it was impossible to maintain the rigor of a joint program.

186 Joseph Nechvatal

Relevant here is the Nicolas Schffer Exhibition I saw in Paris in fall

2005, for if one discounts the existence of Lszl Moholy-Nagys (18951946) Bauhaus Light Space Modulator (1923-30)288 a visionary multimedia noise artwork that helped inaugurate the artistic dialogue between
machines, light, shadow and motionthere is something to the claim
that the Hungarian-born French artist Nicolas Schffer (1912-1992) is
the Father of Cybernetic Art. At the very least, this premise was entertained while viewing actual work (mostly mobile sculpture under theatrical lighting effects) and an incredible amount of documentation at the
museum of the French electricity company Espace EDF Electra.
What is immediately evident in this exceptional historic presentation
is that Schffers career touched on painting, kinetic sculpture, architecture, urbanism, film, TV, and even music (he collaborated with Pierre
Henry)all in the pursuit of a noise dynamism in art which was originally initiated by the Cubo-Futurists and then intensified and solidified
by the Russian Constructivists such as Naum Gabo (1890-1977), Anton
Pevsner (1866-1962) and Moholy-Nagy. All were concerned with opening up the static three-dimensional sculptural form to a fourth dimension
of time and motion, and this was Schffers intention as well. Schffer
however, coming well after, benefited pleasingly from cybernetic theories (theories of feedback systems (interactivity) primarily based on the
ideas of Norbert Wiener) in that they suggested to him artistic processes
in terms of the organization of the system manifesting it (e.g., the circular causality of feedback-loops). For Schffer, this enabled cybernetics to
elucidate complex artistic relationships from within the work itself.
His CYSP 1, from 1956, is considered the first cybernetic sculpture in
art history in that it made use of electronic computations as developed by
the Philips Company. The sculpture is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. Small motors located under their axis operated the plates. Photoelectric cells and
a microphone built into the sculpture catch all the variations in the fields
of color light intensity (and sound intensity). All these changes occasion
reactions on the part of the sculpture.
Consequently, Schffers kinetic sculptural compositions were able to
parallel Warren McCulloch's (1898-1969) adaptation of cybernetics in
formulating a creative epistemology concerned with the self-communication within an observer's psyche and between the psyche and the sur-

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 187

rounding environment. This is cybernetics primary usefulness in studying the supposed subject/object polarity in terms of artistic experience.
That is the theoretical premise, at least.
In actuality, I was treated here to dramatic light shows (some on the
trippy side) that come whirling out of his spinning mechanical metal
sculptures. Colored lights bounce off revolving polished metal towers,
casting ever-changing lights and shadows onto huge wall screens and
into my eyes. There also was a very basic interactive room consisting of
a group of smaller whirling sculptures which responded to my presence
and a large prismatic triangle structure containing infinity views.
In Schffers triangular structure, my image was ceaselessly mixed and
reflected within spinning lights. As such, I was made to feel an integral
part of an exploding noise. In general, this infinity noise experience invited me to view myself in infinity, and so to feel space not in the traditional
passive Euclidean custom, but in a conceptually operative and viractual
(viractive) manner.
In addition, the exhibition demonstrated Schffers three period
styles. First, his spatio-dynamic constructions from 1948 on: attempts
at a synthesis of spatial and dynamic elements. Next came the lumo-dynamic constructions of 1957, which connect light projections to music.
In his chrono-dynamic works of 1959, word and tone, movement and
space, light and color all form together a sum of space-time noise. Also
well documented was Schffers 52 meter high Cybernetic Tower from
1961, which was constructed in Liege with 66 revolving mirrors.
Given the period-piece nature of the exhibition, I found it stylistically
engaging in terms of noise art and not overly retro-looking. Indeed, the
show surprisingly did not appear all that dated, even though of course
it recalled the early Paris 1960s and the futuristic space age designs of
Paco Rabanne, which involved the use of moving metallic discs or plates.
Yet my subject/object polarity never shifted much.
But given this, shouldnt Nicolas Schffers work be considered something other than an art object per se? Perhaps it is more appropriate to
think of it as a means of transforming static perspective vision into a luminous study. We might just as well consider it then as stage props. Or
better, an apparatus for painting with light.
With his video works of 1961, Schffer is additionally regarded as an
early representative of video artso perhaps it all funnels into special ef-

188 Joseph Nechvatal

fects broadcast TV (which he did). For me, the final interest of this show
(which I saw three times) is in its allowing me to better position Schffer
in a certain art-tech artist-engineer intellectual historya living history
that has not yet exhausted itself. Indeed it is touching to consider that
Lszl Moholy-Nagys Light Space Modulatorwhich was driven by a
motor and equipped with 128 electric bulbs in different colorswas finally demonstrated at the 1930 Paris Werkbund exhibition. So I see Nicolas Schffer here not only as a pioneer of cybernetic art, kinetic sculptor,
town planner, architect and theoretician of art, but as a key player in the
middle of the art-tech intellectual narrationa narration that increasingly defines artistic achievement in the beginning of the 21st century.
Also significant in immersive noise terms from that period is Stan
Vanderbeek's 1966 Movie Drome, a hemispherical movie-mural created
in upstate New York State where the viewer assumed a supine position
to look upon an onslaught of hemispheric cinematic projections.289 As
Vanderbeek himself described it, the Movie Drome operated as follows:
In a spherical dome, simultaneous images of all sorts would be projected
on the entire dome-screen. The audience lies down at the outer edge of
the dome with their feet towards the center, thus almost their complete
field-of-view is the dome-screen. Thousands of images would be projected on the screen.290 According to Vanderbeek, details of this hour-long
multi-plex dense image flow (inherently excessive) were not important.
What was important was a total scale felt in rapport with the rapid
panoply (what Vanderbeek called the dome's visual-velocity) which
functioned so as to penetrate to unconscious levels.291 This hemispheric
reconfiguration of the screen (so as to heighten film's immersive appeal
in terms of filling the FOV) conforms to what Jonas Mekas called absolute cinema.292
In addition, Francis Thompson, best artistically known for a six screen
projection arrangement called We Are Young which covered a total area of
885.6 square meters (2,952 square feet) at the Expo '67 in Montreal, produced large-scale immersive projections based on his interest in having
films optically swallowing an audience. Thompson said about these large
displays that he would like to see a theater with so great an area that you
no longer think in terms of a screen: it's the area you're projecting on.
Then images would come out of this surrounding area and hit you in the

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 189

eye or go off into infinity. So you're no longer working with a flat surface
but rather an infinite volume.293
Non-immersive noise cinema makes use of what is called framing.
Framing is intended to eliminate what is deemed unessential in the motion picture, to direct the spectator's attention to what is important and
to give it special meaning and force. Each frame of film, which corresponds in shape to the image projected on the screen, forms the basis for
a graphic composition in the same way as the frame of a painting encloses
the area in which the painting must be organized. Several different ratios
of frame width to frame height (called aspect ratios) have been used in
motion pictures. The most common, known as the Academy ratio, is 1.33
to 1, or 4 to 3, a ratio corresponding to the dimensions of the frame of
35 millimeter film. By using 70 millimeter film or a special CinemaScope
lens, an image with wider horizontal and shorter vertical dimensions is
achieved; a proportion of about 5 to 2, or between 2.2 to 1 and 2.65 to 1.
A similar effect, called wide-screen, was sometimes achieved without the
expensive equipment required for CinemaScope by using 35 millimeter
film and masking the top or bottom, or both, giving a ratio of 1.75 to 1, or
7 to 4. Although some theaters in the 1970s were enlarged and widened
to accommodate 70 millimeter images, a trend toward smaller theaters
fixed the image ratio close to 1.85 to 1 in the United States and 1.66 to
1 in Europe.
Rejecting the framing trope for art, in 1954 Yaacov Agam began to
undertake research into what he called transformable structures (the
equivalent of paintings and reliefs) and transformable objects (the equivalent of sculpture) where the spectator was obliged to take up successive positions in front of the reliefs in order to discover the sequence of
changing lines, forms, colors and structures which offered themselves
from different exclusive angles. Agam himself pointed out that all his
works are in fact transformable, but he reserves the term in particular for
those in which the basis of the transformation lies in being able to modify
the pictorial structure, for example in the 1953 piece, Nuit. He extended this premise immersively with his Total Picture Environment Salon at
l'Eyse in Paris.
According to Gene Youngblood, with the art of Marcel Duchamp,
John Cage, and Andy Warhol (1928-1987), western civilization rediscovered art in the ancient Platonic sense in which there's no difference

190 Joseph Nechvatal

between the aesthetic and the mundane.294 This, we can say, is the basis
of Pop Art (a term coined in 1958 by the critic Lawrence Alloway) as Pop
Art found its imagery and many of its techniques in the realm of advertising and consumer packaging and pop stars and cinema idols.
Most definitely, the Pop-Happenings of Andy Warhol's art-music
group, the Exploding Plastic Inevitables (E.P.I.) (which eventually became the rock group The Velvet Underground) is the most conspicuous
Pop noise work, as the audience and the players/performers were embedded in a high volume light/sound/film show which dominated the
space and stirred the consciousness of those watching or dancing. E.P.I.
Happenings first were performed in the spring of 1966 at a Polish dance
hall on St. Marks Place in New York City called Polsky Dom Narodny.
Warhol rented the Dom (home) from two artists who sculpted with
light, Rudy Stern and Jackie Cassen, and painted it white so that movies
and slide projections could be cast on the walls in wallpaper-like fashion.
Five movie projectors were utilized along with five carousel-type slide
projectors which could each change an image every ten seconds. The
slides were projected directly onto the films, whose sound tracks would
sometimes be played, and thus blend in with the live music/hullabaloo.
A mirror-ball also was utilized along with spot-lights and strobe-lights.295
E.P.I.'s noise Happenings aimed to achieve a traumatically dazzling
ontological restructuring of consciousness. Here the space of the Happening (light-show/concert/film-show/live-performance) verges on the
all-consuming in a way now familiar to those who have participated in
techno-raves, rock concerts, and/or house music clubs (such as the legendary Paradise Garage (1976-1987) in New York City, a club that attained an added immersive noise sweep to its milieu by embedding powerful sound-speakers under its dance floor). Indeed, the now ubiquitous
mirror-ball (whose inventor I was not able to uncover) must be recognized as an immersive noise artwork of significant stature.
In 1969, a 210 immersive noise Gesamtkunstwerk model was first
created by the Los Angeles wing of the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)296 project for the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Expo 70 in
Osaka, Japan. The 210 mirrored sphere, whose prototype was shown in
the U.S.A. in a Santa Ana blimp hanger in September 1969, was simply
a light-weight mirrored sphere constructed from 3,900 square meters
(13,000 square feet) of mirrored mylar 2,540th of a centimeter thick

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 191

(1,000th of an inch) which spanned 27 meters (90 feet) in diameter and

16.5 meters (55 feet) in height.297
Another Pop-Happening artist emblematic of an all-consuming immersive noise aesthetic is the previously mentioned Japanese artist Yayoi
Kusama, who in 1958 moved for a time to New York City. Kusama's
dominant obsessions have been the excessive accumulation of polka-dots
(or extraordinary milky phallic growths) which on occasion span entire
rooms and create very noisy experiences. As a juvenile in Japan, Kusama developed an obsessive-compulsive disorder that caused encircling
hallucinations, as mentioned previously. Kusama's obliterating installations strive to characterize a waking hallucinated-vision she experienced
as a young woman, where sitting at a table covered with a floral tablecloth, in a room covered with floral wallpaper, she saw that her hands,
too, were covered with flowers. As she herself has said, There was a vase
of golden violets and when I looked at them and then looked away they
began to cover everything. They were on the drawings I was doing and
then I saw that they were all over the phone book, and going up the walls
and then they covered the doors so that I could not see a way out of the
room. These experiences were typical.298 As a result, it is as if Kusama
was agonizing to overwhelm the entire world with the noise of her polkadots, and it is this explosive and immersive-noise model that places her
at the forefront of the noise-Pop post-war avant-garde, reflective, as her
installations, happenings, and even paintings are, of noisy psychological obsessions.
Kusama's noisy Infinity Net paintings are comprised of small, overlapping, looping brush strokes which create optical-fields reminiscent of a
boundless sea. This, of course, ties her paintings into issues of the previously discussed painterly noise sublime. Moreover, she also has created
an extraordinary group of Net Paintings in the late-1950s and early-1960s
(for example Yellow Net) which insinuate the overall webbed-infinite
hyper-total aesthetic accomplished by Jackson Pollock. This implied
immersive-overall noise hyper-space becomes literalized in her infinity
cubed mirror installations at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s.
As she has said, In New York, I was painting the red nets and then I
noticed that it spread to the floor and the curtain and to the window. So I
went to catch the red net, and I examined it without noticing at first that
my hands were also covered by the red nets. And that was the turning

192 Joseph Nechvatal

point, and I started creating sculpture, so that I could put the patterns on
everything.299 This desire is realized in the installations Repetitive Vision
and Dots Obsession. In Dots Obsession, a room 4.8 meters wide by 15 meters long by 3 meters high (16 by 50 by 10 feet) had been painted an intense yellow with different sized black dots randomly placed on the walls,
floor, and ceiling. Three huge, organically-shaped balloons (one was 9
meters long by 3 meters high (30 feet by 10 feet)) are the same color as
the room, right down to the black dots that filled the total space.
Her grottoesque noise installation Repetitive Vision was approached
by walking first into a black corridor and then into an intensely lit space
whose floor was covered in hot-red dots. I encountered there three female mannequins painted white, their bodies and hair covered with the
dots, reflecting to infinity in the mirrored walls and ceilings.
As Kusama is consistently motivated by her desire for an obliteration of the self in visual-noise-infinity characterized by the all-over use
of polka-dots (so immersive is this impulse that Kusama often covered
her skin and hair in polka-dots), her mirrored immersive installations are
salient noise sites in which to explore issues of disembodiment (issues of
self devastation of cognitive self-body-image) and willed visual self-obliteration, as when within them the viewer may merge with, and dissolve
into, the visual panorama reflected ad infinitum in the walls of mirrors.
The effect is as if being itself was being circuitously inhaled.
To immerse one more fully in her proliferating noise environments,
in 1965 Kusama turned to the use of mirrored-rooms to enhance the
feeling of expansive immersion into noise ad infinitum with the construction of Narcissus Garden, Kusama's Peep Show and Endless Love Room,
for example.
Stylistically, this work can be seen as a synthesis of Op, Pop and Psychedelic Art, and there is the obvious communality she shares with Lucas Samaras' 1966 Room 2 and Christian Megert's environments (which
also incorporate mirrors) as in the Spiegelraum that was included in the
Environments exhibition in Utrecht in 1968 and in Mirror Environment
included in Documenta 4, Kassel. Moreover, though less immediately
all-encompassing, but perhaps even more highly charged with total noise
symbolism applicable to the entire environment, in 1969 Robert Smithson (1938-1973) began producing works in the landscape called Nine
Mirror Displacements, Mirror Shore by placing mirrors on a beach or in the

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 193

jungle of the Yucatn. Smithson then took photographs of these ordinary

mirrors set out on the ground and what they were reflecting back.
The Italian artist Getulio Alviani, in his 1964-9 Cubic Environment,
also made use of reflective media towards immersive noise ends on an architectural scale, and again in Surface and Texture (1969), an aluminium
wall 3.20 by 5.60 meters in size (about 10.5 by 18.4 feet). His Interelazione Cromospeculare was wonderful to experience, as I did, at the Italics:
L'art italien entre tradition et rvolution 1968-2008 show in Venice at the
Palazzo Grassi in 2008. Luc Peire's Environment was also constructed as
an enveloping reflective arrangement where mirrored surfaces rebound
amplitude to an indefinite degree in order to help one achieve noise consciousness of the unlimited dimensions of vibrant space.
In like manner, Domingo Alvarez created mirrored rooms out of a
number of large mirrors in an entirely closed construction which projected a self-conscious space outward ad infinitum, as in his 1972 Mirror Environment. Its seemingly immeasurable space might seem exclusively and
merely external to one at first glance, but if considered closely, penetrates
consciousness noisily. We saw this in Kusama's installation Infinity Dots
Mirrored Room where a white Formica floor was covered with three sizes
of colored fluorescent dots within a mirrored-room teeming with blacklight. By being ceaselessly reflected on the ceiling and walls, one felt an
integral part of the exploding noise. In general, then, the infinity noise
experience bound me to view and feel space not in the traditional passive
custom but in a conceptually operative and viractual (viractive) manner.
It is partly for this reason of noise visuality, I submit, that the use of
mirrors in art flourished during the late-1960s, curiously around the same
time the post-structuralist French psychologist Jacques Lacan (19011981) was broadly publishing his theory of the mirror stage in human development in the chapter titled The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the
Function of the I in Ecrits (originally published in 1949 in French). The
Lacanian term mirror stage indicated the point in a child's growth when
the psychological feeling of undifferentiated unity with the mother is
substituted with a conception of a disconnected self. According to Lacan,
the experience of perceiving oneself in a mirror, literally or figuratively,
generates internal trepidation (noise) inasmuch as one anticipates and
wills for oneself a homogeneous total being over which the ego has domin-

194 Joseph Nechvatal

ion. However, this totality is never achieved, so that one's spellbound ego
comes to feel inadequate.300
Moreover, Lacan emphasized the primacy of language as the mirror
of the unconscious mind, and he tried to introduce the study of language
(as practised in modern linguistics, philosophy, and poetics) into psychoanalytic theory. His major achievement was his reinterpretation of
Freud's work in terms of the structural linguistics developed by French
writers in the second half of the 20th century. The influence he gained
extended well beyond the field of psychoanalysis to make him one of the
dominant figures in French cultural life during the 1970s, and in Critical
Studies within Anglo-Saxon academic circles from the early 1980s on.301
Coming at this noise mirror issue from an almost polar-opposite position is the American artist Bruce Nauman's 1968 efficacious noise installation called Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, that consisted
of an empty, small, white room, filled only with noise that seems to come
from all directions. Simply constructed, it consisted of loud-speakers invisibly embedded into the walls which played a male voice shouting and
moaning the injunction of the title. There is nothing to see, yet the rhythmic pattern of the voice bleating out this repetitious ornately coupled
incantation without end locks one into a surround-sound cognitive/dissonant noise situation of attraction/repulsion. However, if we are not to
settle for affirmations of the emptiness of our being, it seems to me that
any noise art proposition must also be an initiatory one done at the limits
of ourselves which must, on the one hand, open up a realm of ontological
doubt, but on the other, put itself to the test of affinity with contemporary ideas of infinity, both to grasp the points where noise expansion is
possible and desirable, and to ascertain the accurate form the expansive
proposition should take. This means that the constructed ontology of
ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be determined
and restricting by persisting in an immersive noise consciousness both
rhizomatic and infinite.
In terms of the immersive noise art of the 1960s which addressed
contemporary concepts of the infinite, mention should be made of
the Dvizjenije movement in Moscow and its leader Lev Nusberg. The
Dvizjenije movement adapted the cosmic ideas of the Malevich tradition 302 in an attempt to construct what were called Living Machines (i.e.,
kinetic environments) between the years 1962 and 1967. Lev Nusberg

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 195

himself had in effect been working since 1964 through 1967 on noise
projects concerned with setting up artificial kinetic milieus which would
register kinetic sensations within them, though only partly realized. One
Nusberg project idea was for a kinetic labyrinth that was to extend 500
meters (1,640 feet) and branch off into several different directions containing a large number of consecutive shaped and colored rooms accommodating, at various points, film, music, mime performance, text, kinetic
objects, smells, and even air currents. This atmospheric approach to art
is also evident in Carlos Cruz-Diez's environmental color-events called
Chromosaturations where atmospheric three-dimensional color experiences were encouraged in various rooms or booths, thus bringing one
in direct contact with a unique sensory encounter by hanging homogeneous color in space. In some of his Chromosaturations, the visitor, after being decontaminated in transitional coal-black chambers, passed
through a sequence of consecutive chromatic situations in which one experiences sheer blue, red, and green. In his Chromosaturations for a Public
Place in the Open Air, exhibited at Venice, Cruz-Diez returned to an idea
which he had already put into effect at the Carrefour de l'Odon (Paris)
in 1969 where pedestrians were invited to enter and pass through a series of differently colored-filled booths. In the version exhibited at Venice, this principle was carried further by inducing the spectator to follow
a corridor of continuous color saturation so that one successively experienced absolute blue, absolute red and absolute green. Cruz-Diez thus
achieved a total vision303 through the summation of distinct monochrome
perceptions. Mathilde Perez also created complete color experiences by
constructing a prolonged corridor of unified chroma which essentially
brought one into the experience of pure color carefully modified in such
a way as to permit the sensory perception of colored space.
This noise emphasis on art as a kind of sensory-stimulation laboratory304 took on the cybernetically charged open-field and provided inputs for a post-modern noise activity generally characterized by a process
aesthetic and a de-objectification that emphasized the artist's encounter
with the palpable and malleable properties of reality from within the conglomerate atmosphere. In the open-field, sculpture came to incorporate
wholly new modes of compositional events, such as earthworks and media art: film, video and electronics. Various conditions of presentation
(including site-specific installations and street works) brought art further

196 Joseph Nechvatal

from the framework constraints of the picture frame and the traditional
function of the gallery and deeper into noise. In Process Art, Conceptual
Art, and Earthworks, there was a sense of common motivation: an effort to escape the conventional terms of the art object as nurtured by the
museum/gallery milieu and to move art out into a broader context. Here
was a definite opening towards the noisy environment, coupled with an
appeal to general creativity that was evident from the very simplicity of
the materials and statements.
Another aspect of noise practice in the expanded-field is that of
the artist becoming his or her own work of art, totally losing the usual
boundaries between 'art' and 'life' and 'artist' and 'work'. This tendency
is best represented by Linda Montano, the founder of the Art/Life Institute and the main defender of Living Art. Living Art is an attempt to
merge art and lifestyle through long-term performance works, defined as
any work/play that artists/non-artists are willing to perform together or
alone. Montano's Living Art performances, which she has created over
the past 25 years, include Three-Day Blindfold (1975) and a co-operative
work with Tehching Hsieh in which the two artists spent a year tied together by a 2.4 meter (8 foot) rope (1983-84). This work had the additional stipulation that the artists not touch.
The 1981 immersive noise performance collaboration between Bill
Seaman and Carlos Hernandez called Architectural Hearing Aids touches
on this immersive Living Art mode in a noisy way, as it drove the participant in a car installed with two different sound systems and a 4-track
mixer and seven speakers on a specific tour of San Francisco. Sound/music was composed specifically to alter perceptions of the real architectural
structure of the city.
Noisily, Joseph E. Furey's (1906-1990) Brooklyn railroad apartment
at 447 Sixteenth Street was completely covered with brightly painted
cardboard appliqus, shells, and other found objects so that the walls
were teeming with stippled dots of black, green, beige and red paint that
covered thousands of clam shells and hand-cut cardboard hearts, cross
shapes, and diamonds. Mussel shells, spread open to resemble butterflies,
were bordered by colored tile and chips of mirror, lima beans, and glass
beads. Bits of collage, pictures of monkeys, butterflies, and dogs, dotted
the wallpaper landscape mural.

Modern Nervous Noise Eyes 197

There, too, is ST EOM's Pasaquan, created between 1958 and 1984

by Eddie Owens Martin (1908-1986)305 located in the sand hills of
south-west Georgia, near the small town of Buena Vista. Pasaquan consists of eight grass covered acres, surrounded by pine trees and adorned
with walls, pagodas, buildings, temples, and walkwaysall brilliantly
decorated, inside and out. This all-over noise tendency to address a space
aesthetically has recently merited the term Installation Art, an artform I
will illustrate with Milton Cohn's late-1960's Space Theater. The essence
of Cohn's Space Theater was a rotating assembly of mirrors and prisms
adjustably mounted on a flywheel around which were arranged a battery
of light, film, and slide projectors. Essentially, Space Theater was an expanded version of Moholy-Nagy's Space-Light Modulator into which one
may enter. Cohn's intention was to free film from its flat and frontal orientation and to present it within an ambience of total space.306
This desire to create a surrounding projective noise space was also
the intent of Jud Yalkut's late-1960s Floating Theater. The Floating Theater consisted of a parachute canopy 9.6 to 15 meters (32 to 50 feet) in
diameter anchored with nylon strings on which projections were cast.
The canopy, which reflected both rear and frontal multiple-projections,
was suspended over and around the audience by the use of fans.307 Henry
Jacobs and Jordan Belson's intermedia Vortex Concerts, realized intermittently between 1957 and 1960 in the 18 meter (60 foot) domed Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park firmly established
the surrounded/expanded field-of-view objective as well. As reported by
Youngblood,308 the Vortex Concerts consisted of an abstract light/sound
presentation created with interference-pattern projectors that intermixed with the surrounding star projections and strobe lights, an experience which engulfed the onlooker in art noise. Belson explained that
in the Vortex they were able to project images over the entire dome so
that things would come pouring down from the center, sliding along the
walls.309 Also, Aldo Tambellini's mid-1960s environmental Electomedia Theater served as a robust precursor to this surrounded/expanded
noise trend. Particularly significant are Tambellini's 1965 Black Zero environment, which engulfed the viewer in a maelstrom of audio-visual
events,310 and his 1968 collaboration with Otto Piene on the multi-channel, closed-circuit environment called Black Gate Cologne, a performance

198 Joseph Nechvatal

environment that helped re-establish this surrounded/expanded noise

inclination again in Europe.
More recently, this appetite to fill us in projection noise was appeased
in inverse micro-fashion in a one-on-one interactive assisted film-performance by Bradley Eros called Movie Head Box which he presented as part
of The Extremist Show at ABC No Rio in New York City in 1983. Eros
provided me with a screen-box which slid over my head (like a primitive
HMD). He then projected a color super-8 film onto my head-screen's
faade (which insinuated a noisy erotic chronicle dipped in alchemy)
thereby over-flooding my visional capacities, as the erotic/alchemical images seeped into the box and were reflected off its inner sides. A walkman
provided an intimate noise soundscape311 accompaniment made up of
metallic abstract sounds.
All of the above examples demonstrate that there has been a developing taste for what I have identified as immersive noise art: art that attempts
to project its aesthetic noise value ambiently but coherently throughout
an expanded aesthetic field-of-view.

Chapter 5

Viral Attack within Connectivist Noise Schematics

{loop:file = get-random-executable-file;
if first-line-of-file = 1234567 then goto loop;
prepend virus to file;}
Fred Cohen, Computer Viruses: Theory and Experiments

We cannot be done with viruses as long as the

ontology of network culture is viral-like.
Jussi Parikka, The Universal Viral Machine

Dada is the viral option to the virtual certainty.

Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide

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 interiorand 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 circuitsis also expansively applicable to
the all-over interlacing network of today: the World Wide Web.
Lets 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 internetwork 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

200 Joseph Nechvatal

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 Roussels (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 Hbler
and Alexander Tuchacek) have experimented with so called intelligent
agentsapplications 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 noise316 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

Viral Attack within Connectivist Noise Schematics 201

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

202 Joseph Nechvatal

a book with that title would be of sole interest to those sniggering hornrimmed 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 bypost-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 conditionand
the brimful push of technological modernization in generalfrom catastrophically killing itself off.
This admirable embryonic redemption is achieved by a vaccinationlike 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

Viral Attack within Connectivist Noise Schematics 203

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 trendsas viruses, by definition, are merger machines based on
parasitism320 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.

204 Joseph Nechvatal

But beyond the techno-cultural relevance, the significance of the viral

issues in Parikkas 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 doand which accounts for our
cultural feelings vacillating between anxiety and enthusiasm over being
invaded by something invisibleand 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 Flix
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 Contagionss genealogical account is proportionately impressive, as it devotes satisfactory space to the discussion of historical precedent, including Turing machines, Fred Cohens 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),

Viral Attack within Connectivist Noise Schematics 205

the Creeper virus in the Arpanet, the coupling machines of John Conway, the nastily waggish Morris worm, Richard Dawkinss 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 (alife). Using viral a-lifes 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 attributesnot 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/Varelas 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 Neumanns conviction that the
ideal design of a computer should be based on the design of certain hu-

206 Joseph Nechvatal

man organsor 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 eventualyet chimericalreference 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 becoming325 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

Viral Attack within Connectivist Noise Schematics 207

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 Ive heard about at the Musee
dArt 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 Franois Roche, Stphanie Lavaux, and
Jean Navarro; working here with Benot Durandin. Together, they utilized generative heterogeneous mutations in the creation of proposed
utopian city spaces. In fact what they propose at the Musee dArt Moderne is the artificial growing of extruded urban housing (generative & robotic) where new cities are constructed via robotic processes328 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 Debords 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 Ive 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

208 Joseph Nechvatal

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. Cognitiveaesthetic space has to be coordinated phenomenologically with the proprioceptive space of the eyeand 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 21st century dandy. Like those at the birth
of the 20th 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 dandyismif dandyisms defining
characteristic is remembered to be the making of ones 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 ones hand.
Indeed, one can say that Ive heard about favorably extolled artificiality, indifference, impassivenessthe reign of an ironic causality
and knotted ambivalencewhile 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 todaythat is viractualizedby stressing the embodied
nature of human and artificial consciousness and bodily existence as the
original and originating material premise of sense and signification.

Conclusion

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective

Philosophy of Noise Culture
To think about existential problems in such a way as
to leave out the passion is tantamount to not thinking
about them at all, since it is to forget the point.
Sren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There

is for me an evidence in the realm of flesh which has
nothing to do with the evidence of reason.
Antonin Artaud, Manifesto In Clear Language

Philosophical theory is a practice of concepts, and it must be

judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2

In agreement with the philosopher Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the

Mirror of Nature, my expectation in espousing this entangled immersive
art noise theory is that it will be understood not as a static aesthetic position, but as a glitch move that is continuing to amplify. This theoretical glitch hypothesis makes no pretensions to scientific methodology as
it, by its very nature, must retain its speculative character because of the
impossibility of attaining conclusive experimental data in art. A similar
impossibility is also the case, however, with the field of consciousness
studies,329 a field which often insists on calling itself scientific. So, rather
than contending that this book's conclusions are scientific, this investigation into cultures of noise ends by involving its findings in the artistic
phenomenological question of the qualities (and levels) of awareness of our
own consciousness within aesthetic realms which we are capable of attaining through noise art.

210 Joseph Nechvatal

Especially inasmuch as I am involved in the humanities, I am reluctant to model my conclusive methodology on a mechanistic model of
an earlier power-oriented science, even though the philosopher Werner
Heisenberg maintained that the differences between art and science are
minimized if one views both art and science from the more general vantage point of the Zeitgeist. Indeed, Gilles Deleuze also points out that
the special perceptions and affections of science or philosophy connect
up with the precepts and affects of art.330 Therefore, in that conscious
experience is not directly observable in an experimental context,331 it is
indeed this Deleuzian science/philosophy/art connected phenomenological zone that seems to be the appropriate theoretical model for this
art noise summation. The philosophic rhizomatic theory332 of Deleuze
and Guattari, at a general level, supports such a connectivist-glitch approach towards theorizing art, as rhizomatic theory encourages philosophic non-linear and non-restrictive thinking/imagining.
For me, Gilles Deleuzes vision of our post-industrial life opened the
way for the production of current noise art by affirming the befittingness
of multiplicity and the necessary entitlement of dissension. In recognition of his work, this reflection has been an attempt to hypothesize and
demonstrate a counter-mannerist glitch excess, an idea that was specifically inspired by the rhizomatic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. This
glitch idea re-establishes an ambiguously private critical distance for art:
a distance achieved through the connectivist challenge of (and disparity
between) pleasure and frustration. This theory of noise art demands of
society an active visualizing participation in private interpretationsand
thus is a legitimate metaphor for contemporary art as a form of simulation-shattering engagement. For example, the noise music of John Cage
demanded an open mind from the listener and a predisposed ear for all
the sounds usually excluded from music in the traditional sense. If (s)he,
the listener, can relate to the noise sounds (sounds that are always already there anyway) in a musical sense, then the distinction between
music and noise becomes very diffuse, tentative, and rather arbitrary.
This reminds me of Raymond Roussel's themes and procedures that
involved imprisonment and liberation, exoticism, cryptograms and torture by languageall formally reflected in his working technique with
their inextricable play of double images, repetitions, and impediments, all
giving the impression of the pen running on by itself through the dreamy

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 211

usage and baroque play of mirrored form. Roussel's technique and the
process he developed lends itself well to the creation of unforeseen, automatic and spontaneously noise art which gives me the feeling of prolonging action into eternity through the ceaseless, fantastic constructions
of the work itself, transmitting an altered, exalted and orgasmic state of
mind which after the initial dazzling creates one predominant overall effect, that of creating doubt through mechanical discourse.
The image of enclosure is common with Roussel where a secret to
a secret is held back, systematically imposing a formless anxiety in the
reader through the labryrinthian extensions and doublings, disguises and
duplications of his texts, which make all speech and vision undergo a moment of annihilation. Roussel presents to us the model of noisy perfection of the eternally repetitive mechanical machine which functions independently of time and space, pulling the artist into a logic of the infinite.
Roussel's last book, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, is the last of
his conceptual noise machines, the machine which contains and repeats within its mechanism all those mental machines he had formerly
described and put into motion, making evident the machine which produced all of his machinesthe master machine. All of these machines
map out a noise space that is circular in nature and thus an abstract attempt at eliminating time. They reproduce the old myths of departure, of
loss and of return. They construct a crisscrossed mechanical map of the
two great mythic spaces so often explored by western imagination: space
that is rigid and forbidden, containing the quest, the return and the treasure (for example the geography of the Argonauts and the labyrinth)
and the other space of polymorphosis noise, the visible transformation
of instantly crossed frontiers and borders, of strange affiliations, of spells,
and of symbolic replacements (the space of the Minotaur).
With such a wildly visionary333 look at an art of noise, I wish to suggest what art's contribution could be to the enlargement of self-understanding334 in the context of our conspicuously excessive, connected and
collapsing society. My contention is that glitch awareness/appreciation
potentially removes us out of our quiet and glib indolence and points us
in the potent direction of expanding thunderous intensity.
I believe that a post-Pop noise art is critical to us now335 because its
glitch counter-mannerist excess can problematize the popular simulacra
and make livelier the underground privateness of the human condition

212 Joseph Nechvatal

while remaining immersed inside the social network that engulfs and
(supposedly) controls us. This glitch consideration offers us a personal
critical distance (by skip, by stutter, by gap), and thus another perspective on (and from) the given social simulacra.
Such a destructive-creative thought might provide us with two essential aspects relevant to our lives. First, it can provide a private context
in which to suitably understand our current situation.336 Secondly (but
more importantly), it may then undermine this understanding by overwhelming our immersion in the customary along with our own prudent pose as judge.
For me, then, a bacchanalian post-Pop glitch art is capable of functioning (paradoxically) by nurturing in us a sense of polysemic uniqueness
and of individuality brought about through a counter-mannerist destructive-creative style (ever more circuitous, excessive and dcadent)a
style that takes us from the state of the social to the state of the secret I,
by overloading ideological demonstration to a point where it becomes
non-representational. This destructive-creative thought makes judicious
use of the process of Deleuzian/Guattarian nomadic thinking (hearing/seeing).337
Accordingly, Deleuzian/Guattarian noise art would be composed of
variously formed segments, stratas, and lines of flight which involve territorializing as well as deterritorializing spacio/psychic activities.338 It is
this nomadic, non-representational, counter-mannerist vacuole glitch
that can suggest breaks from the fascination and complicity with Pop art
and the mass media mode of communication (hung up on the felt need
to be liked).
As I have shown, the art of noise needs not be likeablenor be polite. It is certainly not info-tainment. It is, rather, as Paul Hegarty points
out, infliction.339 For me it is, more precisely, an infliction of a pleasant frustration that can lead to creative visualization.
Subsequently, my idea of noise art can also be long-suffering drle
merde (funny shit).340 Undeniably, such a comic art backflip ties into the
counter-mannerist pataphysical anti-concepts developed by Alfred Jarry
(1873-1907) and The Collge de Pataphysique founded on May 11th,
1948 by an anarchic group of artists and writers interested in the philosophy of Pataphysics. These zealots devoted their time to perpetuating (and
often distorting) Jarry's philosophical pranks.

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 213

For Jarry, Pataphysics is the anti-scientific realm beyond metaphysics

that examines the laws that preside over exceptionsan attempt to elucidate an imaginary cosmos. Jarry specifically defined Pataphysics as the
science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.341
In 1959, Marcel Duchamp agreed to be a satrap in the Collge de
Pataphysique, and there have been numerous links established with
the Oulipo literary movement, specifically through the participation in
both groups by the poet Raymond Queneau (1903-1976). The fabulous
wordsmith, Jean Genet (1910-1986), has described himself as following in the Pataphysical tradition. Pataphysics makes a rare pop musical
appraearnce in 1969 in the Beatles' song Maxwell's Silver Hammer on
Abbey Road by mentioning a student who studied pataphysical science
in the home. But unlike pop culture as a whole, Pataphysics (like noise
culture) navigates inside popular topographies by disturbing their sense
of collective order.
Like the thinking of Jarry, art noise mostly arrives at an anti-social
examination without demonstrating any sustained systematic analysis. It
just interrupts. That is what makes it counter-mannerist. But what strikes
me as most exact to noise arts peculiar propositions in terms of Pataphysics is its deep reflection (one might even say brooding) on the theme
of ignobility, and this realization should shoddily shift something in your
appreciation of it. Notably, already evident in the art of noise is its display
of a harsh obsession with volume, a volume (both visual and audio) that
tests the limits of form and stretches the bounds of meaning by recasting
our experiences of encountering wildly disjunctive ideas into the sumptuously physicality of negation.
This reality-rejecting-ness delivers an airy irrational punch of nonsensical negation to art noise by tying together methods of insouciant informality with a visceral irony: at turns hip and flamboyant or abrasively
outrageous. Still, the audience is expected to work devotedly to appreciate its absurd conundrums, to supply mental transitions between the
diverse assortments of irrational elements that supply the art of noise its
Pataphysical hooks. One must fabricate a complicated forensic fairy-tale
out of this counter-mannerist mlange as it keeps slipping in and out of
idiosyncratic narration. And, alas, that recitation keeps turning back into

214 Joseph Nechvatal

one about stinking death, that strange, incurable and deeply irrational
affliction.
So yes, as noise art is about self-transcendence by means of rupture, I
read the art of noise as a meditation on humiliating death in all its undifferentiated fabulousness, by which I mean its essentially nasty comedy.
It is a counter-mannerist art about comical, difficult death, then. Pulling
down our pants and revealing our soiled undies while keeping everyone
laughing (or at least gurgling) till the deafening end.
With the art of noise, there is then an awareness of impertinent splendor in the tranquility of decomposition, which makes it all seem faintly
heroic in face of deaths inexorability. Thus this irrational art implies an
antiphilosophers knowledge of dumb deaths putrid ignobilitybut the
art of noise will not give in to that parody either. And this is what gives
the work its extraordinary sense of dignity, a dignity that asserts lifes primacy over death because death is beyond images, beyond sounds and
beyond words.
Accordingly, art noises hypothesis is actually fine absurdist Ubu art.
Ubu is first encountered in Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, a play that created a
famous scandal when it was first performed at the Theater de l'Oeuvre in
Paris in 1896. It is an important precursor of Dada. Through a language of
shocking lad hilarity, Ubu Roi tells the farcical story of Pre Ubu, an officer of the King of Poland, a grotesque figure who epitomizes the mediocrity and idiocy of middle-class officialdom. It was through writing Ubu
Roi that Jarry became the creator of the science of Pataphysics, his absurd
a-logic that defined the science of imaginary solutions as enshrined since
1948 in the Collge de Pataphysique. But an Ubu art does not merely
help us pass the time away, it enlivens time if we surrender to its fearful
difficultyas noise art may provide the chance to do the counter-silent
thing, to look at and hear what we fear, so that such an effort will help release us from fears irrational grip. Then we might pataphysically expand
into the counter experiences of noise and see beneath the stucco surface
of Maya342 and so enjoy absurd life all the more. So that the ignobility of
death can be ignored and nonsensical dignity restoredfor the fleeting
moment, at least.
Deleuze and Guattari's term for such counter-experiences to mannerism343 is becoming-animal. For them to become animal is to participate in
movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 215

threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit
of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs.344
Building upon their suppositions, I speculate that glitch excess can
put forth an aesthetic lan of superabundance that re-conceptualizes art
in terms of noise connectivity so as to unbridle us (some). This is how I
interpret the counter-experience of feeling intricated in a becoming-animal noise panorama by fashioning a map of intensities.345 However, this
glitch character of de-simulated openness, which an inception of the art
of noise assumes, demands that we seek a liberation from custom, doctrine and influence, and that we grasp again the autonomy and priority of
art as a special type of excessive ideological activity.346
According to Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomatic activity is boundless
in its branching. Thus noise art reflections may cross wide chasms of psycho/optic space on one surface as the most disparate elements and details may be linked. Moreover, a psychic rhizome is continually dynamic
and is ceaselessly actualized by the arousal its dynamism produces and
thus it is never in accord with some pre-established strategy or imposed
configuration. The psychic rhizome is regularly swarming itself into being
as micro and macro factors attract. One cannot declare in advance what
its limiting confines are or where it will or will not operate nor what may
become connected and tangled up in the rhizome's multiple dimensions
because the connections do not inevitably plait common types together.
Rather, a psychic rhizome's multiple dimensions instigate cross-overs
between both the highest synthetic level and the slightest, most minute
discrete distinctions. An artistic noise rhizome would be a complication
of perceptual vicissitudes so intertwined that it gives birth to different
scopes of macro-perception.
Such a noisy probing at the outer limits of recognizable representation and the excited all-over fervor of such a syncretistic probe isn't a failing of communications within noise art terms then. It is its subject. Such
a bountiful realization is insinuated through overloaded/excessive stimulus inasmuch as noise may represent every integrated meaning conceivable (as white noise) for, as I demonstrated, in the art of noise the focal/
audio point is generally uncircumscripted. The expansive elements within noise art are not, by definition, passively received and accepted then.

216 Joseph Nechvatal

By nature of its challenging, conflicting, excessive presentation, visual

noise art is also psychically withheld as it is inexorably displayed all at
once to the limited nature of our human perceptive competence. Thus a
successful art of noise takes us away from the habitual focus of the picturesque and potentially liberates us inwardly from the infringements stemming from the deluge of mass-media imagesand so stimulates us to assess anew the caliber of any such infringement. Hence it is in the amity
felt with the glitch that we may feel a sensuous liberation from ideological
monotony and cultural prudery.
Such an art of noise may then stand in defiance against the limits of
ordinary perception and representation. Thus it is (or can be) about the
opposition between the daily work-day and the transgressive/ecstatic
moment. In a sense, it attempts to set up a long-standing form of ecstatic
offence where one can go back and forth at will via the glitch.347
Underlying this aim is a miasmatic idea which questions linear and
hierarchical structures and seeks to replace them with atmospheric loose
structures, keyed to a penetrable, reciprocal flow of events. This realization came to me when reading Gilles Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. In it, Deleuze pointed me towards a recognition of my desires'
productiveness, as he indicated how desires propel us to move towards
greater or lesser states of magnificence depending on whether the thing
encountered enters into composition with us, or on the contrary tends to
decompose us.348
So as noise art both decomposes us and stirs re-composures in us,
this means a re-positioning of identity within an atmospheric and artistic
ontological model of relations, diversities, shocks, connections, heterogeneities, breaks and unexpected links. This means that the intellectual
situation of Deleuzian inspired noise art is one of magnanimous self-connectivity through confrontation.
As such, noise art promotes as if imaginable desires for extrasensory349 distributed disembodiment350 involving the enthused transmigrational expansion of boundaries and a yearning to penetrate and merge
characteristic of spirituality (ignudo spirto). Hence the role of noise art
remains the necessary prosthetic task of artificially facilitating such an
unrestricted stateand so remains associated with the most fleeting
elaborations of artistic consciousness. This erudite desire to exist in an
anti-mechanistic state of expansion is temporarily realized (albeit sym-

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 217

bolically) in engaging noise art. As such, noise art posits itself as a metasymbol of and for expanded human potential linked to tolerance.351
This goal of an expanded human capability through art is important
to me, as I feel that the substantial ability to self-modify (self-re-program)
ourselves is the point of art. In this inference, aesthetic immersion into
noise adheres to and fosters Kendall Walton's theory of make-believe in
which Walton sees art as a generator of fictional truths352 which through
art's inventiveness invites ontological self-modification via participation
in the creative process. Moreover, Walton's theory of fictional truths reflects Friedrich Nietzsche's important assertion that logical fictions,
which he saw as comparisons of reality with a purely imagined world of
the absolute, are indispensable to humanity.353 The key value of immersive noises fictional truths in terms of formulating an original theory of
noise art, however, lies in underscoring the fiction behind the assumed
real perspective354 when seen as empirically true and universally valid
instead of as conventional and contingent355 idiosyncratic compliances.
Given that noise disturbs order, it is reasonable to interject here that
the notions and experiences of aesthetically quickened disembodiment
may (via noise art) claim the distinction of serving as the (or a) lucent
interface between David Bohm's aforementioned implicate order and explicate order. But aesthetic noise consciousness above all renders a lightness of being which is supported by a metaphorical consciousness of passage
principled on the electron transport conditions of the nerve cells. Hence
aesthetic glitch sensibility is rooted in linked neurological self-programmable operations where the conceptual exchange between the disembodied/ecstatic and the bound/submissive (conceived of as teeming),
constructs the neural-noise-metaphysics356 of immersion into noiseas
well as, what Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) would consider to be, its
combinational delight.357
As I have outlined earlier, fixed-point perspective generally configured pictorial art in the West since the Renaissance. Immersion into
noise's fundamentally spherical, all-over perspective of dynamic thresholds cast a fraction of art on its course since the Fin-de-Sicle. This marginal tendency has now amply flowered in noise art as art practice began shifting us away from illusionistic trompe l'oeil. Immersive noise-arts
360 cognition enlivens receptive and organizing attributes of peripheral
awareness and, as such, intensifies thalamic input to the cortex by making

218 Joseph Nechvatal

the active thalamic neurons in that region fire more rapidly than usual.
Moreover, with this immersive noise vision there is a shift to a more conscious peripheral mode of perception which entails a de-automatization
of the perceptual process (whereby more emphasis is placed on what is
on the edges of sight, sound and consciousness) thus presumably adjusting us to an expanded and fuller consciousness. This emphasis on the peripheral utilizes the Deleuzian broad scan, Deleuze's non-linear dynamic
conceptual displacement of a view along any axis or direction in favor of
a sweeping processes in space/time.358 Hence, immersive noise vision
may acquire an increasingly computational-like encompassing range useful in expanding the customary perception so as to increase situational
awareness. For, as Luigi Russolo said in his seminal text The Art of Noises,
Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise.
Noise consciousness is essentially a cognitive challenge to our habitual sensibility, thena challenge to find the fullest possible cognitive
resources to cope with the expanded context of the art's excess, and a
proposal that implies that those cognitive-visual resources are available,
if as yet undefined. Hence aesthetic immersion into noise is consistent
with Georges Bataille's intellectual comprehension of dithyrambian excess (itself suggestive of the human cortex with its vast array of micro intra-cortical nerve connections) as a mercurial movement that surpasses
entrenched limits. The intensity of indeterminate dithyrambian excess as
experienced in dynamic noise art is key to this cognition.
By refusing the dichotomized, utilitarian, manageable codes of representation with free non-logocentric associational operations, noise art
triggers a multitudinous array of synaptic charges and thickens perception to the extent that it prevents the achievement of a prior determinate
aesthetic. This threshold component of the immersive noise aesthetic
adds enough uncertainty to the usual signals in the internal circuitry of
the human biocomputer so as to make new configurations of the self
probable (by organizing the internal energies of the self more broadly via
disembodiment). The subsequent and ultimate aesthetic benefit of noise art,
then, is in attaining a prospective realization of our perceptual circuitry as a
self-re-programmable operation.
This self-re-programmable ontological operation occurs specifically
in a constructed space between the noise art and the subject, similar to
how Wolfgang Iser locates the encounter with a written text by its reader

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 219

in a third realm of indeterminate interaction which he calls the work: a

transaction situated somewhere between the text and the reader.359
However, unlike a written text, the self-re-programmable ontological
adjustments and modifications one makes during the process of coming to understand noise as art never ceases and sensorial closure is never
evoked.360 This kind of liberational ecstasy potentially found within aesthetic noise is exceptionally important, for as Brian Massumi tells us, if
there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the
universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death.361
Aesthetic immersion into noise's indeterminate vibratory excess,
then, facilitates our desire to transcend the boundaries of our customary
human cognition so as to feel that state of unconditionally Hegel called
the absolute (our absolute sense as an unalloyed being akin to non-being) by way of a neuro-metaphysics conveyed through noise art's ambient milieu. This vibratory extrasensory dispersion, which presupposes a
loss of fixed reference points, implies a diaphanous neural-metaphysics
constructed around the disembodied psyche's enhanced identity as nonsite consistent with Jean-Franois Lyotard's (1924-1998) assertion that
metaphysical concepts have been realized in the contemporary world.362
By the noisy psyche taking up an anti-position of circuitous non-site, I ascertain that the immersive noise sensibility is essentially non-logocentric,
ecstatic, variational, non-hierarchical, and excessive. It is particularly excessive in that immersion into noise deframes and overwhelms the envelope
of hardened fixed-point (i.e., window) perception with aesthetic input
and, hence, is an excess of and for the prosaic gaze as it offers an immersive scope beyond our perceptual capabilities. Indeed, instead of nicely
proceeding along towards an expedient comprehension and appraisal,
immersive art noise actually opens up an oppositional anti-mechanistic
space of self adumbration for the self-re-programming, ontologicallyminded by revealing the loose limits of our solipsistic (and hedonistic)
inner circuitry. The noisy excess necessary for triggering such an immersive keenness offers to the self-re-programming immersant a scope of
sensibility beyond what Jacques Derrida identified as typical of the consolidated, passive, spectator/consumer.363 Indeed, in our heavily materially oriented, technologically accelerated, information saturated culture,
where experience is increasingly prescribed, facile, and fast, thoughtful
langor in noise satisfies an essential need consistent with the interpretative

220 Joseph Nechvatal

theories of both hermeneutics and the phenomenology of perception. In

this respect, noise fulfils the negative dialectical ideal of art as affirmed by
Theodor Adorno when he upheld the view that the radical potential of
art lies in formal innovations which refuse to allow its passive consumption, demanding instead an active-critical intellectual involvement (inherent in the noise aesthetic) in opposition to unthinking assimilation.
It is for this reason that noise art possesses a negative dialectical felicity
of its own. For as Luigi Russolo says in his seminal text, The Art of Noises,
to attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation
and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations.
The negative dialectical confrontation with non-knowing typical of
noise is an important component of noise-art-consciousness' intellectual
satisfaction, as the entire benefit of addressing the espoused principle inherent in noise art exists in attempting to adhere to an exciting transmissible hyper-state that exceeds, ruptures, transcends, and overwhelms our
former inner territory.364
Noise culture (wired with an excess that consequently disallows itself to be readily grasped) suggests a sense of immense inner incompleteness commensurable with a post-Hegelian consciousness, as Hegel maintained that no idea has a fixed meaning and that no form of understanding
has an unchanging validity. Indeed, this post-Hegelian consciousness of
excess is how immersion into noise challenges distinctive ontological beliefs about the limits of the self. In immersion into noise, self-re-programmable thought takes over the space displayed around the constructed self
as the meta-programming ego expands to fill (by transference) the vastness of noise. So conceived, the ontological self ceases to think of itself
as a substance or thing and, by contrast, thinks of itself as a continuously
changing process of vibrational events.
This would indicate that, when challenged with art noise, our biocircuitrycircuitry usually occupied with perceptual demands of a different (more standard) kindmust surpass our prior limitations (and
lazy assumptions) as programmed by the petite bourgeois world-view.
This self-programming variance, however, requires (and is) what Sren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855) calls passion. Indeed, it is in this manner that
I wish to use the term hyper-cognitive with respect to noise art, a term
that has been extended out from Dick Higgins's term post-cognitive which

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 221

he put forward to describe the field of post-1958 artistic production

centered around developments in Intermedia365 and Happenings that
conceptually fused together aspects of traditional media so as to promote non-linear and multi-linear thinking.366 Higgins adapted the term
from the Fluxus related artist/non-artist/philosopher/noise-musician
Henry Flynt's use of cognitive, a term that addresses the issue of becoming through connectionist activity which Flynt approached from a postLogical-Positivist position he called beliefless empiricism.367 Flynt's 1961
text Concept Art (first published in book form by La Monte Young and
Jackson Mac Low in the 1963 publication, An Anthology of Chance Operations) outlined the genre that later became known as Conceptual Art and
had a strong impact on me. According to Flynt, Conceptual Art is an art
of which the material is concepts, whereas Higgins asserted that the process of cognition, after 1958, was no longer a major subject for artistic
exploration.368
I find that, with the necessity of understanding noise culture, cognition (now viral-cognition) is again a dominant theme for art. Indeed, I
believe I have shown here that an allusive sense of embedded viral-cognition of productive paradox is indeed the inner logic (and one might also
say the poetics) of the art of noise.369 This finding collaborates what Siegfried Zielinski thinks is the potentiality of virtuality as an aesthetic enterprise in that Zielinski maintains that art's potential in terms of virtuality
lies in the tension between the virtual and the impossible.370
Viral noise culture expands the measure of cognitive-perception
through well-being's enthusiastic contact with impossible (and disturbing) excess and, thus, is a superabundance of and for the imagination.
Insofar as ontological distinctions within noise culture clatter, it makes
extensive demands on our previous facilities of critical reflection by addressing our inarticulate connections between the intuitive and the conscious realm that cannot easily be expressed in words but of which we
can be occasionally appreciative.
Cultural noise, then, is identifiable (and interesting) when it sounds
or appears as moments of non-narrative narativewhere something
runs counter to the narative imperative of the human psyche. Thus, fully
understanding the non-narrative narative of noise culture is only possible
through addressing the question of consciousness called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term denoting the mental

222 Joseph Nechvatal

state in which two or more incompatible or contradictory ideas are held

to be equally sustainable. A person who is successful at keeping contradictory ideas in dialectical suspension is said to have a high degree of negative capability. This is a particularly important concept for noise culture
for, as Deleuze asserts, there is a double structure to every event.371 Also,
we must recollect once more Massumi's Deleuzian interpretation of the
virtual as a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect.372
So yes, Noise Culture as a perturbing designate of non-narrative narative may appear oxymoronic and hence cognitively dissonant. Subsequently, such a vacuole theory of paradox would be aligned with Gene
Youngblood's theory of synaesthetic cinema, an alloy, superimpositional
cinema373 which creates an awareness of the process of one's own perception,374 by being structured by the language of paradox.375
From a sociological point of view,376 noise culture opposes (through
enhancing our awareness of the plurality of the possible) existential postmodernistic oblivionthe dulled, blas, over-stimulated gaze of the
alienated and ironic. It does so in that the practice of noise-culture-mindfulness requires continual discernment with the mind in an imaginative
and receptive, rather than passive, state. Hence, noise culture may provide
a fundamental antithesis to the authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the technical world. Indeed, aesthetic immersion into noise
stands in opposition to mental (and cultural) sleep in that its methodology is to jolt, exceed and hence attempt to expand with appreciative input.
Correspondingly, ontological consciousness expands into an enlarged
synthetic field of vibration: the connective field of inter-consciousness. In
this field-connective-condition, notions of a singular, discrete, logocentric consciousness are incoherent.
In this respect, Charles Baudelaire's ode Paradis Artificiel (Artificial Paradise) is increasingly outstanding for what it has to say about
the promise of noise culture. In it, Baudelaire cites imagination as that
force that serves noise culture's primary purpose, which is to enlarge consciousness so that it may approach the connective field of inter-consciousness.
Georges Bataille confirms this assertion in his essay Baudelaire, particularly by linking Baudelaire's imagination with notions of the impossible.
As noise culture places us in the position of indeterminate unknowing,
consciousness ceases to be definitive and becomes inter-relational, and

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 223

so provides questions that disturb and disable previous emphasis on the

false objectivisms accorded to cultural production.
This extremely pliable state of cognition rests on the basis of relaxed
(but extended) attentiveness. Indeed, it is within this elastic attentiveness
(constituted between artist and audience) that noise culture takes place.
In this respect, Giovanni Careri's description of Bernini's bel composto as
a vehicle of an experience that goes beyond all images377 pertains to the
central idea of noise culture. By way of dishabituation and disorientation
through merging with the mise en scne of noise, a partial obliteration of
self-consciousness may occur which returns self-representational mimesis to the infinity of noise in the raw sense. In that sense, immersion into
noise is a tender via negativa, a delicate overrunning and self-annihilation
in the interests of further growth and expansion.
That said, I contend that what is also important about noise culture
is that which is revealed as being in synthetic accordance with the basic
extravagant and excessive aspirations of humanity, in accordance with the
effective deployment of the earth's sustainable resources. Such a notion
of responsible excess is important to the extent that it helps us push deeper into our stored ontological metaprograms, so as to enhance their (our)
performance in the social and ecological field. As such, noise culture is an
exercise in conscious responsibility coupled with liberty produced in the
reflective province which Baudelaire calls art.
Thus, my idea of noise art adheres to Antonin Artaud's proposal in
Le Thtre et Son Double (The Theater and its Double) that art (in his case
drama) must be a means of influencing the human organism and directly altering consciousness by engaging the audience ritualistically. Even
though in his essay, The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation, Jacques Derrida describes how Artaud's theory may be seen
as impossible in terms of the established structure of Western thought,378
this is precisely why noise cultural theory (with its, as previously explained, vital connections to the unbearable) can be placed in parallel position to Artaud's hypothesis. This is so in that, when inside noise art, one
experiences a prelude to the work's fullness (its impossible commotion
usually diverts the immediacy of the art), thus stimulating a viral desire
that bio-chemically affects the state of mind.
In noise culture, we are essentially challenged to find new expanded
boundaries.379 For example, John Cage does not depart from music when

224 Joseph Nechvatal

he begins with noise. More accurately, he creates a music that belongs to

the noises of the environment and takes them into consideration. As in
Artaud's theory of cruelty, this challenge to find new expanded boundaries through noise is accompanied by a vibrating love-hate where we may
sense an intimateif disagreeablerelationship to the work. Through the
immoderate excess of perceptual possibilities in an aesthetic immersion
into noise (which involves a more active and continuously searching situation) one enters (and thus hopefully understands through experience)
hyper-noise, a state which circumvents the current fragmentary view of
the self in the world that has been built into the structures underpinning
traditional culture.
I believe that my noise art examples have amply testified to the potential for noise cultureand, by concentrating on myself in relationship
to noise art, I have articulated intense (but short-lived) art noise experiences that will not let me reach a final organization. Subsequently, noise
forms a semi-living viral380 culture where the form and the meaning construct a precise union in their agitational existence. This precise union
suggests a taste for Mediterranean paganisms stoic view of life where
the arbitrary cruelties and difficulties of being are met without flinching.
Here, forms of extended vitality are cherished and diligent forms of stasis
shunned, including dreary scholarship and most aspects of routine public lifeso as we may respond to all forms of art more vividly and completely, not merely the thwarted or offensive. So noise sophistication is
about developing our quality of disinhibuted mind as manifested in full
sensuous reactions.
The primal wantonness suggested in edgy art noise sophistication
epitomizes what is exhilarating about culture. It rips open our delirious
heart of darkness when noise (typically thought of as a bad quality) and
art (typically thought of as a good quality) mingle. Hence hostility and
anxiety mix with what lushly attracts us. And this is the magic formula for
excitement: obstacle mixed with attraction equals excitement.
As we have seen, the scintillating genesis of noise culture starts in the
semi-artificiality of the adorned prehistoric cave and points towards digital interconnection and viral rupture. But the lax digital (interconnected)
signal fragment, and the speed and ease in which it moves of late, has now
lulled our emotions and is beginning to fail to stimulate critical thought,
transformation or perturbation. What I deduce from this history is that

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 225

noise culture is brimming with hypotheticals, when adversary. The noise

culture theory put forth here then clarifies, deepens, confirms and exalts a desire for elite, virtuoso, and indeterminate art noise that, as I have
shown, has marginally existed in human culture throughout time.
This stoic theory of viral-noise culture is one of vibrational estrangement: breaks and bindings that admit unknowingness and the non-self.
Its high seriousness insists on difficulty and is a reinvigoration of vangaurdism. As such, it is qualitatively and quantitatively distinct. Its politics are those of listening hard and seeing widely. Its esprit de corps is
diaphanous being within a kind of experiential span and ocular extravagance through which abstract inter-relationals are felt to be a function of
one another. For when seeing our well-being connected to states of exuberant, non-graspable noise, we temporarily dissolve former boundary
ontological dichotomies into an unoccupied topos of being that implicates our internal self-programmer in a desire for unrealizable summational resolution.381
Noise art thus serves art's classical function of modelling in microscopic proportions the overwhelming phenomenon which Hegel and
Nietzsche called the absolute (an imagined orb beyond immediate sense
perception). As such it addresses, by extrapolation, self, social, and political limitations when we adapt and incorporate aesthetic noise (with its
insinuation of natural infinity and its inexorable pull towards the liberation of confines) into our everyday view of the world.
In the space of linear perspective (with its historically invented fixed
placement of the vanishing point on the horizon), the viewer imagined
that she or he was looking at the complex world as if through a windowas a spectator. This implied a separating wall with a small rectangular opening in it between the subject's perceptions and the visible
world as dictated by pre-established criteria. This pre-established window has become the post-industrial human's mental tendency. Behind
this pre-established window, human sensitivity has become increasingly
bored, neutral, distant, detached, separated and narrowed. With this tendency, restrictions on the excess of complexity are already decided unconsciously in advance, regardless of the actual character of our perceptual input. As a result, there has been a de-emphasis on the peripheral,
and the ambient as vision has become restrained by the habits of linear
perspective; pre-established habits now encoded in the methods and ex-

226 Joseph Nechvatal

pectations of photography, video382 and film.383 Thus vision has increasingly taken on the attributes of a focused, singular, narrow vision which is
staring straight ahead.
In contrast, noise culture proposes a style of consciousness marked
by an emphasis on din and by a re-entry into the rich fringes of sensation.
Keep in mind that John Cages music starts from the simple fact that we
are always already surrounded by noise. What is vital to our consciousness is how we connect to those noises. Cage suggests a lucid scheme:
if we try to disregard them, they agitate us; but if we listen to them and
recognize them, they may become enthrallingly artistic.
The viral noise theory of consciousness that I have been sketching out
here is not a precise theory of consciousness in that it does not explain
what consciousness is, nor does it explain exactly how it arises in the first
place. Such problems of defining the essential constitution of consciousness have been widely discussed elsewhere within the realm, principally,
of philosophy, thus far without arriving at a consolidated consensus. But
if we accept the more modest definition of a theory of consciousness as
a theory of self-awareness of how our inner life and thoughts function
(and may function fully), I take it that what I propose concerning noise
consciousness might be judiciously placed within the arena of contending theories of how consciousness functions (and/or may function)in
this case, through ruptured induced expansion.
Lateral (horizontal) thinking, a term introduced by Edward de Bono,
refers to the capacity to shift the context of thought away from conventional logical (vertical) progressions to unaccustomed lateral ones,
thereby shifting thought away from fixed, predefined orders and towards
creative ambiguity. According to Albert Rothenberg, creation involves
intense motivation, transcendence of time and space, and the unearthing of unconscious material,384 and lateral thinking is beneficial for shifting consciousness out of habitual formulations and ways of seeing.385 In
lieu of my ideas of intense noise culture, creative immersive noise thinking might now be conceptualized not as a vertical or even lateral thought
process, but as diaphanous and spherical. Such a boisterous and diaphanous formulation defines noise culture's general pull away from established thought and is what makes it, in Paul Hegartys words, a form of
anti-fascist 386 resistance.387

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 227

Noise art, with its implied access to the ineffable, suggests gentle chaos, which is of course the basis of our most advanced recent revolution
in scientific understanding: chaos theory. Still, the art of noise, for the
connoisseur, is generally a ribald art of the outside(r) where noise culture
feeds into a cognitive process that involves a deep involvement in (and
appreciation of) the contradictory nature of opposites and antitheses
(now blended into living abstractions). Such creative thought is useful
in configuring a viral-oriented cultural vision of the technological world
sensitive to what John Cage made clear: that all the music we hearand
I add much of the art we seeis constantly and inevitably pervaded by
noise, by uninvited vibrations. In this operationally defined model of
the creative intellect, artistic and divergent thinking wins the capacity
through situating itself within an immersion into noiseto generate and
appreciate multiple alternatives by deviating away from overly hushed
modes of perception-cognition. Such sensitivity is enhanced by experiencingand participating innoise culture.
This sensitivity, if I may say so, is required today because we tend to
live numb, embedded, as we are, in our spectral age of easy image/sound
production and consumption, both gluttonous and frictionless.388 Noise
culture offers a stimulus forand way ofthinking and feeling against
easy answers that never interrogates, for noise art emphasizes disorientation for the inner life. Thus, the art of noise may act as punctum in the
slick palimpsest simulation in which we live, disrupting all plodding, dehumanized, routined conceits.
Dare I say it: the art of noise extends the possibility of a transforming
rupture (something renewed and renewing) by addressing the frissure
between intellect and the sensible. The frissure that noise art offers culture is that of a different view of the sensible, one that no longer regards
the sensible as only an image (signal) cast by a remote and detached intelligibility. In noise art sophistication, signal (foreground) and noise
(ground) are impenetrably interlocked and inter-embedded. And this
interpenetration reveals the truth of reversibility in our culture, laced, as
it is, with the counter-force of incoherence. Yet its inclination surpasses
simple nihilism (as demonstrated in the Apse of Lascaux) by a collected
inwardness that says a delicate yes to incoherent sense and impulseand
so inverts aesthetics, bending it towards rapturous plentitude.

228 Joseph Nechvatal

This reciprocity of rupture and rapture is of utmost consequence. The

rupture of noise is the embedded, immersive and immanent space from
which the signal comes and to where it goes. Noise in art deconstructs
signalness/thingness by functioning as a self-withholding ground for signal: something raw beneath and beyond conceptual language.389
But noise has no inherent value. It can be awful for you, or grand.
It can be grand when it reminds us of the marvellous: that pre-eminent
primal energy that surrounds and forms us, both beneath and beyond
usand when it demetaphors our techno-mechanical society.390 But
mostly, it is gradational and, as such, a conceptual tool for the judicious
revolutionary: those that coordinate reason and irrationality, harmony
and dissidence, lucidity and obtuseness in the interests of open-minded
transformation.
sO
tOday
fully emplOy randOm pOsitiOns
chOOse the kingdOm Of nOise afflictiOns
emplOy bOdily recOnfiguratiOns
embrace randOm afflictiOn frictiOns
endure all frictiOn OppOsitiOns
masquerade yOurselves in visiOns
tOy with cOnstant afflictiOn respOnses
prOccess randOm enOrmOus assumptiOns
emplOy tandOm cOntact cOnfiguratiOns
endure nOisy quest attentiOns
cOnstantly

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture 229

Notes
Introduction
1.

Torben Sangild points out in his essay The Aesthetics of Noise that, etymologically,
the term "noise" in different Western languages (stj, bruit, Gerusch, larm etc.)
refers to states of aggression, alarm and tension, and to powerful sound phenomena in
nature such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. It is worth noting in particular that
the word "noise" comes from Greek nausea, referring not only to the roaring sea, but
also to seasickness, and that the German Gerusch is derived from rauschen (the sough
of the wind), related to Rausch (ecstasy, intoxication). http://www.ubu.com/papers/
noise.html [accessed 1/15/2008]

2.

See Luigi Russolos seminal text The Art of Noises (1913) (Hillsdale: Pendragon, 2005).

3.

Ideally, communication must be separated from noise. Noise is what is not

communicated; it is just there as a kind of chaos, as the empirical third element of the
message, the accidental part, the part of difference that is excluded.

4.

Here I will focus on cultural virtues that cut against the grain and provide the grain.

5.

Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies, in Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New

York: Columbia, 1995) 178.

6.

Signal-to-noise ratio (often abbreviated SNR or S/N) is an electrical engineering

measurement, also used in other fields (such as scientific measurements, biological
cell signaling), is defined as the ratio of a signal power to the noise power corrupting
the signal. In less technical terms, signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired
signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The higher the ratio, the
less obtrusive the background noise is. In image processing, the SNR of an image is
usually defined as the ratio of the mean pixel value to the standard deviation of the
pixel values.

7.

In an interview Deleuze explains that the key thing may be to create vacuoles of
noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control. Gilles Deleuze,
Control and Becoming, trans. Martin Joughin, Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995) 175.

8.

Normal noise, as opposed to art noise, doesnt mean anything and isnt about
anything; it just is annoyingly so.

9.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1976).

10. After all, each of us must make decisions about screening the wanted from the
unwanted and distinguishing the essential from the random.

11. David Chalmers, "Facing up to the Problems of Consciousness," Journal of

Consciousness Studies: Controversies in Science and the Humanities 2.3 (1995):
200-19; 208-10.
12. Noise art presents us with possible saturating border experiences in that noise is a
modality of modern communication systems that is by definition non-signifying and
deals with signals, and not signs.
13. Maria L. Assad, Reading with Michel Serres (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999) 18.
14. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/ViralSymphony
15. Hear in electronica music the unruly fuzziness of the fragile gestures of Pole, Boards of
Canada, Oval, Christian Fennesz and/or Microstoria (Markus Popp of Oval and Jan
Werner of Mouse on Mars) for example.
16. Impure and irregular sounds that are not tones.
17. The crux of the matter is in differentiating the difference between
stimulation and wonder.
18. Chalmers, 200.
19. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984) 21.
20. Thomas Metzinger, ed. Conscious Experience (Paderborn: Schningh, 1995) 30.
21. As I mention phenomenology here in passing, I shall briefly relate what it is.
Fundamentally, phenomenology is a philosophy of experience but the term
phenomenology is often used in a general sense to refer to "subjective" experiences
of various types; thus it becomes relevant to an investigation of immersive artistic
states, insofar as it is a descriptive science that covers the chief features of experience
taken as a whole. It is, in this sense, the study of all possible appearances in human
experience during which considerations of so-called objective reality and of purely
subjective response are temporarily left out of account. In the philosophical sense,
phenomenology begins to redress the alienation between objectivity and subjectivity
as initiated by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason where Kant proposed that humans
do not see the world objectively but rather through a number of ideal and subjective
theory-laden categories. Philosophical systems and aesthetic theories receive their
standing as truthful and useful abstractions through the human experience of the
phenomenological relationship to the world. More narrowly, phenomenology is a
school of philosophy whose principal purpose is to study the phenomena of human
experience while attempting to suspend all consideration of objective reality or
subjective association. Historically, phenomenology is the philosophical movement
initiated by the German philosopher (and teacher to Aaron Gurvitch) Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938) in circa 1905 and his systematic study of consciousness from
a first-person standpoint. Husserl's crucial contribution to philosophy was his
methodical disclosure of how meaning emerges in our consciousness of the world
by our becoming conscious of our internal rapport with the world. What is relevant
to this discussion is Husserl's formation of a new field of experience, the field of
transcendental subjectivity which, according to Husserl, incorporates a method of
access to the transcendental-phenomenological sphere in which Husserl claimed
his transcendental idealism advanced beyond common idealism, beyond common
realism, and beyond the very distinction between these two ideas. With the advent of
phenomenology, rigorous studies of the working of consciousness were undertaken,
most noticeably by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941).

232 Joseph Nechvatal

22. Primarily tone-research that led to the introduction of noise as a musical possibility.
23. In his article, ''Noise as Permanent Revolution'', Ben Watson points out that Ludwig
van Beethovens Grosse Fuge (1825) sounded like noise to his audience at the time.
Beethovens publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last
movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro, and they
subsequently published it separately. See ''Noise as Permanent Revolution: or, Why
Culture is a Sow Which Devours its Own Farrow'' in Anthony Iles and Mattin Iles,
eds. Noise & Capitalism (Donostia-San Sebastin: Arteleku Audiolab (Kritika series),
2009) 109-10.
24. See the list of noise musicians I have been helping to maintain at http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/List_of_noise_musicians
25. Where all can be noise, as well as noise itself being the message.
26. I do not agree with Ray Brassier in his essay, Genre is Obsolete, when he claims that
Noise has become the expedient moniker for a motley array of sonic practice
academic, artistic, counterculturalwith little in common besides their perceived
recalcitrance with respect to the conventions governing classical and popular musics.
Multitudes, 28 (Spring 2007).
27. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984) 125.
28. Unsystematic activity at the molecular level suggests that the universe consists
primarily of processes of noise.
29. Nature's difference from human representational languages.
30. Aspects of uncertainty via excess equals increased information in this modeleven
as I recognize that the validity of a total anything came under severe attack with
post-modernism/post-structuralism in which the realization emerged that concepts
and images were always already laden with specific cultural values and implicated in
networks of prejudiced and invested power. Structuralist concepts of totality (based
primarily on the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913),
led post-structuralists to formulate such theories, where the impossibility of ever
adopting one transcendent meaning is maintained and this trend has carried over into
a general inclination.
31. In The Allure of Machinic Life, John Johnston points to this required totalizing by
recounting that while noise is often considered as coming externally into a non-noise
entity (that ideally performs a clean communicative function), noise can also be
viewed diagrammatized as an integral part of the same function of that system and so
accorded a position within the diagrammatic structure (instead of residing as unmixed
noise outside the communication performance). John Jonhston, The Allure of Machinic
Life. Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008) 136-37.
32. Fundamental psychology breaks consciousness into two essential categories: the state
of awareness and the subjective aspect of neurological activity (i.e., the impression of
self so produced, whatever its actual cause). There are sub-categories and variations
of these however. For example, some researchers define consciousness as the totality
of experience at any given instant, as opposed to mind, which is the sum of all past
moments of consciousness. Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von Schelling (1775-1854),
in agreement with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), maintained that the only thing
we can have direct knowledge of is our consciousness. However, consciousness, in
Aldous Huxley's (1894-1963) view (as influenced by William James's (1842-1910)

Notes233
study The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature), is mainly an
abridgement application that allows us to construct a coherent world view based on
selective oblivion. Aldous Huxley (1970) 22. Brian Massumi upheld Huxley's/James's
"subtractive" understanding of consciousness by seeing both will and consciousness
as "limitative, derived functions which reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally
expressed. Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique (Fall
1995) 83-109; 90.
33. Librarian, libertine, paleologist, archivist, radical thinker, author of erotic fiction;
Bataille took an active role in the mid-20th century Parisian avant-garde art and
literary scene by objecting to what he saw as the aestheticism and sentimentality of
the Surrealists. Consequently he became Andr Breton's (1896-1966) antagonist
from the intellectual ultra-left. After World War II, as founding editor of the journal
Critique and after authoring the transgressively philosophical books L'Exprience
Intrieure (Inner Experience) (1943), Le Coupable (Guilty) (1944), Sur Nietzsche (On
Nietzsche) (1945) and La Part Maudite (Accursed Share) (1947), Bataille's thought
emerged as a viable alternate to Jean-Paul Sartre's then reigning philosophical school
of Parisian Existentialism.
34. For Georges Bataille, examples of non-productive excess/expenditure can be found
(in varying degrees) in forms of luxury, lamentation, spectacle, art, poetry, erotic
activity and mystical endeavours; some of which place an emphasis on a loss that
must be as great as possible in order for that activity to take on its fullest meaning. For
the finest comprehensive overview of Bataille's thought in this regard, see his book
Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, intro. Colin MacCabe (London: Penguin, 2001),
along with Denis Hollier's book on Bataille's general postulates, Against Architecture
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
35. As is art. Piet Mondrian has made the valid point that fine art is not made for anybody
and is, at the same time, for everybody.
36. I should establish that the pantheoristic definition of noise in art which I am
upholding here, and which I find requires reiteration as artists move increasingly from
organic materials to the use of electronic and synthetic ones, is basically that supplied
by Susanne Langer in her book Feeling and Form where she determines that "art is the
creation of forms symbolic of human feeling, Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form
(NJ: Prentice Hall, 1953) 40.
37. Indeed Leon Cohen in his paper The History of Noise makes a case for
noise being involved in the solution of some key scientific, mathematical and
technological problems.
38. When I use the terminology expanded here I am referring to the rich meaning given to
it by Gene Youngblood in his book Expanded Cinema as that which transgresses and
exceeds the customary boundaries of our encounters. When Youngblood discusses
what he calls "expanded cinema" he refers it to an "expanded consciousness, Gene
Youngblood, (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, Inc. 1970) 41.
39. In science, and especially in physics and telecommunication, noise is fluctuations in
and the addition of external factors to the stream of target information (signal) being
received at a detector. White noise is always present.
40. Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 90.
41. In philosophic terms, subjectivity denotes how the truth of some privileged class
of statements depends on the mental state or reactions of the person making the

234 Joseph Nechvatal

statement. In epistemology, subjectivity is knowledge that is restricted to one's
own perceptions. This implies that the qualities experienced by the senses are not
something belonging to the physical beings, but are subject to interpretation. In
metaphysics, subjectivity includes the idea of solipsism. In aesthetics, subjectivism
is the view that statements about beauty (for example) are not reports of "objective"
qualities inherent in things but rather cognitive reports of internal feelings
and attitudes.
42. The concept of the sublime as such first emerged as the topic of an incomplete treatise
entitled "On the Sublime" that is believed to have been written in the mid-third
century AD by Cassius Longinus (third century AD). The author of the treatise
defines sublimity as: (1) excellence in language, (2) the expression of a great spirit,
and (3.) the power to provoke ecstasy. The immersive sublime, from the combined
point of view of Cassius Longinus's last two definitions, is apprehended and grasped as
a totality while at the same time experienced as exceeding our usual lucidity, therefore
provoking a sensation of awe (as recognized by Longinus). Centuries later, the term
was given special prominence by Edmund Burke (1729-1797) in his A Philosophical
Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), one of the most
popular 18th century treatises on aesthetics, which was translated into French in 1765
and into German in 1773. According to Burke, the sublime feeling (which contrasts
with that of the beautiful) is caused by a mixture of terror, admiration, apprehension,
and supra-attention. Burke maintained that the life of the spirit depends on this type
of awe in agreement with the immense scheme of the universe.
43. Romanticism (circa 1795-1840) is the cultural movement inspired by the
writings of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and the French philosopher Jean Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778), (among others) that focused on individual passions and
inner struggles and hence produced a new outlook and positive emphasis on the
emotional artistic imagination which became perceived as a gateway to transcendent
experiences of unity.
44. Torben Sangild points out in his essay "The Aesthetics of Noise" that in Gense, French
philosopher Michel Serres sketched out the idea that the ultimate being-in-itself is
noise. Behind the phenomenal world (the world we perceive)he proposesis an
infinite complexity, an incomprehensible multitude analogous to white noise. (http://
www.ubu.com/papers/noise.html accessed 1/15/2008). What Serres initially finds
intriguing about noise (rather than the message) is that it opens up a fertile avenue
of reflection. Instead of remaining pure noise, it becomes a means of transport. Also,
Serres addresses the theme of noise and communication to show that 'noise is part of
communication'; it cannot be eliminated from the system.
45. Jane. Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts: Moonraker
Press. 1913) 80.
46. In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a
random variable.
47. Harsh feedback sounds are tones that may have drone-like charactistcs or swarm
chaotically.
48. Bataille has remained a great fascination, though always slightly out of distance, given
his penchant for violence, as I am largely a pacifist, politically. I believe in the political
effectiveness of civil disobedience and passive rsistance. So he is always pithily
slipping from my mental fingers. But with his last book, The Tears of Eros, he provided
the inspiration for my art to attempt a visual sagacity that tests the limits of form and

Notes235
stretches the bounds of meaning by recasting our experiences of encountering wildly
disjunctive phantasmagoric data on the Internet into the sumptuous physicality of
negation. In that sense, he turned my work against the grain of its prior obsession
with fabricating a complicated forensic fairy-tale out of the internets grisly mlange, a
mlange which keeps slipping in and out of idiosyncratic narration as it keeps folding
and unfolding. When I went to Vzelay to visit his tomb, I searched the cemetery for
something like two hours, reading each headstone meticulously. But I was unable
to discover his grave! Merde! I had hoped to leave a little perverse poem and perhaps
defecate on it, but no luck. In that sense I am reminded that frustration often amplifies
desire and that this is essential to noise in art also.
49. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1985) 116-29.
50. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason
Aronson. 1975) 26.
51. Noise vs. music, non-intended sounds vs. intended sounds, life vs. art; the
oppositional pairs resonating along with the first opposition form an everextending thread.
52. Stephen Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst
(Sebastopol: O'Reilly and Associates, 1995).
53. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, Inc. 1970) 81.
54. Youngblood, 85.
55. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967) 9.
56. Thomas Metzinger, ed. Conscious Experience (Paderborn: Schningh, 1995) 14.
57. For a consideration of aural history see Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity
Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2004).
58. Metzinger, 15.
59. This concept owes something to Quentin Meillassouxs idea of hyper-Chaos that
was sketched out in After Finitude (64): a form of absolutization where nothing is
impossible or unthinkable. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the
Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008).
60. Given our heightening condition of connectivity, the heterogeneous, multiplicitous,
spreading and non-hierarchical nature of the epistemological rhizome come together
under the hyper (i.e. connected) effect of hyper-noise.
61. We know from Michel Foucault (1926-1984) how all ideals, all symbols in fact, can
be readily adapted to fit the dictates of social power. Surely incoherent views of the
whole have been destructive, as Boris Groys's book The Total Art of Stalinism: Avantgarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
substantially makes apparent. However, we also know that ideals are indispensable in
creating possibilities for change.
62. John Cage, Silence (London: Calder and Boyers, 1966) 14.
63. Excess noise radiation indicates that the universe is continuously expanding.

236 Joseph Nechvatal

64. Wikipedia defines as Noology or Nology deriving "from the Greek words
'mind' and 'logos'. Noology thus outlines a systematic study and organization
of everything dealing with knowing and knowledge, i.e.: cognitive neuroscience. It is
also used to describe the science of intellectual phenomena. It is the study of images
of thought, their emergence, their genealogy, and their creation." Available at https://
secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Noology.
65. The essential opposing philosophy to epistemological symbolization is that of rational
empiricism, but there are many gradations and intermediary positions staked out
from this binary opposition, including Immanuel Kant's synthetic a priori, which
allowed for an account of art, among other things. Kant held that space was in essence
mental and a priori to the perception of exterior objects.
66. Although Freud was not an intentional aesthetic theorist, he did influence aesthetic
theory through his comprehensive psychoanalytic framework and through his use of
art to elucidate the fact that the breadth of psychoanalysis extended beyond dreams
and neurosis into aesthetic achievements.
67. In that regard, it is interesting that Russolo, in his manifesto of March 11, 1911 writes:
It will not be through a series of lifelike noises but through the fantastic associations
of these various tones and rhythms that the new orchestra will obtain the most
complex and new sound emotions.
68. Extemporaneous conceptual/cultural intoxication involving powerful auto
improvizations.
69. Take, for example, NoiseFold, an interactive visual-music-noise performance
that draws equally from mathematics, science and the visual and sonic arts. This
networked performance duet explores the use of infrared and electromagnetic
sensors to manipulate and fold virtual 3-D objects that emit their own sounds. The
work integrates multiple techniques including real-time 3-D animation, mathematic
visualization, recombinant non-linear database, A-life simulation, image to sound
transcoding, complex data feedback structures and a variety of algorithmic processes
used to generate both sonic and visual skins. The result is a theater of emergence and
alchemical transformation existing within an intricate cybernetic system.
70. Given the impossibility of self-identical signal transmission.

Chapter 1
71. There is no opportunity to get rid of the deferring effects of noise, as it is a
fundamental principle of the physical world.
72. See Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2007) on how twentieth-century composers felt compelled to
create a bewildering variety of sounds that approached the purest beauty to the purest
noise (even as I do not accept that dichotomy).
73. In an interview John Cage refers to a workshop he conducted: "I had the lights turned
out and the windows open. I advised everybody to put on their overcoats and listen
for half an hour to the sounds that came in through the window, and then to add to
themin the spirit of the sounds that are already there, rather than in their individual
spirits. That is actually how I compose. I try to act in accord with the absence of my
music. (Gena and Brent, 176).

Notes237
74. Excess here, I wish to point out, may also be of the silentalmost unperceivable
type as well. For more on this approach see the essay Silence is Sexy: The Other
Extreme Music by Thomas Bey William Bailey in his book Micro Bionic: Radical
Electronic Music And Sound Art In The 21st Century.
75. Dadaism tries to expose the impotence of reason and technology while being aware of
its social power. In an effort to achieve this goal, an illogical sound-poetry (adapted by
Dadaism from Italian Futurism) was common at Zurichs Cabaret Voltaire (founded in
1916 by Hugo Ball Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck).
Simultaneous poems by Henri-Martin Barzun and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi were recited
there. For more on Dada as an ongoing active urge, see Andrei Codrescu's Posthuman
Dada Guide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
76. That in philosophy which is concerned with theories of knowledge.
77. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994) 7.
78. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 21.
79. Anti-art is the definition of a work of art that may be exhibited or delivered in a
conventional context but makes fun of serious art or challenges the nature of art. A
work such as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain of 1917 is a prime example of anti-art.
80. John Cage's 'anti-art' music still operates within an aesthetic abstraction similar to art
music, but the aesthetic isolation and abstraction are questioned. Thus, the borders
become permeable.
81. Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993) 60.
82. John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008) 26-8.
83. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1961) 42.
84. Paul Hegarty, Noise Music: A History (London: Continuum, 2007).
85. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2001).
86. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1985).
87. Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 90.
88. See Artstica de Valencia, After The Net, 5 29 June 2008, Valencia, Spain catalogue:
Observatori 2008 After The Future (80).
89. Often using scratched, warped, defective, damaged aspects of recording technology.
90. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy recognized in 1923 the unprecedented efforts of the Italian
Futurists to broaden our perception of sound using noise. In an article in Der Storm
#7, he outlined the fundamentals of his own experimentation: "I have suggested to
change the gramophone from a reproductive instrument to a productive one, so that
on a record without prior acoustic information, the acoustic information, the acoustic
phenomenon itself originates by engraving the necessary Ritchriftreihen (etched

238 Joseph Nechvatal

grooves)." He presents detailed descriptions for manipulating discs, creating "real
sound forms" to train people to be "true music receivers and creators. See UbuWeb
Papers, A Brief history of Anti-Records and Conceptual Records by Ron Rice.
91. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the
yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human
philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers. From
Tristan Tzaras "Dada Manifesto" [1918] and "Lecture on Dada" [1922], translated
from the French by Robert Motherwell in Dada Painters and Poets, Robert Motherwell
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 78-9. Leading Dadaists include Hans
(Jean) Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hannah Hch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz,
John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel
Duchamp, Louis Aragon, Johannes Baader, Hugo Ball, Andr Breton, Jean Crotti,
Paul Eluard, I.K. Bonset, Marcel Janco, Clment Pansaers, Tristan Tzara, Hans
Richter and the lesser known but one of my personal favouritesBaroness Elsa von
Freytag-Loringhoven (ne Else Pltz).
92. Mathew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 50. Also, I have been informed
by Timothy Shipe, the curator of The International Dada Archive at The University
of Iowa, that the performance of Antisymphonie was held at the Graphisches Kabinett,
Kurfrstendamm 232, at 7:45 PM. The printed program lists 5 numbers: Proclamation
dada 1919 by Huelsenbeck, Simultan-Gedicht performed by 7 people, Bruitistisches
Gedicht performed by Huelsenbeck (these latter 2 pieces grouped together
under the category DADA-machine), Seelenautomobil by Hausmann, and finally,
Golyscheff's Antisymphonie in 3 movements, subtitled Musikalische Kriegsguillotine.
The 3 movements of Golyscheff's piece are titled provokatorische Spritze, chaotische
Mundhhle oder das submarine Flugzeug, and zusammenklappbares Hyper-fis-chendur.
93. Watts made a series of spray-painted records for a Fluxus performance at the Fluxstore
on Canal Street played by the audience, and as the paint wore off, gradually the music
was revealed.
94. Generally his noise music is created from damaged LP recordings: often cut and glued
together or painted over or melted. Hungarian constructivist Lszl Moholy-Nagy
did similar noise experiments in the 1920s.
95. Thomas J. Harrison, The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1910).
96. In Futurism and Musical Notes, Daniele Lombardi discusses the mysterious case of the
French composer Carol-Brard; a pupil of Isaac Albeniz. Carol-Brard is said to have
composed a Symphony of Mechanical Forces in 1910 but little evidence has emerged
thus far to establish this assertion.
97. In 1977, the Historic Archives of Contemporary Arts of the Venice Biennale
organized an exhibition of Russolo's work and the curator, Gian Franco Maffina, had
five noise-intoners reconstructed for the occasion. (Russolo's original instruments
had all been destroyed during the Second World War). See Futurism and Musical Notes
by Daniele Lombardi on UbuWeb.com, originally printed in Artforum as translated
by Meg Shore.
98. In 1912, Marcel Duchamp, along with Appollinaire and Picabia, attended a
performance of Impressions of Africa, a play by an obscure author named Raymond
Roussel. Roussel greatly admired the works of the author Jules Verne, which he read

Notes239
over and over again, fascinated with their extraodinary voyages and machines, full
of bachelor scientists completely absorbed in positivist exploratory dreams taken
to delirious extremes. Duchamp later credited Roussel with the inspiration for his
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. In 1912, Duchamp started producing
paintings and drawings depicting mechanized sex acts such as Mechanics of Modesty
and The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride. At the same point in time, Freud was
explaining in his lectures that complex machines in dreams always signified the
genital organs. Roussel invented language machines that produced texts through the
use of repetitions and combination/permutations. This machine-like logic provided
his art with a seemingly pure spectacle of an endless variety of textual games and
combinations flowing in circular form. Within this writing process, Roussel described
a number of fantastic machines, including a painting machine in his novel Impressions
of Africa. This painting machine wonderfully describes and foresees the arrival of
computer-robotic technology and its application to visual art which we have available
to us today, nearly a century after he envisioned it. Thus it is through Roussel that we
might start to map a certain lineage in the avant-garde noise through out our century,
passing through Duchamp and the Futurists.
99. For a fascinating discussion of Cages Imaginary Landscape works in relationship to
noise, see Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995)
49-55 with a focus on Imaginary Landscape #4, 54-55.
100. Weiss, 45-52.
101. Weiss, 9-34.
102. The original Dada model for these art startegies are beautifully exemplified by the
early photomontages of Hannah Hch (see Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions
of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2009) 65-103, and the assemblage God (c. 1917) by Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven and Morton Livingston Schamberg that is in The Philadelphia Museum
of Arts Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. Dada questioned and affected what
art can look like, as well as what art can do, and set the stage for many avant-garde
movements, including Surrealism, Pop Art, Performance Art and Digital Art. Dada
also irrevocably changed the landscape of popular culture, influencing graphic design,
advertizing, and film.
103. Barbarella is a 1968 erotic sci-fi film staring Jane Fonda directed by Roger Vadim
based on the French Barbarella comics of Jean-Claude Forest. By appropriately
manipulating the keys of the Excessive Machine, a player of this torturous musical
instument may induce enormous sexual pleasure, sufficient to cause death by orgasm.
In one of the final scenes of the movie, the evil opponent is torturing Barbarella with
the pleasures of this machine, but in the end the machine overloads and is destroyed
in a burst of noise. Barbarella survives and feels rather grand.
104. See Paul Hegartys essay Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music http://www.
ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=314 [accessed 28 October, 2010].
105. Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2009) 6-24.
106. Kim Cascone, The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary
Computer Music, Computer Music Journal 24.4 (Winter 2002): 1218.
107. Steve Goodman, Contagious Noise: From Digital Glitches to Audio Viruses in
Jussi Parikka, and Tony D. Sampson (eds.) The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and

240 Joseph Nechvatal

Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton
Press, 2009) 128.
108. In that noise may instigate a decentering of subjectivity.
109. Mona Lisa Overdrive is a cyberpunk novel by William Gibson published in 1988 and
the final novel of the Sprawl trilogy, following Neuromancer and Count Zero.
110. Donald Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982) 18-23; 26.
111. Op Art: a hard-edge geometrical movement which flourished in the early-1960s
largely inspired by various optical experiments of Marcel Duchamp.
112. According to Arthur Koestler's holon concept (established in Beyond Reductionism and
in The Ghost in the Machine, 1967, 45-58), instead of cutting up immersive perceptual
wholes into discrete focal parts, immersion should be scrutinized and understood
using synthetic sub-whole sets found within the ambient atmospheric spectrum
of immersive perception's entirety. It is the expos of the synthetic atmospheric
phenomenology of such holonertic listening (dependent on the linked and amassed
sum-total) that will concern us here.
113. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Hutchinson, London and
Macmillan, 1967) and Beyond Reductionism (Boston: Beacon, 1971).
114. Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine , 45-58.
115. XS: The Opera Opus was a no wave avant-garde music and art performance created by
Rhys Chatham and Joseph Nechvatal in the mid 1980s. Jane Lawrence Smith sang
the lead role in the Boston performance and Yves Musard danced the main role. Its
theme was the excess of the nuclear weapon buildup of the Ronald Reagan presidency.
XS: The Opera, Shakespeare Theater, Boston was the final production and consisted
of three soprano singers, 4 trumpets, six electric guitars, base, drums, 35 mm slide
projection and dance. The duration was 90 minutes. Choreography: Yves Musard,
35 mm cross-fade art slides: Joseph Nechvatal. See Rosetta Brooks, "Interview-Rhys
Chatham & Joseph Nechvatal", ZG, (#12 Fall) and/or Robert Kleyn, "The Shadow
Reflected", ZG (#12 Fall).
116. Tellus was created in 1983 in New York City by myself, Claudia Gould, a curator, and
Carol Parkinson, a composer and staff member of Harvestworks/Studio PASS. We
began to collect, produce and document the art of audio through publishing works
from local, national and international artists. We worked with contributing editors
who proposed themes and collected the best works from that genre. Unknown
artists were teamed with well-known artists; historical works were juxtaposed
with contemporary and high art with popular art, all in an effort to enhance the
crossover communication between the different mediums of artvisual, music,
performance and spoken word. Tellus is archived on the web at http://www.ubu.com/
sound/tellus.html
117. http://www.ubu.com/sound/tellus_13.html
118. http://www.ubu.com/sound/tellus_20.html
119. See, for example, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, The Record as Artwork from
Futurism to Conceptual Art. The Collection of Germano Celant. Exhibition Catalog, 1977.

Notes241
Chapter 2
120. Deleuze, and Guattari, On The Line (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 2.
121. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema. ( New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, Inc., 1970) 41.
122. Non-communication.
123. That is, disorder, chance, and the exceptional.
124. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) 271.
125. R. G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1938) 223.
126. Robert Stewart, ed. Ideas That Shaped Our World: Understanding the Great Concepts of
Then and Now (London: Marshall, 1997) 93.
127. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (NY: New York University Press, 1993) 1.
128. Wolff, 92.
129. Teresa Brennan, and Martin Jay, eds. Vision in Context (London: Routledge, 1996) 31.
130. Hal Foster, ed. Vision and Visuality , (Seattle: Bay Press,1988) x.
131. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1976).
132. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986).
133. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage,
1979) 201.According to Foucault, the major effect of the panopticon (a circular
prison designed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) based on his
principles of happiness calculus) is to induce in the prison inmate (and by extension
anyone) a state of consciousness that assures the automatic functioning of power.
134. Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts: Moonraker
Press, 1913) 21.
135. Homo Sapiens with large frontal-lobes who migrated from the Middle East about
17, 000 BP. At first their art consisted of intimate body decoration such as beads,
bracelets, pendants and necklaces.
136. LOreille d'Enfer in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil and Grotte de Pair-non-Pair in Gironde
are good examples.
137. Brigitte Delluc, and Gilles Delluc, Discovering Lascaux (Pollina Luon: Editions Sud
Ouest, 1990) 46.
138. Delluc and Delluc, 55.
139. Carla Hoekendijk, ed. Interfacing Realities (Amsterdam: V2 Organisatie, 1997) 21.
140. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Summit Books, 1991) 379-82.
141. Alfred Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia:
Saunders, 1953) 615.
142. Begining about 45,000 to 38,000 years ago and ending around 10,000.
143. Delluc and Delluc, 57.
144. If one accepts the point concerning an infants rapport with voluminous breasts.

242 Joseph Nechvatal

145. The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total-artwork) is a proposition rooted in the
Neo-Platonic heritage of Romanticism. However, for Richard Wagner, it took on
a narrow and precise meaning as he re-theorized it in his 1849 hypothetical essays
"The Artwork of the Future" (Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft) and "Art and Revolution"
(Kunst und Revolution). "The Artwork of the Future" has two principal themes. The
first proclaims the doctrine of an "art of the people" which idealized art in a way that
would necessarily engage the masses (inasmuch as it was a narration of the masses
own thoughts, feelings and aspirations) as Wagner had imagined existed during the
period of the Greek dramas. This is the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal in the kind-hearted
political sense. In order to attain this level of idealized democratic-communist
amiable social blend, the formal characteristics of the Gesamtkunstwerk were
theorized as necessarily being the product of a fusion of the separate arts in pursuit of
a "total effect" which would be achieved through a total synthesis in which all of the
individual arts contribute.
146. Officially discovered by Emile Cartailhac in 1906.
147. Mario Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographic Record (New York:
Abrams, 1987) 82.
148. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes: Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art (Paris:
Gallimard, 1979) 46.
149. Carbon dated circa 17, 000 BP.
150. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes: Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art (Paris:
Gallimard, 1979) 37.
151. Some of the paintings in Chauvet cave are over 30, 000 years old, 3, 000 years older
than the oldest cave paintings previously known and nearly twice as old as those
found at Lascaux.
152. Mario Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographic Record (New York:
Abrams, 1987) 81.
153. Full of interruption and corruption and ruptures of information.
154. Brigitte Delluc, and Gilles Delluc, Discovering Lascaux (Pollina Luon: Editions Sud
Ouest, 1990) 74.
155. Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and
Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 165-67.
156. John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Bio-Computer: Theory
and Experiments (New York: Bantam Books, 1974) 40.
157. Deleuze, and Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1986) 13.
158. Deleuze, and Guattari, Nomadology , 36.
159. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 36.
160. Andr Leroi-Gourhan, The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1968) 163.
161. Mario Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographic Record (New York:
Abrams, 1987) 80.

Notes243
162. Leroi-Gourhan, 315.
163. Mario Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographic Record (New York: Abrams,
1987) 146-47.
164. Ruspoli, 146.
165. Ruspoli, 171.
166. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes: Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art (Paris: Gallimard,
1979) 58-9.
167. Leroi-Gourhan, 315.
168. Albert Rothenberg, The Emerging Goddess (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1979) 342.
169. Bataille, 59.
170. Leroi-Gourhan, 316.
171. Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique (Fall 1995): 83-109 (91).
172. Hegel's notion of the absolute consisted of becoming other in spirit.
173. Richard Rudgley, The Alchemy of Culture: Intoxicants in Society (London: British
Museum Press, 1993) 28.
174. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 510.
175. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 153.
176. Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze
and Guattari (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 70.
177. Also further altered by the meta-nihilistic chaos of repressed excess.
178. Leroi-Gourhan, 33.
179. This idea ties into Simultaneity in music: attempts at interweaving sound fragments.
180. Transmission as Derridean diffrance.
181. Nigel Pennick, The Ancient Science of Geomancy (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1979) 119.
182. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New
Key (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953) 69.
183. Grotte in French and grotta in Italian.
184. Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1982) 17.
185. Miller, 18-20.
186. Miller, 7.
187. Allen S. Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th Century
Metaphysics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995a) 48.

244 Joseph Nechvatal

188. Jacques Bersani et al. eds. Archologie: Les Grands Atlas Universalis (Paris:
Encyclopedia Universalis, 1985) 38-9.
189. De Antro Nympharum is a consequential and elaborate interpretation and defence
of Paganism, which adapted Plotinus's (AD 205-270) teachings while putting extra
emphasis on the importance of theurgic magical practices. In turn, Porphyry's
theurgic theories were succeeded by those of Iamblichus (circa AD 250-312) (who
also emphasized the preternatural theurgic factors in Neo-Platonism) and Jamblichus
(circa AD 255-315) who also maintained a belief in sorcery and theurgy (the art of
compelling demons and other supernatural powers to produce desired results).
190. Porphyry, L'Antro des Nymphes (Paris: Pliade, 1918) 20.
191. Vecellio Titien's (1488-1576) painting from the Renaissance era, Nymph and Shepherd
(1576), now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, illustrates the nymph
concept beautifully.
192. Miller, 13.
193. Depicted in human form with the legs, horns and ears of a goat.
194. Miller, 15.
195. Jane E. Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts: Moonraker
Press, 1913) 64.
196. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969) 72-7.
197. Viractualism is an art theory term I developed in 1999. The term viractualism (and
viractuality) emerged out of my doctoral research into the philosophy of art and new
technology concerning immersive virtual reality at Roy Ascott's Centre for Advanced
Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, UK
(now the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth). There I developed this
concept of the viractual, which strives to create an interface between the biological
and the technological. Viractualism is central to my work as an artist. The basis of
the viractual conception is that virtual producing computer technology has become
a noteworthy means for making and understanding contemporary art and that this
brings artists to a place where one finds the emerging of the computed (the virtual)
with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This amalgamatewhich tends to
contradict some central techno clichs of our timeis what I call the viractual.
Digitization is a key metaphor for viractuality in the sense that it is the elementary
translating procedure today. For me, the viractual recognizes and uses the power
of digitization while being culturally aware of the values of monumentality and
permanencyqualities that can be found in some compelling analog art. A key
influence on me was Gilles Deleuze's consideration of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th
century philosopher who merged mind and matter into one material. In his "Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy," Deleuze pointed me towards an acknowledgment of desires'
productiveness, as Deleuze indicated how desires drive us to stir towards greater
or lesser states of exalted comprehensiveness depending on whether the thing
encountered enters into composition with us, or on the contrary, tends to decompose
us. I think that viractualism signals a new sensibility emerging in art respecting the
integration of certain aspects of science, technology, myth and consciousnessa
consciousness struggling to attend to the prevailing contemporary spirit of our age
in which everything, everywhere, all at once is connected in a rhizomatic web of
transmission. But the viractual realm is also a political-spiritual chaosmos in the sense

Notes245
that new forms of order may come up such that any form of order is only temporary
and provisional. Within viractual creation, all signs are subject to boundless semiosis,
which is to say that they are translatable into other signs. Here, of course, it is
possible to find resonances and affinities between formal and conceptual opposites.
I suggest that the term (concept) viractual (and viractualism or viractuality) may be
an entrainment/grore conception helpful in defining our now third-fused interspatiality which is forged from the meeting of the virtual and the actual, a concept
close to what the military call augmented reality, which is the use of transparent
displays worn as see-through glasses on which computer data is projected and layered.
198. Harrison, 65.
199. Harrison, 66.

Chapter 3
200. Robert Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream (London: Routledge,
1989) 83-93.
201. Romanyshyn, 33.
202. Romanyshyn, 33.
203. Samuel Edgerton, The Renaissance Discovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Harper
and Row, 1976) 119.
204. William Ivins, Art and Geometry (New York: Dover, 1964) 69.
205. Romanyshyn, 97-101.
206. Zenon Pylyshyn, "Here and There In the Visual Field" in Zenon Pylyshyn, ed.
Computational Processes In Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Norwood,
NJ: Ablex, 1988) 210-38.
207. Romanyshyn, 42.
208. Croix de la Horst and Richard Tansey Gardner's Art through the Ages (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Javanovich. 1975) 433.
209. Romanyshyn, 77.
210. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to
Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 167-220.
211. Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient
Egypt to Bernini (New York: Abrams, 1991) 34.
212. Interestingly Michel Serres delivered a speech "Physical and Social Sciences:
The Case of Turner," based on two paintings by Turner at the LSU College of
Art and Design.
213. Romanyshyn, 216-21.
214. A Florentine architect and engineer, and mastermind of the distinctive dome that
crowns the cathedral in Florence.
215. Hal Foster, ed. Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) 7.
216. Edgerton, 9.

246 Joseph Nechvatal

217. Romanyshyn, 71-82.
218. Romanyshyn, 74.
219. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Books, 1977) 109.
220. Michael Schuyt, Joost Elffers, and George Collins, Fantastic Architecture: Personel and
Eccentric Visions (New York: Harry Abrams, 1980) 177.
221. Joseph Nechvatal, Hyper-death and the Scopic Corpse, Artforum (November,
1990): 130.
222. Joseph O'Neil, ed. Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1990) 27.
223. O'Neil, 358-59.
224. Madelene Ostwald, "Structuring Virtual Urban Space: Aboroscent Schemes" in
Peter Droege, ed. Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1997) 451- 82; 457.
225. Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1995) 104.
226. Also of interest to white noise viractualism is the origin of the hermaphroditic image.
This hybrid viractual image first appears in Ovid's classic text Metamorphoses, and
perhaps this emergence is well worth recounting here. The hermaphrodite initially
occurs in Western culture as a son of Hermes and Aphrodite named Hermaphroditus.
Hermaphroditus was a typical, if exceptionally handsome, young male with whom
the water nymph Salmacis fell madly in love. When Hermaphroditus rejected her
sexual advances, Salmacis desired him even more. One spring day, Hermaphroditus
stripped nude and dove into the pool of water that was Salmacis's habitat. Salmacis
immediately dove in after him, embracing him and wrapping her body around his,
just as, Ovid says, ivy does around a tree. She then prayed to the gods that she would
never be separated from him, a prayer that they answered favorably. Consequently,
Hermaphroditus emerged from the pool both man and woman. The patriarchal
construction of woman as other and the female body as object is deeply rooted in the
supposed duality (opposites) of the (two) sexes. Most feminist theory questions this
patriarchal construction of sex and gender, suggesting that sex is expressed through
a continuum, rather than as an opposing couplet based on heterosexist male/female
polarities. Accordingly, within my viractual multiverse, containments designed for
womanhood/manhood are subverted by the presence of ambiguous genitalia, the
mutable image and performance of pan-sexuality. Gender here is viewed as an act
of becoming. Consequently, gender performance fails to sustain sex oppression by
ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other. It is a provocation not only to male/
female constructions of heterosexuality, but also to homosexual constructions of
identity. This critique of "representation" in the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of
"representation" in the political sense (and vice versa). Art, here, is seen as political
in the sense that it is a site of power struggles that fail to presuppose a metaphysics
which is itself a politics, one that establishes an order of values which often maintains
the dominant order of meaning and power over breakthrough ideologies. As
previously noted, the tale of Hermaphroditus suggests white noise viractualism is
about pansexual eroticism melded to virtuality, quixotic transformation, and, of
course, immersive noise-excess. The viractual realm is a political-spiritual chaosmos
in the sense that new forms of sexual order arise such that any form of order is
only temporary and provisional. But I don't think it is a chaosmos in the sense of

Notes247
ceaseless flux and chaos. Rather, this sphere is attained through an emergent viractual
operation, and I take abundant pleasure in imagining the forms of pan-order that arise
within its algorithmic processes.
227. Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1995) 104.
228. Walter Stace, The Teachings of the Mystics (New York: New American, 1960) 11.
229. Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography Volumes 1 and 2 (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1978) 332.
230. Jack Stein, Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1960) 6.
231. Wassily Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony (London: Constable, 1914) 5.
232. Wilfrid Blunt, The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (New York: Viking Press,
1970) 21-45.
233. Blunt, 143.
234. Michael Schuyt, Joost Elffers, and George Collins, Fantastic Architecture: Personel and
Eccentric Visions (New York: Harry Abrams, 1980) 59.
235. Miller, 115-17.
236. Blunt, 234.
237. Miller, 116.
238. Blunt, 151.
239. Blunt, 151.

Chapter 4
240. Chaos magic is often highly individualistic and borrows liberally from other belief
systems. In this way, some chaos magicians consider their practice to be an art-like
metabelief and most chaos magicians routinely create magical symbols for themselves.
241. Joseph Nechvatal, Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances (Cologne: LAP Lambert
Academic Publishing, 2009) 76-82.
242. Nechvatal, "The Artist and Familars," Blast 1 (November/December, 1991).
243. For more on this, see my Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in
the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) (New York: Edgewise
Press, 2009).
244. Nechvatal, "The Artist and Familars."
245. Joseph Nechvatal, and Didier Gagneur, eds. Excess in the Techno-mediacratic Society
(Arbois: Muse d'Arbois, 1992).
246. For an in-depth focus of this work see: Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the
New Human in Weimar Berlin, 65-103.
247. Werner Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters (New York: Abrams, 1970) 129-39.

248 Joseph Nechvatal

248. Adrian Henri, Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974) 18-20.
249. Henri, 19.
250. Henri, 20.
251. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Abrams,
1966) 170-71.
252. Henri, 12.
253. In sound, this includes Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, Antonio and Luigi Russolo,
Giacomo Balla, Rodolfo De Angelis, Carlo Belloli, Fortunato Depero and Francesco
Cangiullo, among others.
254. They also sketched out a work called Intuizione: Fiore magico transformabile
motorumorista (Intuition: Magical transformable motor-noise flower) in their futurist
Manifesto Ricostruzione dell'Universo (1915).
255. Henri, 13-16.
256. Henri, 24.
257. Henri, 26.
258. Henri, 24.
259. The mechanamorphic impulse of Duchamp's works from 1911-1912, and the machine
works that follow his exposure to Raymond Roussel, are an inescapable point of
reference for the avant-garde of the 20th century. The machine in that century,
for Duchamp, becomes the symbol of total bliss through pure mentality and autosexual autonomy in contradiction to the horror that mechanized war had brought.
By hypnotizing our attention, the machine frees us from troubling obsessions
and personal hang-ups through the alternative model of android life; intimating
both our rush of desperation and our ecstatic release, refracted through a web of
glazed impersonality. If the machine, as a representative of order, was a fascination
Duchamp used to balance out the ages ineptness, whether of the mind or flesh, his
mechanamorphic production and machine forms refigure the human body into
an almost mechanized substance. In The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even,
which positions a central bride machine over a bachelor apparatus, Duchamp, with
the strictness of machinery, applies fantasy to seduction and masturbation. In a
way, Duchamp suggests that we (as viewers) can use his art as a vehicle for selftranscendence into a kind of dream world of nonsense sex. By mechanizing sex
and dreams, this nonsense of the sex machine converts sexual energy into artistic
noise energy.
260. Henri, 22-4.
261. There had been a substantial eruption of this noise impetus following the war, as the
reader shall soon see.
262. Herbert York, "Nuclear Deterrence and the Military Uses of Space," Daedalus:
Weapons in Space Vol. I: Concepts and Technologies 114.2 (Spring 1985): 17-32; 20.
263. Raymond Roussel's repetitions, for example in his descriptions of eggs on plates and
the multiple allusions to the odor of urine after the eating of asparagus, are typical
of a poetic-mechanical apparatus helping to take us further into the area of the

Notes249
unconscious and the noisy sexual. He points us towards an intellectual history that
maps out arts role in creating social allegory, along with the mechanized mass killing
of World War I and II, the holocaust, Hiroshima and the discovery of psychoanalysis
(which is rooted in noise-sex symbolism) and so offers us an interesting context in
which to view the possible role of the computer and noise art.
264. For a good overview of his work, see Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1983).
265. See my "Immersive Implications" in Roy Ascott, ed., Consciousness Reframed:
Conference Proceedings (Newport: CAiiA/University of Wales College, 1997).
266. Al Hansen, A Primer of Happenings and Space/Time Art (New York: Something Else
Press, 1965) 6.
267. Henri, 162.
268. On March 9th, 1960, three nude female models painted each other with IKB Blue
paint to the sounds of Klein's Monotone Symphony (which consisted of one note and
an equally long silence, first written by Klein in 1949) and then gently pressed their
bodies against the artistic ground.
269. Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media . 2
nd Edition (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1997) 55.
270. John Cage, On Robert Rauschenberg, artist, and his work (first published in Metro,
Milan, 1961); republished in Silence 4th edition (M.I.T Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1970) 13.
271. See my An Ecstasy of Excess (Mnchengladbach: Juni-Verlag, 1991).
272. Henri, 93.
273. Henri, 114.
274. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, Inc., 1970) 368.
275. Andrew Solomon, "Dot Dot Dot," Artforum (February 1997): 66-73; 67.
276. Solomon, 70.
277. Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media:
Second Edition (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1997) 56.
278. Solomon, 67.
279. See my "Immersive Implications," New Observations 116 (Fall 1997): 46-7.
280. Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (New York:
Penguin Books, 2007) 318.
281. Burroughs lusted after Ginsberg in vain.
282. Morgan, 318-19.
283. Morgan, 331-32.
284. Only by being really difficult can the child discover whether the parent is resilient and
robust. In like fashion, noise art must be difficultor we will never find out what the
world (and art) are really like.

250 Joseph Nechvatal

285. From the early 1990s.
286. See Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto
Press, 2004).
287. See Frank Popper, Art, Action and Participation (New York: New York University,
1975). See also his From Technological to Virtual Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
288. Rebuilt in 1970 and now in the collection of Harvard University's BuschReisinger Museum.
289. Stan Vanderbeek, "Movies: Disposible Art, Synthetic Media and Artificial
Intelligence." Take One Film Magazine 2.3 (1969): 14-16; 16.
290. Stan Vanderbeek, "Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and
Manifesto." Film Culture 40 (Spring, 1966): 15-18; 16.
291. Vanderbeek, "Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and
Manifesto," 17.
292. Jean-Christophe Royoux, "Expanded, Extended: Hritage, Transformation et
Ramifications d'un Concept Esthtique dans l'Art Annes Soixante," Omnibus 23
(Janvier, 1998): 7.
293. Youngblood, 354-58.
294. Youngblood, 66.
295. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol' 60. (London:
Hutchinson, 1980) 156.
296. Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was a non-profit and tax-exempt
organization established to develop collaborations between artists and engineers.
E.A.T. initiated and carried out projects that expanded the role of the artist in
contemporary society and helped eliminate the separation of the individual
from technological change. E.A.T. was never a concrete channel that formalized
an art-science interchange in some elaborate bureaucratic institution. Rather it
served to facilitate person-to-person contacts between artists and engineers. It was
officially launched in 1967 by the engineers Billy Klver and Fred Waldhauer with
the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. These men had previously
collaborated, most notably in 1966 when they together organized 9 Evenings: Theater
and Engineering, a series of performance art presentations that united artists and
engineers. The performances were held in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory,
on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets as an homage to the original and
historical 1913 Armory show. Such collaborations continued to break down barriers
between the arts and scientists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and indirectly launched
and supported the experimental sound artist John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham,
and pop artist Andy Warhol. The pinnacle of E.A.T. activity is generally considered
to be the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 at Osaka Japan where E.A.T. artists and engineers
collaborated to design and program an immersive dome.
297. Youngblood, 416-17.
298. Solomon, "Dot Dot Dot," 67.
299. Solomon, "Dot Dot Dot," 68.

Notes251
300. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," Ecrits: A
Selection (New York: Norton) 1-7.
301. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press,
1993) 132 -36.
302. Popper, 158.
303. Popper, 92.
304. Youngblood, 359.
305. Martin called himself ST EOM.
306. Youngblood, 371.
307. Youngblood, 391-92.
308. Youngblood, 387-91.
309. Youngblood, 389.
310. Youngblood, 381-83.
311. For more on soundscapes, see R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic
Environment and the Turning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1984).

Chapter 5
312. For more on net art viruses, see JussiParikka, Archives of Software: Computer
Viruses and the Aesthesis of Media Accidents, in The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn,
and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. Eds. Jussi Parikka, and Tony
Sampson (Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2009) 105-24.
313. Examples of viral net art are biennale.py, the computer virus exhibited at the
2001 Venice Biennale by 0100101110101101.org, and much of the work of Jodi, a
collaboration that uses the dysfunctions and the potential break down of network
software as artistic potential.
314. Knowbotic Research KR+cF has regularly invited people from non-art fields to
participate in their projects, such as scientists, philosophers and engineers, depending
on the concept of each project.
315. One here might recall Luigi Russolos idea of Rete dei rumori (Network of Noises)
published in 1914 in the magazine Lacerba.
316. See for example http://assembler.org/axbx/ax.html and/or http://meta.am/
317. See Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace, Visionary Theories of Art,Technology and
Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
318. A fine example of this overriding is the aforementioned Stan Vanderbeek's 1966
proposal essay "Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and
Manifesto," that was published in Film Culture 40 (Spring, 1966). In thia essay on
page 17, Vanderbeek called for the transformation of his Movie Dromes into image
libraries which by computer inter-play would function as global communication
and storage centers. According to Vanderbeek, by satellite, each dome could
receive its images from a world wide library source, store them and program feedback

252 Joseph Nechvatal

presentations to the local community. Vanderbeek also went so far as to predict
that such a linking of visual feedback could authentically review the total world
image reality and hence produce a sense of the entire world picture. This process of
linking visual dome-worlds Vanderbeek labelled intra-communitronics.
319. Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York:
Peter Lang, 2007) 136.
320. The word parasite, interestingly enough, also means noise in French. For more on this
curious alliance, see Michel Serress book The Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980); The
Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1982) and Reading with Michel Serres by Maria L. Assad (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999).
321. Briefly, the viractual is the stratum of activity where distinct actualizations/
individuations are materialized out of the flow of virtuality.
322. Parikka, 5.
323. This reminds me of the closing statement of Tristan Tzara in his "Dada Manifesto"
where he states, Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a
virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason
has not been able to fill with words or conventions. From "Dada Manifesto" [1918]
and "Lecture on Dada" [1922], translated from the French by Robert Motherwell
in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology 2nd Edition, (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989) 78-9.
324. Retroviruses are sometimes known as anti-anti-viruses. The basic principle is that the
virus must somehow hinder the operation of an anti-virus program in such a way that
the virus itself benefits from it. Anti-anti-viruses should not be confused with antivirus-viruses, which are viruses that will disable or disinfect other viruses.
325. Heuristic virus cleaners work by loading an infected file up to memory and emulating
the program code. It uses a combination of disassembly, emulation and sometimes
execution to trace the flow of the virus and to emulate what the virus is normally
doing. The risk in heuristic cleaning is that if the cleaner tries to emulate everything,
the virus might get control inside the emulated environment and escape, after which it
can propagate further or trigger a destructive retaliation reflex.
326. See http://www.henryflynt.org/and Henry Flynt, "Mutations of the Vanguard: PreFluxus, During Fluxus, Late Fluxus," in A.B. Olivia, Ubi Fluxus ibi motus 19901962
(Milano: Mazzotta, 1990) 99-128.
327. Such thinking relates to my 2001 Computer Virus Project 2.0 that followed along the
same lines as my previous viral works by in 1992works where an unpredictable
progressive virus operates on a degradation/transformation of an image. Using a
C++ framework, I and my programmer and collaborator Stephane Sikora brought
my early computer virus project into the realm of artificial life (A-Life) (i.e. into a
synthetic system that exhibits behaviors characteristic of natural living systems).
With Computer Virus Project 2.0, elements of artificial life have been introduced in
that viruses are modeled to be autonomous agents living in/off the image. The project
simulates a population of active viruses functioning as an analogy of a viral biological
system. Computer Virus Project 2.0 actively propagates viral attacks on image-files
from my ec-satyricOn 2000 (enhanced)+ bodies in the bit-stream (compliant)
series. Here viral algorithmsbased on a viral biological modelare used to define
evolutionary processes which are then applied to image-files from my ec-satyricOn
2000 (enhanced)+ bodies in the bit-stream (compliant) series. Among the different

Notes253
techniques used here were models that result from embodied artificial intelligence
and the paradigm of genetic programming. The world is modeled as an image via a set
of pixels. Every pixel's color is defined by RGB real number vectors that represent the
red, green and blue components of every pixel's color. The image world has no edges.
Every square on the edge of the image is adjacent to another on the opposite edge.
A virus can move around the image and impact the image world as different colors
actually correspond to resources used for survival by the viruses. The behavior of a
virus is modeled as a generated looping activity that is typical of situated artificial
intelligence work. A virus will pick up information from its environment, decide on
a course of action, and carry it out. The loop is simplified here because of the abstract
character of the simulacrum. Viral instructions provide different possibilities for
executing instructions according to the environmental conditions in which the virus
is living. A virus will perceive the pixel it is on and the eight adjacent ones. It can
get information on its color and on the possible presence of other viruses. In order
to decide on a course of action, each virus is programmed with a set of randomized
instructions of different kinds; some relate to direction, others to a change in the
color of the current pixel (the one the virus is in). Others control the implementation
of the program and carry out tests. Once the program has been executed, following
actions to be carried out randomly arise. As the virus executes them, it moves to
one of the adjacent squares and changes the current pixel. It can even reproduce
itself (reproduction here results from the instruction 'divide'). A virus that carries
out that instruction will produce a replica of itselfalthough slightly altered. Its
genome-program changes with the mutation operator. In addition to these changes,
every cycle produces a change in the energy level of the virus. The virus will lose a
set amount of energy with every run, and when it runs out of energy, it dies (i.e. it
disappears). In order to survive, a virus needs to pick up energy, which it can only do
by degrading the image. The more it changes the color of a pixel, the more energy it
acquires. The difference between the color before and after is calculated. We can see
from a viruss behavior and direction whether it will be more or less adaptablemore
or less able to survive. There are a maximum number of viruses that can be present
simultaneously (usually 1000). When that number is reached, the 'divide' instruction
is ignored. If the virus has enough energy it will move around randomly, otherwise it
will follow its favorite color and absorb part of the red component of the pixel it is on.
328. It is amusing to recall here that Pierre Jaquet-Droz created the first robotic mechanical
figure in 1774 called the automatic scribe. It still can be seen at the Musee d'Art et
Histoire in Neuchatel, Switzerland.

Conclusion
329. David Chalmers, "Facing up to the Problems of Consciousness," Journal of
Consciousness Studies: Controversies in Science and the Humanities , 2.3 (1995):
200-219; 211.
330. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso
Books, 1994) 132.
331. Chalmers, 211.
332. A rhizome literally is a root-like plant stem that forms a large entwined spherical zone
of small roots which criss-cross. In the philosophical writings of Deleuze and Guattari
the term is used as a metaphor for an epistemology (that in philosophy which is
concerned with theories of knowledge) that spreads in all directions simultaneously.

254 Joseph Nechvatal

(Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 7.) More specifically, Deleuze and Guattari
define the rhizome as that which is reducible to neither the One or the multiple. It
has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows
and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having
neither subject nor object... . Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 21.
333. Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider
vision of awareness including spiritual, ecstatic or mystical themesor is based
in such experiencesaccessible through the subjective realm of each individual.
What unites visionary artists is the driving force and source of their art: their
unconventionally intense psychic imaginations. Their gift to the world is to reveal
in minute particulars (as William Blake would say) the full spectrum of the vast
visionary dimensions of the mind. William Blake, for example, is famous for his
identifying the entirety of the universe in a single grain of sand. Both trained and
self-taught (Art Brut or Outsider Art) artists have, and continue to create visionary
works. The famous fantastical and visionary 15th century painter Hieronymous Bosch
is a good example of the trained sort. Also important is French Symbolism (Gustav
Moreau and Odilon Redon) and Dadas use of chance automatic irrational procedures
(which grew into Surrealist activities of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Hans Arp, Hans
Bellmer and Juan Miro). The visions of the Surrealists help to define a dream realm
where bizarre juxtaposition is possible and desirable. A profound truth resides in such
strangeness, for these visions can shock us into deepening our acknowledgement and
appreciation of the great mystery of the universe.
334. Achieved through re-establishing a sense of self wonder through forms of noise where
corporations and governmental agencies are not welcome.
335. The milieu of sound/image superabundance and proliferation-collapse.
336. Noise art may be construed as a personal technique for taking back a bit of the raw
actual world from the slick media world.
337. This quality has formulated a new understanding of phallocratic existence which
Deleuze and Guattari have called schizoid. According to them, being is now
inseparable from a technologically hallucinogenic/schizoid culture. Deleuze, and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987).
338. Deleuze and Guattari, On The Line (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 2.
339. Paul Hegarty, Noise Music: A History (London: Continuum, 2007) 122.
340. Perhaps noise is the trickster/joker necessary to the health of a system, as
dysfunctioning remains essential for functioning.
341. Alfred Jarry, "What is Pataphysics?" Evergreen Review 13 (1963): 131-151; 131.
342. The concept of Maya in Indian philosophy refers to the purely phenomenal,
insubstantial character of the everyday world.
343. Perhaps it is relevant here to remember that Mannerism (generally the art of the
period of Late-Renaissance circa 1530-1600) was an aesthetic movement that valued
highly refined gracefulness and elegance: a beautiful maniera (style) from which
Mannerism takes its name. The term usually means an art in which lavish attention is
paid to stylization and to the superficialities of semblance.

Notes255
344. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1986) 13.
345. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology , 36.
346. John Cage has written, It becomes evident that music itself is an ideal situation, not
a real one. The mind may be used either to ignore ambient sounds, pitches other than
the eighty-eight, durations which are not counted, timbres which are unmusical or
distasteful, and in general to control and understand an available experience. Or the
mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver
of experience. John Cage, Silence (London: Calder and Boyers, 1961) 32.
347. This corresponds to Douglas Kahns contention that noise drifts across the binary
empirical/abstract, such that when noise itself is being communicated, [...] it no
longer remains inextricably locked into empiricism but is transformed into an
abstraction of another noise. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in
the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001)25.
348. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984) 21.
349. Non-narrowly empiricist.
350. A loss of cognitive body-image consistent with Arthur Schopenhauer's (1788-1860)
conception of a pure knowing subject . Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truber and Co., 1907) 127.
351. See my small book An Ecstasy of Excess (Mnchengladbach: Juni-Verlag) 3-7.
352. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational
Arts (London: Harvard University Press, 1990) 11.
353. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Edinburgh: Darien Press, 1907) 7.
354. Robert Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream (London: Routledge,
1989) 83-93.
355. Hal Foster, ed. Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) x.
356. The basic neurologically informed concepts of existence.
357. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Random House, 1989) 69.
358. Ronald Bogue, "Word, Image and Sound: The Non-Representational Semiotics of
Gilles Deleuze," in Ronald Bogue, ed. Mimesis, Semiosis and Power (Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 1991) 83-4.
359. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Responses (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1978) 21.
360. I remind the reader here that the emancipation of noise in music via John Cage is not
the exclusive responsibility of the composer or the musician, but requires an active
and transformable attitude on the listener's part as well. When the listener includes
the sounds of the environment in a musical composition, (s)he in fact becomes
co-composer.
361. Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique (Fall 1995): 83-109; 96.
In this regard, I suggest that readers listen to the Big Bang Sound, a noise simulation
of the first (and last) sound as derived from the sound propagating as compression
waves through the plasma/hydrogen medium of the early universe some 100 to 700

256 Joseph Nechvatal

thousand years after the initial Big Bang at http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~dmw8f/
sounds/cdromfiles/index.php (accessed 11/11/2008)
362. Jean-Franois Lyotard, "Que Peindre?: Interview with Bernard Macade," Art Press 125
(May 1988): 42-5; 45.
363. Jacques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation," in
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)
232-250; 235.
364. See my Introduction to The Art of Excess in the Techno-mediacratic Society," New
Observations 94 (1993).
365. Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts (New
York: Printed Editions, 1978) 12-17.
366. Higgins, 3-9.
367. Henry Flynt. "Mutations of the Vanguard: Pre-Fluxus, During Fluxus, Late Fluxus,"
A. B. Olivia, 107.
368. Higgins, 8.
369. For more on this topic, see my book Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the
Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) (New
York: Edgewise Press, 2009).
370. Quoted in Carla Hoekendijk, Ed. Interfacing Realities (Amsterdam: V2
Organisatie, 1997) 14.
371. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) 151.
372. Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique (Fall 1995): 83-109; 91.
373. Though I have never seen it, apparently a satisfactory example of superimposed
cinema was the December 1967 screening of Andy Warhols **** (FOUR STARS)
16mm/25 hrs/sound/color/24 fps that was filmed during August 1966 to September
1967. Two projectors' images were superimposed on a single screen, mixing both films
(color and b&w) as well as the two soundtracks together.
374. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, Inc., 1970) 111.
375. Youngblood, 87.
376. One creating movement/pertubation in societies that would otherwise rest stagnate.
377. Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion ( Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1995) 104.
378. Jacques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation," in
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978) 232-50.
379. For example, there is part of ourselves that has little concern with our best interests.
380. Viruses, by biological definition, must be considered as semi-live.
381. For example, see Leon Cohens paper, The History of Noise in which Cohen makes
the case for noise being involved in the resolution of major scientific, mathematical,
and technological problems.

Notes257
382. A noise art exception here is datamoshing, the manipulating of digital compression to
produce pixel bleeding for artistic effect.
383. Excluding the prior examples of noise film cited in this text along with these Dada
films: Viking Eggelings Diagonal Symphony, 1921; Paul Strand/Charles Sheelers
Manhattan, 1921; Hans Richters Rhythmus 21, 1921, Rhythmus 23, 1923-1925,
Filmstudie, 1926, and the Vormittagsspuk, 1927-1928; Ren Clairs Entracte, 1924; and
Marcel Duchamps Anmic Cinema, 1925.
384. Albert Rothenberg, The Emerging Goddess (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979) 345.
385. Rothenberg, 12.
386. Regardless of Luigi Russolos participation in the pro-fascist (pro-war) Futurist
movement, one must remember that actual right-wing fascist dictators have little use
for avant-garde noise art. They much prefer folk art and popular music.
387. Paul Hegarty, Noise Music: A History (London: Continuum, 2007) 125.
388. This glut of frictionlessness flow has been perhaps best exemplified recently by
the fluid movement (leading to collapse) of money markets for mortgage-backed
securities and derivatives unhinged to tangible value: where the meaninglessness of
huge abstract numbers is slickly numbing.
389. In this sense, noise art equates to the sound of the rage of the seathe sea being the
source of all life.
390. For a probing investigation of this subject, see Quentin Meillassouxs After Finitude:
An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008).

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul. 1984.Ascott, Roy. Telematic Embrace, Visionary Theories of
Art,Technology and Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California
Press. 2003.
Assad, Marina L. Reading with Michel Serres. Albany: SUNY Press. 1999.
Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. 1985.
Bailey, Thomas Bey William. Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music And
Sound Art In The 21st Century. Creation Books. 2009.
Bataille, Georges. Oeuvres Completes: Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art.
Paris: Gallimard. 1979.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. 1985.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin Books. 1977.
Bersani, Jacques, et al. eds. Archologie: Les Grands Atlas Universalis.
Paris: Encyclopedia Universalis. 1985.
Biro, Mathew. The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar
Berlin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009.
Blunt, Wilfrid. The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria. New York: Viking
Press. 1970.
Bogue, Ronald. Word, Image and Sound: The Non-Representational
Semiotics of Gilles Deleuze. Bogue, Ronald. ed. Mimesis, Semiosis and
Power. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991.
Brassier, Ray. Genre is Obsolete. Multitudes, No. 28, Spring 2007.

Bibliography259

Brennan, Teresa and Jay, Martin. eds. Vision in Context. London:

Routledge. 1996.
Cage, John. Silence. London: Calder and Boyers. 1961.
Careri, Giovanni. Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press. 1995.
Cascone, Kim. The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in
Contemporary Computer Music. Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4.
Winter. 2002. pp. 12-18.
Chalmers, David. Facing up to the Problems of Consciousness. Journal
of Consciousness Studies: Controversies in Science and the Humanities,
Vol. 2, No. 3, 1995. pp. 200-219.
Cohen. Leon. The History of Noise on the 100th Anniversary of its
Birth. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. November. 2005.
Collingwood, R. G. Principles of Art. Oxford: Claredon Press. 1938.
Croix, Horst de la and Tansey, Richard. Gardner's Art through the Ages.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Javanovich. 1975.
Crowther, Paul. Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism. Oxford:
Clarendon Press. 1993.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. 1976.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix. Nomadology: The War Machine. New
York: Semiotext(e). 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix. On The Line. New York:
Semiotext(e). 1983.

260 Joseph Nechvatal

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix. What is Philosophy?. London: Verso

Books. 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles. Postscript on Control Societies. Negotiations: 19721990. New York: Columbia. 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University
Press. 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City
Lights. 1984.
Delluc, Brigitte. and Delluc, Gilles. Discovering Lascaux. Pollina Luon:
Editions Sud Ouest. 1990.
Demers, Joanna. Listening Through The Noise. New York: Oxford
University Press. 2010.
Derrida, Jacques. The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of
Representation.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. 1978. pp. 232-250.
Edgerton, Samuel. The Renaissance Discovery of Linear Perspective. New
York: Harper and Row. 1976.
Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Hidden Order of Art. Berkeley: University of
California Press. 1967.
Flynt, Henry. Mutations of the Vanguard: Pre-Fluxus, During Fluxus,
Late Fluxus. Olivia, Achille Bonito. Ubi Fluxus ibi motus 1990-1962.
Milan: Mazzotta. 1990. pp. 99-128.
Foster, Hal. ed. Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press. 1988.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New
York: Vintage. 1979.
Frank, Elizabeth. Jackson Pollock. New York: Abbeville Press. 1983.
Goodman, Steve. Contagious Noise: From Digital Glitches to Audio
Viruses. Parikka, Jussi and Sampson, Tony D. eds. The Spam Book:

Bibliography261

On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital
Culture. Cresskill: Hampton Press. 2009.
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear.
Cambridg: MIT Press. 2010.
Hansen, Al. A Primer of Happenings and Space/Time Art. New York:
Something Else Press. 1965.
Harrison, Thomas. J. The Emancipation of Dissonance. Berkeley:
University of California Press. 1910.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. Ancient Art and Ritual. Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts:
Moonraker Press. 1913.
Hegarty, Paul. Noise Music: A History. London: Continuum. 2007.
Henri, Adrian. Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance.
New York: Oxford University Press. 1974.
Higgins, Dick. A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New
Arts. New York: Printed Editions. 1978.
Hoekendijk, Carla. ed. Interfacing Realities. Amsterdam: V2
Organisatie. 1997.
Iles, Anthony and Iles, Mattin eds. Noise & Capitalism. Donostia-San
Sebastin: Arteleku Audiolab. Kritika series. 2009.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Responses.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1978.
Ivins, William. Art and Geometry. New York: Dover. 1964.
Jarry, Alfred. What is Pataphysics?. Evergreen Review, No. 13.
1963. pp. 131-151
Johnston, John. The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and
the New AI. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2008.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.
Cambridge: MIT Press. 2001.

262 Joseph Nechvatal

Kandinsky, Wassily. The Art of Spiritual Harmony. London: Constable

and Co. Ltd. 1914.
Kaprow, Allan. Assemblage, Environments and Happenings. New York:
Abrams. 1966.
Kelly, Caleb. Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. Cambridge: MIT
Press. 2009.
Kemp, Martin. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from
Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1990.
Kernberg, Otto. Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New
York: Jason Aronson. 1975.
Kinsey, Alfred. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia:
Saunders. 1953.
Koestler, Arthur. ed. Beyond Reductionism. Boston: Beacon. 1971.
Koestler, Arthur. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Hutchinson,
London and Macmillan. 1967.
LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London:
Continuum. 2008.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton. 1977. pp. 1-7.
Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from
Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1953.
Leroi-Gourhan, Andr. The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe.
London: Thames and Hudson. 1968.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. 1969.
Lilly, John C. Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human BioComputer: Theory and Experiments. New York: Bantam Books. 1974.

Bibliography263

Lovejoy, Margot. Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the

Age of Electronic Media. 2nd Edition. Upper Saddle River:
Prentice Hall. 1997.
Lowe, Donald. History of Bourgeois Perception. Chicago: University of
Chicago. 1982.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. Que Peindre?: Interview with Bernard Macade.
Art Press 125, May 1988, pp. 42-45
Massumi, Brian. The Autonomy of Affect. Cultural Critique, Fall Issue.
1995. pp. 83-109.
Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1992.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency. London: Continuum. 2008.
Metzinger, Thomas. ed. Conscious Experience. Paderborn:
Schningh. 1995.
Miller, Naomi. Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto. London:
Allen and Unwin. 1982.
Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art,
Religion and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996.
Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen
Ginsberg. New York: Penguin Books. 2007.
Motherwell, Robert. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. 2nd
Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Random House. 1989.
Nechvatal, Joseph. Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances. Cologne: LAP
Lambert Academic Publishing. 2009.
Nechvatal, Joseph. Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work
of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (19932006). New York: Edgewise Press. 2009.

264 Joseph Nechvatal

Nechvatal, Joseph. An Ecstasy of Excess. Nechvatal, Joseph. An Ecstasy

of Excess. Mnchengladbach: Juni-Verlag. 1991. pp. 3-7.
Nechvatal, Joseph. Hyper-death and the Scopic Corpse. Artforum.
November Issue. 1990. p. 130.
Nechvatal, Joseph. Immersive Implications. Ascott, Roy. ed.
Consciousness Reframed: Conference Proceedings. Newport: CAiiA/
University of Wales College. 1997.
Nechvatal, Joseph. Immersive Implications. New Observations, No. 116,
Fall. 1997. pp. 46-47.
Nechvatal, Joseph. Introduction to The Art of Excess in the Technomediacratic Society. New Observations, No. 94. 1993.
Nechvatal, Joseph. New Territory of Significance. New Observations,
No. 104. 1994.
Nechvatal, Joseph. The Art of Excess in the Techno-mediacratic
Society. New Observations, No. 94. 1993.
391. Nechvatal, Joseph. The Artist and Familiars. Blast, Vol. 1, November /
December. 1991.

Nechvatal, Joseph. An Ecstasy of Excess. Mnchengladbach: JuniVerlag. 1991.

Nechvatal, Joseph. and Gagneur, Didier. eds. Excess in the Technomediacratic Society. Arbois: Muse d'Arbois. 1992.
Nechvatal, Joseph. Selected Writings. Paris: Editions Antoine
Candau. 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Edinburgh: Darien
Press. 1907.
O'Neil, Joseph. ed. Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1990.
Ostwald, Madelene. Structuring Virtual Urban Space: Aboroscent
Schemes. Droege, Peter. ed. Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of
the Information Revolution. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 1997. pp. 451- 482.

Bibliography265

Panofsky, Erwin. Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects

from Ancient Egypt to Bernini. New York: Abrams. 1991.
Parikka, Jussi. Archives of Software: Computer Viruses and the
Aesthesis of Media Accidents. The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and
Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. eds. Parikka,
Jussi and Sampson, Tony. Cresskill: Hampton Press. 2009.
Parikka, Jussi. Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer
Viruses. New York: Peter Lang. 2007.
Pennick, Nigel. The Ancient Science of Geomancy. London: Thames and
Hudson. 1979.
Popper, Frank. From Technological to Virtual Art. Cambridge: MIT
Press. 2007.
Popper, Frank. ArtAction and Participation. New York: New York
University. 1975.
Porphyry. L'Antro des Nymphes. Paris: Pliade. 1918.
Pylyshyn, Zenon. Here and There In the Visual Field. Pylyshyn, Zenon.
ed. Computational Processes in Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary
Perspective. Norwood: Ablex. 1988. pp. 210-238.
Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Reality. New York: Summit Books. 1991.
Romanyshyn, Robert. Technology as Symptom and Dream. London:
Routledge. 1989.
Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso. 1986.
Rothenberg, Albert. The Emerging Goddess. Chicago: University of
Chicago. 1979.
Roussel, Raymond. How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Cambridge: Exact
Change. 2005.
Royoux, Jean-Christophe. Expanded, Extended: Hritage,
Transformation et Ramifications d'un Concept Esthtique dans l'Art
Annees Soixante. Omnibus n23 January. 1998. pp. 5-8.

266 Joseph Nechvatal

Rudgley, Richard. The Alchemy of Culture: Intoxicants in Society. London:

British Museum Press. 1993.
Ruspoli, Mario. The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographic Record. New
York: Abrams. 1987.
Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. New York: Pendragon. 1986.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the
Turning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books. 1984.
Schmalenbach, Werner. Kurt Schwitters. New York: Abrams. 1970.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Truber and Co. 1907.
Schuyt, Michael., Elffers, Joost. and Collins, George. Fantastic
Architecture: Personel and Eccentric Visions. New York: Harry
Abrams. 1980.
Serres, Michel. Gense. Paris: B. Grasset. 1982.
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. 2007.
Solomon, Andrew. Dot Dot Dot. Artforum, February Issue.
1997. pp. 66-73.
Stace, Walter. The Teachings of the Mystics. New York: New
American. 1960.
Stein, Jack. Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press. 1960.
Stewart, Robert. ed. Ideas That Shaped Our World: Understanding the
Great Concepts of Then and Now. London: Marshall. 1997.
Talbott, Stephen. The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the
Machines in Our Midst. Sebastopol: O'Reilly and Associates. 1995.
Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age.
London: Pluto Press. 2004.

Bibliography267

Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity Architectural Acoustics

and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge: MIT
Press. 2002.
Vanderbeek, Stan. Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema:
A Proposal and Manifesto. Film Culture, No. 40, Spring.
1966. pp. 15-18.
Vanderbeek, Stan. Movies: Disposible Art, Synthetic Media and
Artificial Intelligence. Take One Film Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3.
1969. pp. 14-16.
Voegelin, Salome. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosphy of
Sound Art. London: Continuum. 2010.
Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts. London: Harvard University Press. 1990.
Warhol, Andy. and Hackett, Pat. POPism: The Warhol' 60s. London:
Hutchinson. 1980.
Weiss, Allen. S. Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th
Century Metaphysics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 1995.
Weiss, Allen. S. Phantasmic Radio. Duke University Press. 1995.
Westernhagen, Curt. von. Wagner: A Biography Volumes 1 and 2.
London: Cambridge University Press. 1978.
Wolff, Janet. The Social Production of Art. New York: New York
University Press. 1993.
York, Herbert. Nuclear Deterrence and the Military Uses of Space.
Daedalus: Weapons in Space Vol. I: Concepts and Technologies. Issue
114, No. 2, Spring. 1985. pp. 17-32.
Young, La Monte. and Mac Low, Jackson. eds. An Anthology of Chance
Operations. Bronx: Young and Mac Low. 1963.
Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co,
Inc. 1970.

Additional Licenses
Figure 6: 2006 Tessier, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Figure 7: 2007 Djtox The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for
any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.
Figure 8: 2006 Maurice Marcellin, used under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Figure 9: 2009 BobTheMad, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Figure 10: 2005 Andreas Praefcke, used under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Figure 11: 2005 Softeis, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Figure 12: 2004 Rafaelji, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Figure 13: 2007 tato grasso http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
Figure 14: 2005 Pabix, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/