Network Noise not Noise

Description:

Network Noise not Noise was an online exhibition that featured work by artists Cory Arcangel, Aleksandra Domanovic, JODI, Guthrie Lonergan, and Lee Walton. Presented on a project website, the exhibition coincided with Noise not Noise, a two-day symposium exploring the changing role of noise in culture. 

Of the exhibition, Western Front executive director Caitlin Jones writes:

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

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

Curated by Caitlin Jones.