My participation in the

55th VENICE BIENNALE OF ART

NOISE

1st June – 24th November 2013

An exhibition proposed by

Curator Marisa Vescovo

In collaboration with

Art critics: Alessandro Carrer, Bruno Barsanti and Boris Brollo

Official program of the 55th Venice Biennale of Art

Organized by:

De Arte Association

Location:

Magazzino di Campo San Cassiano

Calle della Regina, 2254

Campo San Cassian, Venice, Italy

Information website:

http://www.dearteassociazione.org/www.dearteassociazione.org/NOISE.html

vOluptuary drOid décOlletage (2002) 66x120 inches

Viral Venture (2009) projected on the raw wall

Viral Venture is a digital art projection (and/or ongoing installation) by the artist Joseph Nechvatal with a musical score by the composer Rhys Chatham.

The Viral Venture projection consists of the artificial-life computer virus attacking my digital images of a retina and anus. It acts in real time as modeled on the biological viral mode as programmed by Stephane Sikora in C++.

See: http://youtu.be/L3dlXV3K2C4

NOISE has been selected out of only 35 of 400 art projects submitted to the 2013 Biennale Selection Committee.

Exhibition concept

NOISE deals with visual noise in the contemporary field. It outlines a new aesthetics of noise, excess and immersion.

NOISE is based on a 2011 book titled Immersion Into Noise by the artist / theorist Joseph Nechvatal. According to him, the new digital technologies convey an excessive amount of informational data that leads to the progressive merging of the traditional concepts of figure and ground. This merging generates new forms of immersive noise and brings along with it new viewing expectations and experiences.

The dozen artists selected for NOISE engage mainly with digital media and adopt a modus operandi based on immersion into noise by placing process in a privileged position with regards to representation. They frequently utalize techniques that might have previously been termed as leading to error. They,

however, perform a mode of détournement by using error to create

unexpected aesthetic critical pleasures.

NOISE

curatorial statement

This project takes as its starting point a book published in 2011 by the artist Joseph Nechvatal, Immersion Into Noise. In the text, the artist outlines an aesthetics of noise as an experience of excess that contains in it a politically oriented strategy to be explored as a means of addressing the state of

semantic impoverishment in which art today resides due to the value accorded to spectacle and decoration by a globally mediated late-capitalist society. For Nechvatal, the art of noise represents an element of resistance capable of offering new relational modes whilst drawing us directly and authentically towards “our inner world, to the life of our imagination with its intense drives, suspicions, fears, and loves (...).” The operative potential of noise art – which traces its theoreticalfoundations through Nietzsche by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, Russolo’s noise music,Jarry’s Pataphysics, the writings of Bataille and Debord, Fluxus, Jimi Hendrix and neuroscience – offers us a means of overcoming the abuses of the spectacle, with its instant legibility, that is often typical of art today. Its view is towards a return to the essential principle of indeterminacy.

In its usual sense, noise is understood as an element of interference and disruption in the atmosphere and/or in communication. In acoustics, noise is a disruptive factor at odds with the data transmitted within a system; in electronics, it refers to all the unwanted signals which interfere with

the useful transmitted signal or the signal to be processed, typically found on a channel (medium) of human or electronic communication; in psychology, noise is a disruption caused by an excess of information, such that even a potentially useful piece of information is unrecognised or difficult to identify.

Despite the fact that words like “noisy”, “unpleasant” and “grating” are often used to describe the sound of harsh dissonance – i.e. the quality of sounds that seem unstable and are characterized by a need to resolve to a stable consonance – in actual fact all music with a harmonic or tonal basis incorporates some degree of dissonance. “Noise” is thus an integral part and must be considered in terms of immanence. It is not simply a parasite distorting an object of communication, rendering it grating or incomprehensible, but is in fact a constitutive element. Noise art is founded on the principle that noise is part of the object on an ontological level; it is its necessary condition. Its validity is based on the assumption that “while rhizomatic growth and inter-relations are unpredictable (Deleuze), 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”.

In other words, the role of art is to render dense with meaning that part of communication which usually escapes codification and understanding – NOISE.

Alessandro Carrer, Bruno Barsanti and Boris Brollo

Book: Immersion Into Noise

http://openhumanitiespress.org/immersion-into-noise.html

Luigi Russolo's 1913 manifesto/letter text The Art of Noises

One hundred years after The Art of Noises by Luigi Russolo, the exhibition reflects upon noise as a necessary condition and an integral part of any communication process. The role of art is to render dense with meaning that part of communication which usually escapes codification and understanding, so to return to an essential principle of indeterminacy. By assuming a modus operandi based on listening, or immersion, the artists chosen for the exhibition place processuality in a privileged position with regard to the demands for representation, while locating in what might be termed error an essential precondition for coming to understand the complexity of existence.

RETURN