Panel Statement

Panel: NeuroArts-Noise

Taking my lead from this panel’s framing statement, I wish to address the question of noise as an in-between. Drawing on my recent work on the subject of the ontology of noise, I hope to figure noise as über-relational, as nothing other than the essence of the ontological relation that is itself constitutive of all ontology when ontology is conceived of as relational. However, the way in which noise functions as an in-between renders problematic, I want to suggest, the very possibility of being able to figure or conceptualise the world in terms or concepts as infolded as “inside” or “outside” or, as in communications theory, “emitter” and “receiver” or, of more interest in the present context, “artwork” and “spectator/consumer”. Whilst this has perhaps always been the case, I will suggest that in our media-saturated world it is now more the case than ever that the new cognitive mappings afforded by works of art call for, à la Deleuze, a reconfiguration of the site of consciousness (or neural events). However, rather than simply relocating consciousness in the objects or media to which we had imagined consciousness attends (“the brain is the screen”), I will argue that when filtered through the in-between of noise, it may be necessary rather to suggest that consciousness is deployed in a less-defined and wholly distributed space and that this might have important implications for how we think about modes of artistic consumption.

• Greg Hainge, University of Queensland, Australia