[ISEA2024] Paper: Monika Jaeckel — Realizing noise – creating space for unknown expressions

Abstract

Keywords:
noise, listening, unknowable, unlearning

This essay considers noisy expressions as potential space providers that defer an anticipatory attitude of classification. It questions how our accustomed aurality prevents us from listening to emergent voices and noises around us. Feminist new materialism is com-bined with indigenous resonant studies and critical readings of information theories to examine and undo the negentropic exclusion of noise for knowledge production. Noise causes reverberations not only because of its contribution to information but also due to its unavoidability as an interference pattern. However, congruent to the one-sided interpretation of agency, noise’s affectivity has been rendered dismissible within Western modernity. Despite suppression, distortion, or being declared incomprehensible by Western metaphysics, interferences, when considered in its complexity, noise discloses itself as an equally destructive and creative force. However, by perceiving reverberating interferences as noisy signals, their material affectivity shifts the affordance of response/i/ability. Thus, this essay argues that a re-interpretation of noise fundamentally contributes to widening the frequencies for meaning/mattering urgently needed for the pressing tasks of un/learning.

  • Monika Jaeckel, independent artist researcher Berlin, Germany