Beyond unwanted sound : noise, affect and aesthetic moralism

PhD ThesisThis thesis uses Baruch Spinoza’s notion of affect to critically rethink the correlation between noise, ‘unwantedness’ and ‘badness’. Against subject-oriented definitions, which understand noise to be constituted by a listener; and object-oriented definitions, which define noise as a type of sound; I focus on what it is that noise does. Using the relational philosophy of Michel Serres in combination with Spinoza’s philosophy of affects, I posit noise as a productive, transformative force and a necessary component of material relations. I consider the implications of this affective and relational model for two lineages: what I identify as a ‘conservative’ politics of silence, and a ‘transgressive’ politics of noise. The former is inherent to R. Murray Schafer’s ‘aesthetic moralism’, where noise is construed as ‘bad’ to silence’s ‘good’. Instead, I argue that noise’s ‘badness’ is secondary, relational and contingent. This ethico-affective understanding thus allows for silence that is felt to be destructive and noise that is pleasantly serendipitous. Noise’s positively productive capacity can be readily exemplified by the use of noise within music, whereby noise is used to create new sonic sensations. An ethicoaffective approach also allows for an affirmative (re)conceptualization of noise music, which moves away from rhetoric of failure, taboo and contradiction. In developing a relational, ethico-affective approach to noise, this thesis facilitates a number of key conceptual shifts. Firstly, it serves to de-centre the listening subject. According to this definition, noise does not need to be heard as unwanted in order to exist; indeed, it need not be heard at all. Secondly, this definition no longer constitutes noise according to a series of hierarchical dualisms. Consequently, the structural oppositions of noise/signal, noise/silence and noise/music are disrupted. Finally, noise is understood to be ubiquitous and foundational, rather than secondary and contingent: it is inescapable, unavoidable and necessary

Playing code: Interacting with computers through rhythm

This research project involved the production and public performance of eight audio-visual art works and a corresponding reflective commentary. The aim in creating the artworks was to slow down and translate digital information, in the form of the rhythms and patterns of computer processes, into musical, textual and visual forms. In this reflective commentary, I argue that such processes of playing code offer a distinct form of HCI (human-computer interaction) that has significant musical and critical value in a field that has hitherto been overly dominated by movement, gesture and touch. Through a research process that involved both learning to play the established highly evolved rhythmic artforms of Afro-Cuban and flamenco music, as well as deconstructing data communication signals and developing experimental computer interfaces, I immersed myself in a series of environments in which rhythmic codes were embodied and transmitted through sound. I argue that the systems I developed, by incorporating a variety of cultural traditions - each based upon the transmission of these rhythmical codes - lend what Yuk Hui has described as technodiversity to the field of interactive computer art. Drawing upon postphenomenology and media archaeology, as well as Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, I argue for the importance of practice-based methods - making circuits, writing software, performing, exhibiting and studying the music within their localities - in the forging of productive new links between the fields of HCI data communications and diverse global musical traditions. By making data audible and developing experimental new hermeneutic relations with computers, my work suggests productive expansions to our extant relationship with technological artifacts in terms of embodiment, as well as offering practical approaches towards developing technodiversity

Telepresence: Joan Jonas and the Emergence of Performance and Video Art in the 1970s

This dissertation is a study of the early career of the American artist Joan Jonas that spans the years 1970-1984. At the turn of the 1970s, Jonas was one of the first artists to pick up a video camera. Exploring “live” video’s unique capacity to mediate the present moment, Jonas actively integrated the technology into her live pieces, which are some of the earliest examples of what was then first called “performance art.” Performance art has often been aligned with presence. In contrast, I argue that what at stake in the proliferation of live artworks by Jonas and others that merged performance and video was not a reserve of unmediated experience, but a presence that was newly technologized: telepresence. As Jonas investigated the novel ability to perform at a distance enabled by electronic media, her work led somewhere surprising: to telegraphy, telepathy, and the earliest telephones—“tele”-technologies that appear long obsolete (or completely fantastical). Evoking optical telegraphs, spirit mediums, speaking trumpets, and science fictional prostheses, Jonas’s early oeuvre reactivates the historical contexts and unrealized potentials surrounding these dead media. In so doing, she illuminates enduring formations of the body, subjectivity, and teletechnology underlying not only the twinned emergence of performance and video art in the 1970s, but also telepresence as a seemingly very contemporary (and increasingly pervasive) category of experience

Virtual Nature: A practice-led enquiry into the relationship between painting and vernacular photography through the process of the painted monotype

My practice-led research explores the relationship between painting and vernacular photography through the process of painted monotypes. This project has developed from an ongoing fascination with the visual qualities of photography and what happens when you translate photographs into other material forms, such as painting. The aim of this project is to develop images that interrogate how painted monotypes provide a distinctive interpretation of embodied experience through their visual, material and sensory qualities. Today, like no other time in history, photography is embedded in our daily lives through hand-held devices and the interface of the digital screen. My research examines how this embedded experience of the photographic relates to the processes and visual qualities of the painted monotype. The project is focused on three primary locations as subject matter: the aquarium, the botanical glasshouse and the habitat diorama. Through my research I explore how these sites function in optically and conceptually similar ways to the world of images, through shared notions of virtuality and indexicality. This research is informed by the work of Édouard Vuillard, Mamma Andersson, Peter Doig, David Hockney and the landscapes of Gustav Klimt. These painters interrogate the territory between painting and lens-based images in very specific ways, relating to visual perception, embodied vision, figure and ground relationships, and visual textures. In a theoretical context, my examination of the relationship between painting and photography has been motivated by the writings of Elizabeth Wynne Easton, Aaron Scharf, John Berger and Russell Ferguson; while Anne Friedberg, Rob Shields, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Geoffrey Batchen, Kris Paulsen and Johanna Love have been instrumental in determining a connection to the virtual and the index in my research

The Telecommunications and Data Acquisition Report

This publication, one of a series formerly titled The Deep Space Network Progress Report, documents DSN progress in flight project support, tracking and data acquisition research and technology, network engineering, hardware and software implementation, and operations. In addition, developments in Earth-based radio technology as applied to geodynamics, astrophysics and the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence are reported

Movement: Journey of the Beat

Movement: Journey of the Beat addresses the trajectory and transition of popular culture through the modality of rhythm. It configures fresh narratives and new histories necessary to understand why auditory cultures have become increasingly significant in the digital age. Atomised and mobile technologies, which utilise sonic media through streaming, on-line radio and podcasts, have become ubiquitous in a post-work environment. These sonic media provide not merely the mechanisms of connection but also the contexts for understanding changing formations of both identity and community. This research addresses, through rhythm, how popular music culture, central to changing perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘others’ through patterns of production and consumption, must also be viewed as instrumental in shaping new platforms of communication that have resonance not only through the emergence of new social networks and cultural economies but also in the development of media literacies and pedagogic strategies. The shift to online technologies for cultural production and global consumption, although immersed in leisure practices, more significantly alludes to changing dynamics of power and knowledge. An online ecology represents a significant shift in the role of place and time in creative production and its subsequent access. Popular music invariably provides an entry point and subsequent platform for such shifts and this thesis looks to the rhythms within this popular culture in as much as they encode these transformations. This doctoral research builds on the candidate’s established career as music producer, broadcaster, journalist and teacher to construct an appropriate theoretical framework to indicate how the construction, transmission and consumption of popular music rhythms give an understanding of changing social contexts. The thesis maps the movement of commonly recognised popular rhythms from their places of construction to the spaces of reception within broader political, socio-economic and cultural frameworks. The thesis probes the contribution of place and time in transforming global cultures, via social geography and memory, positioning such changes within readings of mobility, stasis, modernity and technology. By consciously addressing multiple disciplines, from populist to academic, Movement provides evidence of how wider structural changes have become reified within the beat and how in turn rhythm provides an appropriate modality through which change can be negotiated and understood

Encoded Inequality: Hacking The Gender Bias In Technology

There has been growing concern on issues regarding the transparency and opacity of new media, from the algorithmic bias in predictive policing to data extraction practices of social media companies. In this dissertation I address the problem of concealment and opacity in modern technology through investigations into the infrastructures of technoculture as well as material-discursive entanglements of gender. This involves a discussion on visibility in technoculture and an articulation of the infrastructures of technoculture through systems of information, efficiency, rationality and progress. The dissertation is organized around a series of case studies that range from technological objects like video game consoles, to processes of production such as electronics factory systems, to video game culture. I also examine the ways in which gendered discourses is embedded within and around these infrastructures and the ways in which gendered interacts with other elements in the technocultural assemblage. This occurs through a materialist intervention that reveals, interrogates and analyzes the relationship between gender and the technocultural assemblage. This is conducted through a series of case studies that include a sociohistorical analysis of women&rsquo;s needlework and women in early computing assembly as well as a critical political economic investigation into the working conditions and labor of electronics factory workers. I also look at instances and practices that use or break technology in unexpected ways, such as feminist ROM hacking, and how these practices reveal the regulation and subsequent concealment of relations of gender, race and class in the infrastructures of technoculture. Ultimately, my dissertation seeks to examine several key technocultural infrastructures, to critically engage and expose various practices of concealment in technoculture, to investigate the relationship between discourses of gender and technocultural infrastructure, and to begin a formulation of several infrastructural elements of resistance.</p

NASA patent abstracts bibliography: A continuing bibliography. Section 2: Indexes (supplement 18)

Entries for 3900 patents and patent applications citations for the period May 1980 through December 1980 are listed. Indexes for subject, invention, source, number, and accession number are included

NASA Patent Abstracts bibliography: A continuing bibliography. Section 2: Indexes (supplement 20)

Entries for approximately 4000 citations for the period May 1969 through December 1981 are listed. Subject, invention, source, number, and accession number indexes are included

NASA patent abstracts bibliography: A continuing bibliography. Section 2: Indexes (supplement 19)

Citations of approximately 4,000 patents and patent applications for the period May 1969 through July 1981 are indexed according to subject, invention, source, number, and accession number