The following essay was published in cultural futures broadsheet, to accompany Cultural Futures: Place, Ground, and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts, Auckland - December 1-5 2005

A commitment to noise; finding messy spaces inbetween art history, digital media, and the gallery

By Su Ballard

For a long time it appeared that the discipline of art history was incapable of adequately addressing digital media as it entered into the spaces of the gallery. Why?

Image: Rachael Rakena's Close 2003/2004The following essay was published in cultural futures broadsheet, to accompany Cultural Futures: Place, Ground, and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts, Auckland - December 1-5 2005

A commitment to noise; finding messy spaces inbetween art history, digital media, and the gallery

By Su Ballard

For a long time it appeared that the discipline of art history was incapable of adequately addressing digital media as it entered into the spaces of the gallery. Why?

Image: Rachael Rakena's Close 2003/2004One reason is located in disciplinary and sensory distinctions between the sonic and the visual, between the spatial and the temporal, between what we think we see and what we think can only be heard. In accommodating these disciplinary habits, we became accustomed to simply looking in gallery spaces and listening in concert halls without addressing where and how these experiences overlapped. Duplicity in these rules of discipline has tempered our affective knowledges of contemporary art, and in particular hampered our ability to critically evaluate digital installation. In raising these questions, this paper sits alongside recent work in visual cultural studies such as that undertaken by Ernst van Alphen which addresses the ways in which art and new ways of thinking about looking can shape thought. I want to suggest that a commitment to noise offers one possible way to address these problems of aesthetics, media and materiality by highlighting the possibility that the temporal and spatial parameters of the work are not pure, or contained. In committing to noise we also locate the viewer as a crucial material force within the digital installation, and commit to installation as what emerges from the interplay of material forces.
What does this have to do with digital media and senses of place or location? Disciplines exclude. A discipline like any framing device sees only the things it is determined (in both senses of the word) to see. At the very least disciplines broadly exclude they things they have been established to control, or, the things they simply do not understand. At their very worst they draw lines that include very little apart from some predetermined slice of pure space; whatever it's practice. Disciplines are operations of power that operate through, alongside and beneath our languages and practices of digital media. Disciplines have not only written themselves into academic institutions, art galleries, and our public spaces, but into the very systems through which we approach the world. Hence, protests against the increasing power of neo-liberal politics in art institutions become drawn into debates around economics (the creative industries) rather than around visuality or sonics. This is because the language of the discipline is incapable of addressing that which it excludes, and that which might threaten its borders - to do so it must step 'outside' its own languages. (In much the same way this essay is located within a disciplinary language which by its nature excludes other voices.)
However, to maintain this view problematically lends the discipline a significance and an autonomy that is not totally accurate. In reality, disciplines are not autonomous but connected (rather than distinguished) by leaky messy edges. The edge of a discipline is a liminal space rather than a border. This raises the possibility of operating within disciplines, whilst also transforming their ground. What would happen if we 'looked' at these spaces in a different way. On a small scale, I'm curious about the implications of using the tools of art history to address one of art history's exclusions - that is, digital media. In this framework the myths of cross-disciplinarity are also problematised. Whilst standing in this space, art theory can be used to discuss economics, and economic theory discusses art. This is nothing new, but it is a tricky position to maintain. To commit to this in-between location requires a practice that includes rather than excludes; and, which highlights again and again the cultural and social complicity of art history.

So, why is it that disciplinary studies such as art history have found it increasingly difficult to embrace digital media, or any media which might cross, disrupt and disturb these divisions. One reason for this is found in the post-renaissance western traditions of sensory and intellectual division. For example, digital installation is new media (that is media which cross hitherto fixed aesthetic boundaries) located within the structures of the art gallery.

Yet, despite significant challenges to our methodologies from performance art, happenings, sound art, and other generative practices since the 1960s; the current disciplinary languages of the gallery still cannot adequately examine the relationship of a viewer to the digital installation. If my presence before (or within the work) permanently changes the media, structure, aesthetic, spaces, and duration of the work, how do I use the standard tools of aesthetic analysis? In some cases how do I even separate the work from myself (or vice versa). Our affective knowledges of digital media are tempered by our duplicity in the rules of discipline.

To be responsible to digital installation it is necessary to develop methods for critical analysis, which derive from the works themselves, and that question the fixidity of previous visual analysis. In order to make this claim for a new approach to digital installation, I contend that information theory is applicable and useful in the field of aesthetics The fractured spaces of digital installation are haunted by histories of information science. Information is not simply complicit with noise; it is totally dependant upon it for understanding. Without noise, information cannot get through. A commitment to noise in critical analysis engages the writer in a politics of noise, a commitment to entropy; and the potential of a theoretical position that reaches towards its own heat-death. Along the way, it is hoped that an entropic equilibrium of noise is established, upon which the digital art installation and its viewer balance.

Here then the tools of art history require transformation. The digital installation itself has already played an active role in helping us redress contemporary aesthetics. In addressing noise as a process, a material, an image, a sound, and a vehicle for discussions of digital media within art history, this essay has raised the possibility of displacing the Western humanist intellectual position of the privileged outsider or the pictorial aesthete. In particular, digital media plus art history requires the critical relationship of a viewer to digital art installation. It suggests that a commitment to noise locates the viewer as an essential material force within the work, and that the temporal and spatial parameters of the work are not pure, or contained, but infected by noise. Noise is both process and a material - it is the substance through which information travels. A commitment to noise shows that addressing the process of materiality in digital installation exposes the prior commitments of art history to a timeless, appearance-based object of analysis.

The digital artwork plays an active and relational role in helping us redress contemporary aesthetics. A detailed examination of the specific relations of digital artworks demonstrates that it is necessary to engage an open, historically-located analysis, which is not necessarily self-reflexive, but which does suggest a commitment to intrusions, interference, and impurity. Noise, then, not as negative disruption but as the very material by which we access the work. In demanding the commitment of both the critic and the artwork, noise offers a critical framework by which a range of works engaging the viewer and spaces of installation can be approached. Diverse works that suggest this approach (because of their interweaving of the materials of sound, image, surface, movement, and viewer) include: et.al's The Fundamental Practice (2005) which demands a simultaneously mobilized and captured viewer; Sean Kerr's Stacker (2002) that invites an apprehension of sonics as affective force; Ronnie van Hout's On the Run (2004) which distributes the viewer and the work through the uncertain spaces of mobile technologies; and Rachael Rakena's Rerehiko (2002) that suggests the fluid spaces of water as a location for tension as well as immersion.

While these works challenge the prior commitments of art history, and all suggest a shift in the viewer/ artwork relationship, the analysis I am proposing here makes me complicit with some other problematic trajectories. This essay (and the project of which it is a part) sit in an interstitial space attempting to bring together the non-visual, non-aesthetic, scientific-based discipline of information theory, with the aesthetic and visual traditions of art history. The source of art history's complicity within an intellectual project that eliminates or excludes information (a key material of digital media) can be found in divisions of media into sensory alignments of time and space. Information theories also have problematic genealogies, such that introducing information analysis to the gallery will not 'solve' digital media. Is it possible to affect such a challenge to both disciplines without losing the particularity of each; and, in transforming art history's tools of analysis, does digital media itself become complicit in a betrayal of the very material upon which it is founded? Perhaps, an in-between place demands a betrayal of location (or media-specificity). This paper has suggested that the diplomacy of noise offers a potential tool for digital media analysis, without proposing a definite answer. Disciplines are themselves places, locations from which we enter into conversation. In addressing the very exclusions of disciplinary practices, it is possible to see that borders are not fixed, but porous. That a viewer of digital media is still a viewer but a very differently composed and defined one to that previously understood to enter into gallery spaces. This means that making noise in galleries will literally change what we see and hear.

Su Ballard is an artist, writer and musician whose research focuses on new media art with a particular emphasis on contemporary digital and time-based installation from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is currently based in the CCAP (Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and is a senior lecturer in Art Theory at Otago Polytechnic School of Art, Dunedin.

Published in “cultural futures” broadsheet, to accompany Cultural Futures: Place, Ground, and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts. Auckland - December 1-5 2005
http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz