Signal Aesthetics

Abstract

A number of recent contemporary electronic art and performance practices erect signposts in “deeply” (e.g.: Athanasius Kircher) and 20th century (e.g.: Brion Gysin) histories of media and technology. Many such hardware-based techniques can be read as literal fieldwork; as the performance of a media-archeological ‘dig’ and materialised electrical phenomenon by and for both artist and audience. Providing the experience of media-as-signal, and hence media-as-material, performance practice can create a sensible laboratory which reverberates with the history of media studies, chronologies of and fascination with contemplative and perceptual (self-?) experiments with and through technology (e.g.: Beer, Walter, Weiner, Metzinger). What results is a signal-aesthetics that is a distillation of historical practices of media and consciousness studies and alternation, reflected through contemporary immediacies of media signals. The materialisation of the signal phenomenon outside of the more standard forms (I.e.: On screen, through a speaker, inside the laptop) is particularly relevant to these practices. The signal becomes manifest either in the environment (e.g.: ball lightening) or directly perceptible in the brain and mechanical functioning of the human body (e.g.: stroboscopic patterns or static/electric shocks). Thus signal aesthetics operates as an active agent (non-human entity) in the environment rather than a passive consumption as with other modes of media arts practice. The signal directly performs both media practices immediate environment altering EMF’s and the human structure by relying on its receptive signals (mirrors to the non-human signal) and unconscious responses. This in turn highlights the mechanical and material functioning of the environment and the body in direct relation to the functioning of technology.