IN LIKENESS OF ANGELIC NOISE is a collaborative, audiovisual art / sound project

by Delaja Fedorco (SK) and Nyx Guenther (AT/DE). Together we create multimedia art projects and live experiences that question themes such as modern big data technology, digitalization, signals and the fabric of reality. Through the use of multimedia technology like analog sound synthesis, signal bending, live visuals, graphics programming, web-art and poetic and philosophical exploration we want to propose a radical way of viewing and criticizing big data and the creation and breaking of reality through technology.

Our collaboration has started as a project called REALITY MODULATION ENGINE during an artist residency in Kosice, Slovakia. Now we are searching for an opportunity to build upon the concepts that we have established and expand them with further parts. Both of us are coming from a technological background, having worked in or studied IT and having since transitioned to visual media arts and sound art / music respectively. Together we work in a mutually complimentary way in our combination of sound and music and synergistic in terms of building technological exhibition and live-performance solutions.

This background is also where we base many but not exclusively all of our philosophical paradigms in our artistic practice. On one hand we are deeply familiar with data, its collection and transformation which nowadays takes the form of technologies such as AI and large language models. We see this as a process which has been started with the conversion of the first analog signals into digital ones, which became data and has had a multitude of implications for all aspects of human life. On the other hand we relate those developments to our own personal lives. We both are transgender and we have grown up as the first generation of digital natives, in the internet which also served as the space where a lot of our identity-development happened. This is a deeply relatable shared experience that we lived through entirely independently of each other.

Naturally we have been feeling like but also questioning how a major part of this experience is informed and shaped by big data and living a life in the internet. Having experienced recent developments like the push for a decentralization of the web and the upcoming of AI and looking back at technological developments that came before our time in the internet we felt the need to revisit this critically. With our project we are aiming to share our experiences and perspectives as a contribution to the ongoing discussion. At the same time our goal is to propose a wholistic way to criticize which takes the entire development since the digital signal into account and not just recent times.

The purpose of this project lies in signals. As light has shined upon the first living beings and their voices were perceived for the first time, so came the first signals into being. Analog signals, driven by physical laws. It is all waves, to be honest. Even before communication, light and waves have facilitated perception. So every living thing started perceiving. It was peaceful. Then humans came. Almost immediately (it took them about 50.000 years. This is however an insignificant amount of time for the planet and its mechanisms) they started commodifying signals. Just like they have commodified all the living beings before that.

Signals were created, first through means such as instruments. We will skip this. Then signals were recreated with electricity. The analogue signal was born, an electric capturing of reality. We started listening to music and looked at pretty pictures that were recorded with microphones and cameras. It was a reasonable record of reality, although not a perfect one, on tapes and cassettes. The most significant characteristic is, that this was an analogue signal, meaning that it is capable of recreating the original waves that make up the signal with infinite precision (within reason).

This also made the signal prone to noise: vinyl scratching, scan-line inaccuracies, etc. People noticed the noise. And they set out to get rid of it. As if it was an undesirable fault rather than a quality of the medium itself. It lies however in human nature. This was not the first time that humans tried their best to tame, order and destroy the chaos that is inherent to nature and physicality. It is seen as imperfect, even though it is not even chaotic. We just simply cannot easily wrap our heads around it so we perceive it as illogical and thus try to bring it into order.

A next major step towards reaching the goal of what is incorrectly assumed to be perfect signals is called digitalization. By taking analogue, physical measures and ignoring almost every part of it except for two discrete sample points at the extreme ends (the metaphor for the human condition here should be obvious) humans were able to reach new hights of civilization. The age of digitalization has begun. Digital signals were just as consequential of an invention as electricity itself. And the natural noise of the analogue world was tamed. No more fluctuations, every signal was just one of two states now. Sampling analogue signals with a certain sample rate made those discrete samples easy to manipulate and it made it easy to further smooth out and remove any noise. Perfectly noise-less and abstract signals could even be constructed entirely from null.

Of course those do not actually exist at the time that they are created, but (almost) analogue signals can be made from them which then can be perceived. This abstraction is the basic principle of what we call a computer. And the noise was contained. But not for long: signals became data and data became big data. The process of digitalization never stopped and recently it has brought us AIs which are in their core large collections of data that is operated on and sorted in a multitude of ways with simple and rather brainless math. Signals, now data do not any longer represent or recreate reality. Rather they break it, by creating new reality. This is a chaotic process which serves as a breeding ground for massive profits, bad actors and the destruction and reforming of culture.

Through this, noise was reintroduced into our digital landscape, which ever increasingly is becoming the only landscape. This time it is not analogue noise that stems from the nature of signals. It is artificial, digital noise. And since it is the only landscape and since those noisy signals define reality, it is increasingly breaking and defining our entire reality. Does this mean we are all doomed to sink and blur away in digital noise? The good news is, we can create noise too: counter-noise, if you will. Maybe this could even be called a form of personal, digital warfare against the machine. By defining our own reality and breaking with expectations we introduce our own unpredictable signals into the system, our own noise. Through means of rejecting the digital noise machine and true self-expression we create digital spaces that take the breath and bandwith away from it. We use noise to force open a room of nonconformity.

In doing so we break the reality of the system that breaks reality. IN LIKENESS OF ANGELIC NOISE is an active participant in this process. It does so by creating noise. And it tries to reveal this process, to facilitate and show means for everyone to participate in this process. ANGELIC NOISE is noise but it is also light. It is bright shining and hopeful noise. Anyone can and everyone should think about signals, noise and most importantly: data. The signals and data that we put out and that we receive. We need to be aware of how those shape and interact with reality, how it breaks our reality and how we can break it back to regain ownership over it. This can make many forms: expressing oneself with art, creating weird music, being queer and trans, deleting one's online data. IN LIKENESS OF ANGELIC NOISE does all of that and it shows how to.