For

more information about the author, please visit: www.aprior.net Noise at the interface Andrew Prior

Abstract The notion of noise occupies a contested territory, in which it is framed as pollution and detritus even as it makes its opposite1 a possibility - noise is always defined in opposition to something else, even if this other is not quite clear. This paper explores noise in the context of the interface asking what its affordances as an idea may contribute to our understanding of interface. I draw historically on information theory in particular to initiate this exploration. Background Noise can be understood in a wide variety of ways most obviously as unwelcome sound, either because of excess volume, inappropriate context or inharmonic qualities of the sound. It can also be thought of outside of the realm of sound - for example Information Theory defines it in contrast to signal, which in turn is framed as the content of a message that one wishes to communicate. Here, noise may or may not be sound; but it is the part of a communication one does not want. Culturally speaking, noise has a particularly interesting status if we initially understand it as sidelined, unwelcome and worthless; noise has, through these same qualities, also maintained an ongoing power to express dissent from accepted norms, to question value, aesthetics, hegemony. An understanding of Information Theory is useful here, as it was a major factor in the development of the concept of digital information, together with some of the primary methods of dealing with such information. The impact upon the interface within the context of Information Theory In A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) Claude Shannon, builds out from work on Pulse Code Modulation by Nyquist (1924) and Hartley (1928), outlining a way in which any communication might be encoded mathematically, stored numerically and decoded back into its original form2. Information Theory developed out of this to encompass the mathematics and the material means, the electronics, logistics etc. Shannons initial focus was on strengthening signals for the improvement of mass-media systems (telephone networks in particular), but clearly developing a means to deal with information digitally has impacted far beyond this initial remit.

1 What is the opposite of noise? The range of possibilities indicate something of the flexibility of this term: Signal? Silence? Harmony? Even these are subject to interpretation.

Thanks to Morton Riis here for pointing out that such processes can also be traced back to work on the Vocoder, also carried out in Bell Laboratories in the 1920s - 30s. (Schroeder 2004:3) - 1 -

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Shannons paper begins by considering the problems of a generic communication system diagrammatically (see above). The diagram shows engineering noise can interfere with the transmission of a message and modulate its meaning - a key problem for Information Theory was about finding ways to block or overcome noise within the system. Interfaces are points of exchange between two systems, though they are concerned more with input than output (presumably every output of one system is an input of another or by dint of not being an input elsewhere represent a dead-end). Each of these boxes can be considered discrete systems one can think of interfaces between any two consecutive parts of this chain. Moving briefly beyond the scope of Information Theory to focus on the characteristics of the interface itself, one might invoke the process of encapsulation within Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Encapsulation allows objects to hide their internal methods such that only those methods that need to be accessed outside the object are public. In effect an interface is the public face of a (set of) processe(s) to take an analogue example, the user of a Hi-Fi amplifier doesnt need access to the electronics that make it work, so only a few controls are offered, the rest of its functionality hidden away inside the black box. Within OOP software interfaces, the encapsulation is quite literal, a requirement of the process of coding itself. One can argue then that whilst interfaces offer particular functionality, they also imply making other kinds of interaction impossible, hiding away the workings within the black box. Interfaces then, act as filters blocking out certain messages, whilst privileging others for relay3. The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible Interestingly though, a number of other papers within this conference (Riis, Jackson) take a different approach in which interfaces, themselves limited by the affordances of the system cannot therefore be said to be actively filtering or blocking particular interactions. - 2 -

For more information about the author, please visit: www.aprior.net selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design. (Shannon 1948:1) In Information Theory, a well-designed system is one which allows an appropriate spectrum of possibilities to be communicated (through resolution bandwidth, and encoding), whilst differentiating sufficiently between noise and signal by including enough redundancy to overcome any noise within the channel.

Culture as Information The impact of Information Theory can be found in so many areas because it provides such a reductive and therefore highly focused way of considering communication. Despite enormous strides forward in technology since Information Theory was at the cutting edge its legacy is one of literally millions of interfaces based on this reductive logic. At this scale, the question of what is noise and what is signal, what is an appropriate spectrum of possibilities to be communicated and how signal and noise is differentiated is thrown into stark relief, drastically altering our experience of technology, culture and biopolitics. If there is an informational quality to contemporary culture, then it might be not so much because we exchange more information than before, or even because we buy, sell or copy informational commodities, but because cultural processes are taking on the attributes of information they are increasingly grasped and conceived in terms of their informational dynamics [... that is with the relation between noise and signal, including fluctuations and microvariations, entropic emergencies and negentropic emergences, positive feedback and chaotic processes.] (Terranova 2004:7) Marxs Fragment on Machines (also known as the Fragment on General Intellect) explores the notion that technology can embody knowledge and that the result of this process is a deskilling and further alienation of the worker. Whilst encapsulation is a function of Object Oriented Programming specifically and interfaces in general, it is information theory that first provided a way in which any message could be translated into digital information. It is as information that human relations are most effectively subsumed in technology, and therefore as information that they become subject to the filtering and relay processes of interfaces. The general intellect [i.e. knowledge as the main productive force] includes formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and language games. Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as productive machines in contemporary labour and do not need to take on a mechanical body or an electronic soul. (Virno 2001) Such objectified knowledge [] embedded in the automated system of machinery (Virno 2001) may not need a physical substrate, but as Terranova points out, increasingly the transformations of technology are echoed in social relations and culture elsewhere. The frustrating experience of ringing an automated call centre exemplifies a situation in which systematization of human exchange, requiring decisions to be made about priorities of service in advance, results in only allowing certain kinds of interaction along strictly prescribed - 3 -

For more information about the author, please visit: www.aprior.net channels. Conversely, exchange outside these routes becomes impossible, recasting potentially perfectly reasonable interaction as noise. Whilst Information Theory is intended to operate at a micro level, encoding the constituent parts of messages (such as letters or waveforms); one might argue its logic results in a kind of scalar symmetry whereby operations at a macro level of communication such as this call centre example, mimic its reductionism, not only resembling it at the level of metaphor. Information and Semantics Digitality brings to media, and relations mediated by technology, a leveling effect in which they all become information (which in information theory terms means bits of information binary digits, 1s and 0s); and as such become subject to the assumptions that determine digital information. Once media are encoded as information there is little ontological difference between sound, text and visual media, or for that matter software. Since the user interface to a computer program is always symbolic, and involves syntactical and symbolic mappings for operations, it always boils down to being a formal language. (Cramer & Fuller 2008:150) Conversely one might argue that despite operating through symbolic operations, our experience of media and technology never boil down to only being a formal language: these are the means of transformation, but the transformed material still maintains a complex matrix of meanings beyond grammars toward the gramatological. Here is a tension between the immanence of media, embodied in its material means, and an immediacy of media, in which meaning is communicated even as the medium itself is effaced (Bolter & Grusin 1999). Bolter & Grusins notion of hypermediation (referencing the former) complicates the situation, as they argue that foregrounding material and mediated qualities can, counter-intuitively, come to represent a very immediate experience. This is a discussion beyond the remit of this paper, but media as information are caught in a perpetual cycle of reconstituted meanings, only made more acute by the collapsing of differences between content and interface, one medium and another. Information bounces from channel to channel and from medium to medium; it changes as it is decoded and recoded by local dynamics; it disappears or it propagates; it amplifies or inhibits the emergence of commonalities and antagonisms. (Terranova 2004:2) Warren Weaver suggests adaption of Shannons initial diagram to account for Semantic Noise (1949), his assumption being that mathematics could overcome not only engineering noise but also problems of semantic meaning - allowing technology to faithfully communicate a message without itself modulating the meaning. This notion of a transparent technology overlooks the encapsulation processes of the interface, the way in which the design process must necessarily premeditate the role and flexibility of the realization to optimize its performance.

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For more information about the author, please visit: www.aprior.net To some extent these assumptions produce an interesting power reversal in which the user, as presumed controller of the interface becomes subject to it:

Software has traditionally been understood to place the user as its subject, and the computational patterns and elements initiated, used and manipulated by the user as the corresponding grammatical objects. (Cramer & Fuller op cit. p.151) The affordances of media as digital information mean that on the one hand the possibilities to manipulate content multiply drastically, whilst on the other encapsulation of the interface easily obscures the restrictions and boundaries of functionality. The filtering tendency of the interface therefore has a homogenic, normative result on our experience of media by reducing the breadth of possible interaction into prescribed choices through a kind of aesthetic quantization. In combination with the propensity toward repetition underwritten by media as information, such homogeneity is magnified manifold. Filtering is not only relevant to the signal that gets through everything that isnt input is bypassed as unacceptable, creating a kind of modulus situation whereby non-compliant input is automatically recast as noise. Noisy Tactics One obvious way around this normative effect is to go beyond, or beneath, the interface beyond with actions that break or subvert it (for example through circuit bending); beneath by invention of new interfaces through programming, electronics or physical design, a situation in which the tool becomes the message. (Cascone 2010) Interface design involves decisions around what functionality will or will not be provided, acceptable ranges of interaction and so on. Through this process, interfaces become representations of the operational logic of the systems they act upon. Despite the tendency for interfaces to exclude unwanted noise, obsolescence means they soon become the source of new noise, embodying outdated assumptions, giving realized form to fragmented schema. Nevertheless, whilst broken or obsolete interfaces may represent dislocated knowledge, once repurposed they also offer the possibility of bricolage and revitalized meaning, outflanking homogeneity even in the act of repetition. The recent interest in glitch art, whilst part of a long tradition of the aesthetic possibilities of chance, failure and openness, is in one sense a response to the suffocating, self-correcting hydra of informational dynamics. Beyond the repetition of information, the normative qualities of the interface are a result of filtering, quantizing the breadth of possibilities through which interaction can occur. Glitches and failures overcome the seeming inevitability of systemized communication. Nevertheless, even such strategies as these have the potential to be derailed. Glitch as an aesthetic is always recouperable, monitisable. Whilst this is by no means the fault of aesthetics, the role it has come to play makes this - 5 -

For more information about the author, please visit: www.aprior.net trajectory to some extent inevitable. The claims toward progress under a late capitalist, post modernist, informational society mean that the nature of revolutionary, antagonistic, or noisy aesthetics is always to provide new territories for domination and control. the popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable The procedural essence of glitch art is opposed to conservation; to design a glitch means to domesticate it. (Menkman 2010:6) Interfaces are arbiters of noise and signal. Their influence when operational is toward standardization, and when broken towards fragmentation and dislocation. Their ubiquity demands attention, scrutiny and challenge. In Glitch Studies Manifesto, Menkman argues that only through focus on failure as process, rather than outcome can such tactics overcome the normative trajectories of culture and economy. Attalis metaphorical noise is often misread to equal signal noise: interference, distortion, dissonance; yet all these prove to be as pliant and accommodating vessels for commodification as consonance, harmony, clarity and so on. The trouble with difference is that it implies an eternal connection to the very thing it negates.

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For more information about the author, please visit: www.aprior.net Bibliography Attali, Jacques (1985) Noise The Political Economy of Music, University of Minesota Press Bolter, Jay David & Grusin, Richard (1999) Remediation - Understanding New Media, The MIT Press Cascone, Kim (2000) The Aesthetics of Failure - Post-Digital Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music, Computer Music Journal 24, no.4 (Winter 2000). Reprinted in 2005 in Audioculture: Readings in Modern Music, Continuum. Cascone, Kim (2010) The Failure of Aesthetics, Share Festival, accessed January 2010 at http://vimeo.com/17082963 Eco, Umberto (1989) The Open Work, Harvard University Press Evens, Aden (2005) Sound Ideas - Music, Machines and Experience, University of Minnesota Press Fuller, Matthew (2005) Media Ecologies, The MIT Press Fuller, Matthew (ed)(2008) Software Studies A Lexicon, The MIT Press Goodman, Steve (2010) Sonic Warfare Sound, Affect & the Ecology of Fear, The MIT Press Grusin, Richard (2010) Premediation: Affect & Mediality After 9/11, Palgrave Macmillan Katz, Mark (2004) Capturing Sound - How Technology Has Changed Music, University of California Press Kelly, Caleb (2009) Cracked Media The Sound of Malfunction, The MIT Press Labelle, Brandon (2006) Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum Marx, Karl (2010) Fragment on Machines,from The Grundrisse, accessed November 20th 2010 at http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf Menkman, Rosa (2010) Glitch Manifesto, accessed November 10th 2010 at http://www.slideshare.net/r00s/glitch-studies-manifesto Meyer, Leonard B. (1967, 1994) Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture, The University of Chicago Press Russolo, Luigi (1913) The Art of Noises, in Cox & Warner (2005) Audioculture, Continuum Schroeder, Manfred (2004) Computer Speech Recognition, Compression, Synthesis, Springer-Verlag Shannon, Claude (1948) The Mathematical Theory of Communication, The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379423, 623656, July, October, 1948. Terranova, Tiziana (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, Pluto Press Virno, Paolo (2001) General Intellect, accessed December 5th 2010 at http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm Watson, Ben (2010) Noise as Permanent Revolution or, Why Culture is a Sow Which Devours its Own Farrow, in Mattin,& Iles, Anthony (eds)(2010) Noise Capitalism, Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia-Arteleku Weaver, Warren (1949) Recent Contributions to The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press

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