CIMATICS PLATFORM / Brussels

Art of Artifacts

Even though the concept of noise has many meanings, mainly because it is often used as a figure of speech, for the purposes of this set noise is best understood as an undesirable disturbance or addition to the linear signal of useful data, or as I would like to suggest, a generative quality present in any communication medium, that shows itself as an artifact. While the communication process as described by Shannon and Weaver is reasonably linear, this static notion is undermined by the overall addition of noise, particularly during the encoding / decoding step, feedback and when the messages whilst in transmission is corrupted (due to for instance the addition of noise). These interruptions involve their own technical specificities and appearances, which are often understood as artifacts (errors or misrepresentations) that obscure the original information. The word artifact stems from the Latin words ars and facere, which, put together, mean as much as ‘artificially made’ (made by human practice). The use of the word has changed over time, and differs per context. In archeology, an artifact is something that is uncovered by an archeological endeavor. Artifacts are often called 'finds'; they are found objects. They are (normally) not created to be an artifact, but originate as a feature (of a time, a process, a culture). In archeology as well as in the digital age, the artifact is subject to many questions. These questions range from how artifacts represent the people of a time to who created the artifact and how and why? In art-history, we see a growing tradition of music, video and intermedia artworks, in which artists make use of artifacts, to reflect on the techniques they use for their work. Sometimes these artworks research the technologies and their role in the communication process. On other occasions they are applied as a form of politics, critique, punk or simply as a celebration of the flawed. In any case, they can be used as the symbolic components that fuse the video and sound into a conceptual, synesthetic whole and, in doing so, create a new space for dialogue. So in the beginning there was noise, but today, noise is understood and recognised via many different categories, like feedback, compression and glitch artifacts.