Noise is a phenomenon resulting from vibrations transmitted through a medium, such as matter, air, or liquid, and emerges when multiple frequencies move freely through space, occupying it with their collective presence. It is commonly understood as an undesired, unpredictable, disruptive, and high-intensity sound. Noise appears precisely where it is not meant to be and is often described as “productively counterproductive” (Kahn 2001). It is unwanted because, when it emerges, it exposes the flaws of the system within which it operates.
Communication theorists Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver defined noise as interference attached to an intended signal, an obstruction in the transmission of information from one point to another in the effort to deliver a message (Shannon and Weaver 1964). Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein approach noise from a different perspective: as one of two behavioural errors (the other being bias) that arise in human judgment and decision-making in both private and public domains. They define noise as “unwanted variability in a system of judgments” and attribute this variability to the subjective nature of human evaluation (Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein 2021).
In their attempt to identify and eliminate noise through “noise audits,” they observed that noise emerges under varying conditions, including the subject matter under evaluation; the ethics and values of the individual in relation to the institution in which they operate; interpersonal disagreements and conflicts; tastes and preferences; identity, race, and cultural background; as well as context, occasion, place, and coincidence or randomness.
In the arts, noise emerged prominently in the 1910s with the Italian Futurists, who shifted their creative focus toward the auditory perception of noise as an homage to the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, technology, institutions, machine-generated sounds, military combat, war, and violence. In contrast, post-war American avant-garde artists found value in practices that celebrated alternative cultural models grounded in community-building, collectivism, social action, playfulness, and freedom of expression (Banes 1993; Kahn 2001; Goldberg 2014).
During this period, artists such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and Allan Kaprow, among others, resisted institutional forms of representation. They redirected their attention toward social impact and collective experience, transforming noise into a social tool. At the time, noise became a necessity, both an artistic inquiry and a metaphor, through which values of democracy, social justice, equality, and freedom could be articulated. The avant-garde turn toward noise can be understood as a response to both material conditions and social urgencies. While this tradition remains alive, its contemporary necessity and societal role across media is shifting and requires re-examination.
Noise Traffic draws from the American avant-garde tradition of the 1960s but approaches noise through different creative means, perspectives, and methodologies in order to explore its purpose and its function in today’s society. Theories of Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein, as well as those of Norbert Wiener are incorporated and approached through female gaze in this project. For example, Noise is conceived as a performative organism that transmits messages across borders. It is intentional rather than random, indeterminate, or unintentional. As such, noise operates as an allegory for the performativity of social systems and the variabilities that compose our realities.
Noise becomes a site of reflection and a living archive, revealing realities that exist at the intersection of ontology and performance. If noise is understood as such, its capacity to inhabit space enables it to mobilise voices that are often unheard. It takes a role of that of a cartographer, who maps the spatial dimensions of new geographies, worlds, places, and forms of existence. In this sense, noise’s performativity maps and exposes systemic errors and prompts collective action toward more just social configurations. The project explores how this performativity functions, shapes, alters, and interacts with other performativities within broader societal contexts and across media.
In Noise Traffic, noise is freed from representational frameworks because it resides in the a priori conditions of things, places, laws, and orders. This a priori modality allows for the “restoration of behaviour” and the enactment of social change (Schechner 2013; Phelan 1998; Goffman 1956). Noise thus becomes a tool for rethinking through thinking, imagining through reimagining, unlearning through relearning; for acting and reacting, presenting and representing, placing through replacing, and claiming through reclaiming.
Traffic, in this context, refers to the dense movement of bodies occupying and shaping flows within an environment as a means of transmitting messages; messages that activate movement, change, difference, and spatial inhabitation. Thus, noise depends on the collective presence of individual sounds that mobilise our ears, bodies, and movements. In other words, noise traffic constitutes the collective voice of a multiplicity of voices that struggles for human rights, democratic stability, and justice.
Bibliography:
Banes, Sally. 1999 [1993]. Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Third ed. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books. New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group.
Goldberg, RoseLee. 2014. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. 3rd edition. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
Kahn, Douglas. 2001. Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Kahneman, Daniel., Sibony, Olivier and Sunstein R. Cass. 2021. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. London: William Collins.
Phelan, Peggy. (1998) “Introduction – The Ends of Performance.” In The Ends of Performance, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, 1–19. New York: New York University Press.
Schechner, Richard. 2013 [2002]. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Shannon, Claude E and Weaver, Warren. 1964 [1948]. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Tenth edition. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press.