The Order of Noise

An Art/Music Symposium

With contributions by Stuart Bailey, Mathieu Copeland, Beatrice Gibson, Yann Chateigné, FM Einheit, Pauline Julier, Mattin, Doreen Mende, microsillons, Muscha, Nils Röller, Laurent Schmid, Paolo Thorsten-Nagel, Franz Treichler, Tris Vonna-Michell, UN Unruh

Devised by the Master in Visual Arts Programs at HEAD – Genève CCC / Trans / Work.Master

“The static comes at him again : a second burst, heading the other way, like an enormous echo or the backrush from the first explosion, air propelled out by its breath being sucked in again. This time it carries him along with it : he feels himself rushing backwards, through a black and endless void. He’s merging with the void : seared, shot through, carbonisé, he’s become the sea of ink, the distance between planets, the space across which signals travel. Like time itself, he’s flattening, turning into carbon paper : the black smear between the sheets, the surface through which things repeat, CC themselves, but that will itself always remain black, and blank. Looking backwards as the soundwave draws away from him, accelerating onwards, he sees things being duplicated in the expanse created by its passage : cats and phone-wires, cars and dancers, rivers. The orchard’s been duplicated too : the siblings have stopped running through it and are sitting at a game-board. All these scenes and objects have been reproduced inwardly, as though injected through some kind of time-syringe into his stomach, in whose blackness they’re suspended like small, lit-up screens, contained by the walls of a new syringe that frames them and injects them further inwards, again and again, the scenes and objects miniaturising more and more as they regress. Eventually, they become so small and distant that they dwindle. From where he is now, he can see the children in the orchard and their game-board shrinking, and the orchard itself shrinking, and the wires around it too : their edges all contracting to form a compound that itself shrinks until it’s so small that it’s no longer perceptible. Then the whole image fades away. The noise has faded too : only fragments of it are left, small residues, vague sonic smudges…”

Tom McCarthy, C, 2010