Noise in the System: Kinga Araya’s Media Art
(from Hybris: Kinga Araya. Ed. Sebastian Cichocki. Bytom: Bytomskie Centrum Kultury, 2003, 79-87.)
 

In Art as a Social System, Niklas Luhmann rethinks the communicative function of artworks as a component in the “autopoiesis” or ongoing self-recreation of social systems. Discussing the longstanding demotion of perception relative to thought in Western philosophy in general and aesthetics in particular, he remarks: “We are still spellbound by a tradition that arranged psychological faculties hierarchically, relegating ‘sensuousness’—that is, perception—to a lower position in comparison to higher, reflective functions of reason and understanding. The most advanced versions of ‘conceptual art’ still follow this tradition.”  For Luhmann the limitations of traditional aesthetics are not only that the hierarchical elevation of thought over perception is a hangover of Cartesian dualism, but also that both perception and thought are modes of consciousness—cognitions located in and bounded by individual psychic systems. Thus, sole concentration on them leaves out of account the distinct operations of social systems, which exist as systems only through the circulation of communications. In other words, traditional aesthetics differentiates where it should unify (the perceptual and the intellectual) and unifies where it should differentiate (the psychic and the social).

This sketch of Luhmann’s highly detailed argument provides an angle from which to observe with greater precision the subtle accomplishments of Kinga Araya’s media art.  As recorded and disseminated on video, hers is an advanced form of conceptual art that has already moved beyond capture by Luhmann’s generalization above.  Rather, Araya sets out in a direction that Luhmann might have applauded for its undermining of the division between the psychic operations of perception and thought and its trajectory away from subjective insularity. Araya’s art plays with the materiality of the media that embody and circulate the forms of communication.  This art makes noise both sensuous and communicative, converting the music of material resistance into artistic communications that systematically override traditional social and generic structures. Araya rides the video and digital new wave in a way that combines narrative, sculpture, and performance, breaking standard psychic and cognitive framings as it heads for the streets and the open spaces. Her media art loops together gallery spaces, urban sidewalks, and high plains landscapes with the video screens that float among them.

Luhmann’s systems theory is explicitly informed by developments in cybernetics; Araya’s art may be taken to have absorbed these developments through cultural osmosis. Whatever the lines of influence or resonance in her particular case, Araya deploys the classic themes of early cybernetics—signal and noise, self-organization, feedback, the structural coupling of organic and mechanical systems—and brings them into line with the current “neocybernetic” interests in systemic self-maintenance (autopoiesis), observation, epistemological constructivism, and self-referential forms. Luhmann writes: “The art system has no reality except at the level of elemental events. It rests, one might say, on the ongoing dissolution of its elements, on the transitory nature of its communications, on an all-pervasive entropy against which anything that persists must organize itself.” From the outset, Araya’s artifacts construct conceptual communications in which physical impediments—for instance, the friction and clatter of the tentacles of the Princess Headgear—feedback into and so reform her self-stated themes of “walking and talking,” locomotion and writing, transportation and transmission, creating form out of the tensions of intentional forces meeting material and mediatic resistances.

“Exercising with Princess Headgear (Adjustable),” 4 minutes, 2000; video installation with a sculpture. Source: Concordia's Thursday Report 25:15 (April 26, 2001).

Consider the transit between two pieces of 1997, “ABC” and “Video Diary.” Of all of Araya’s works, “ABC” is the most insistently narrative, the most overtly subjective and political, the most susceptible to a description such as “feminist anger.” Each letter is connected to a term of bodily invective: “A as in asshole” turns the speaking mouth into an anus. In “B as in bullshit” the black lips send out flares like dark rays, and in “C as in cocksucker” the smeared red lips turn the mouth into a violated vagina. Out of each mouth comes a brief story of a female immigrant confronting bureaucratic regulations or institutional assault. But the potential for autobiographical or dogmatic melodrama in such a “message” is mostly swallowed up, so to speak, and sublated by the outlandish fixed focus on the lipsticked mouth that fills nearly all of the video frame, pressing the observer’s gaze against the outermost organ of speech and its interplay of lips, tongue, saliva, and teeth. Brain, lungs and larynx, though absent from the frame, suggest their presence just beyond the impenetrable darkness of this wounded maw spitting out each phoneme and syllable with exaggerated emphasis.  The mouth itself as vocal transmitter and its contortions under the speaker’s stylized articulations overtake the “signal” one assembles from the mere words pronounced. The signal is not drowned in but powerfully resisted by the noise of its transmission. The “conceptual form” of the work lies in that resistance. The materiality of the mouth as organ of speech is rendered sensuous, hyper-perceptible, and so comes level with the thought transmitted.

The movement from “ABC” to “Video Diary” marks the deconstructive displacement from speech to writing, while remediating both modes of communication by embedding them within the video frame.  In “Video Diary” the content of the writing is incidental; as in “ABC,” the signal transmitted is overtaken by the noise inhabiting the transmission—uneven writing surfaces, the folding and curling of the paper, and the progressive hobbling of the inscribing instrument, as the pencil is manipulated by hand, by foot, and by mouth. “Video Diary” makes a perfect Derridean metaphor: the mouth that speaks becomes the hand that writes.  All the while the video captures and amplifies the very friction of the pencil lead pressed on and scratched across the paper and makes a concrete percussive music out of the materiality of writing.

This evocation of the materiality of media, of constraints formed into narratives of sequential progressions, continues throughout Araya’s work. In this way it resonates with the extension of cybernetic science and information theory toward the philosophy of media.  Michel Serres, a pioneer in this transdiciplinary movement, comments that “Pathology of communication is not only a fact of writing.  It also exists in spoken languages: stammerings, mispronunciations, regional accents, dysphonias, and cacophonies.  Likewise in the technical means of communication: background noise, jamming, static, cut-offs, . . . various interruptions.  If static is accidental, background noise is essential to communication.”  And this is so because media possess a technological body that cannot be eliminated in favor of pure signal, just as the notion of soul or identity evaporates in the absence of any bodily vehicle. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler writes: “Technological media operate against a background of noise because their data travel along physical channels . . . .  Noise is emitted by the channels media have to cross.”  Rephrased in neocybernetic terms, noise is the self-reference of the medium.  And as William Paulson remarks, “what is noise, what is information depends on the position of the observer: information theory recognizes that it is itself caught up in systems of information.”

This gives us a theoretical position from which to observe the way that Araya combines information and utterance, other- and self-reference, when observing her own body within the video frame. The possible narcissism of taking herself as media object is consistently deconstructed by the amplification of perceptual noise level with semantic or symbolic signal.  Consider in this respect another of her earlier media pieces that stages her body without sculptural supplement, but with ready-made, ostensibly mundane supplements such as lipstick or pencils.  In “Modus Vivendi” Araya subverts socially scripted gender and affective messages by ironically reframing fashion and facial signals.

“Modus Vivendi,” 11 minutes, 1997; video installation. ("My head acts out and misbehaves"). Source: Glenson Gallery, Toronto.

A ludicrous unflattering wig broadens her face into a shaggy screen that fills out the video frame.  On this screen she then recites an alphabet of facial expressions, segmenting them into minimal moments without context or motivation.  We glimpse an audible but wordless series of emotive non-sequiturs: pleasure, shock, concern, exasperation, perplexity, malaise—sneezing, itchy eyes—exhaustion, headache, toothache, runny nose, sadness, impatience, boredom, pain, frustration, agony, mirth. By embedding a depersonalized facial screen within the frame of the video screen, Araya’s anti-hermeneutic art communicates the noise of communication.  It makes its forms out of the entropy of the media it employs.  We see what the body says prior to its saying anything that might be construed to predicate a subject. Luhmann provides a generalization of this primal effect: “In avoiding and circumventing language, art nonetheless establishes a structural coupling between the systems of consciousness and communication.”

Further in his opening chapter on perception and communication in Art as a Social System, Luhmann develops the issues of form and observation: “An arrangement of forms that claims to be art tends to strive toward ‘double closure.’ A work of art must distinguish itself externally from other objects or events, or it will lose itself in the world. Internally, the work closes itself off by limiting further possibilities with each of its formal decisions. Ultimately, external or internal closure amount to the same thing; both are supported by the frame that is produced along with the work and cannot be transgressed.” In the pieces we have discussed so far, Araya lets the video medium itself do the framing—and we certainly have no trouble telling her pieces apart from anything likely to be on TV. But in her next series of constructions, Araya complexifies these sensuous alphabets by introducing sculptural elements as supplements to the artist’s body. These sculptural supplements themselves enact the framing of the art as art, further embedding the body of the artist within those artifactual frames within the video frame.

Part of perceiving art as social communication, then, involves distinguishing the two-sided frame that both encloses and discloses it.  This frame can be crossed in both directions.  For instance, as in literary narratives, musical numbers, plays, or paintings lying on planar surfaces, “The typical case is a work of art enclosed within a beginning and end, within a frame or a stage, a work that ignores and does not interfere with its surroundings.  In this case the imaginary space is construed from the inside out, as if breaking through the frame or creating its own world behind the frame. The imagination is driven beyond the work. One must at once see and think away the frame in order to gain access to the work’s imaginary space.”  This orientation toward the frame is typically the case, that is, when the artifact has discernible spatial or temporal edges that gather the piece into itself. However, art embodied in all three spatial dimensions and otherwise indeterminate as to temporality can reverse that semiotic/symbolic orientation: “Sculpture or architecture presents an entirely different case. Here, the boundary does not draw the viewer’s attention inward but instead directs it outward.  The work permits no view of its depths, no penetration of its surface. . . . The imaginary space is projected outward in the form of distinctions suggested by the work itself.”

Araya’s combination of sculpture with narrative and dramatic forms would seem to have it both ways at once, and this might explain how she gets so much out of what seems so little. That is, the closure of the performance draws us across the video frame into the piece’s imaginary space, while the sculptural prosthesis inverts the frame and seems to send the piece tumbling out the other side of the screen. For instance, like the earlier pieces, “Peripatetic Exercise” offers another inducement for the increment of noise, with the interruption of a musical performance by the rumbling and clanking together of the performer’s heavy metallic footgear, wobbly hemispheric “shoes” like oversized bowling balls cut in half and provided with cavities for bare feet to step into.

“Peripatetic Exercise,” 6 minutes 30 seconds, 1998; video installation with a sculpture. Source: Galerie Christiane Chassay, Québec.

Yet these minimal sculptures also bear the entire weight of the performance, framing it from beneath, and conveying a sense of solidity that spills out into the world. This supplementing of melody with random noise and of acoustic vibrations with lumps of heavy metal forms a mute treatise on the contingency of “balance.” We expect the earth to maintain itself as a stable foundation, and yet all the while we are spun about upon hemispheres that wobble through space with irreversible rotations in multiple dimensions. Our world is not stable but tipsy, and the shape of all our performances is contingent upon autonomic balancing acts that go unnoticed until, periodically, our center of gravity lurches out of proper alignment.

“Exercising with Princess Headgear (Adjustable)” redeploys strategies of random noise, rotation, and sculptural solidity with a light touch of fairytale bemusement. The video amplifies the rattle and clatter of scores of thick copper wires sprouting from a copper helmet the size of a large wok and cascading to the ground where they drag along while the artist slowly climbs the steps of an urban park. This hybrid of performance artist and sculpture is in no danger of losing itself within the world. It stands right out against a populated vista (Mount Royal in Québec) overlooking city buildings in the foreground and mountainous prominences in the distance. The camera pans from the highlands on the horizon back to the promontory of the Princess Headgear as the artist like a timewarped Cinderella in a trance negotiates the crowd and ends by spinning around, arms outstretched, sending the wires flying outward like the chains of swings on a carnival whirligig.

Perhaps the most astounding of these sculptural pieces is “Orthoepic Exercise.”

“Orthoepic Exercise,” 4 minutes, 1998; video installation with a sculpture. Source: the artist.

Here the time warp operates in reverse, not bringing the medieval to the present but taking the present back to the archaic. The video track begins by focalizing the point of what seems to be an impossibly broad spear. The camera runs along this distended spear as it crosses over a U-shaped cradle mounted on a vertical shaft. Resting in this socket, the spear suggests the oar of a boat. The spear is bolted at the other end to the mouthhole of a piece of frightful headgear reminiscent of the helmets of ancient Greek warriors. Spear, oar, helmet: these Homeric allusions would be elements of the “ortho-epic” in question.  Completing the apparatus, however, the artist herself wears the headgear like a beast of burden yoked to the spoke of an axle and bound to the circular track of an ancient mill. To turn upon the central shaft the artist performs short side steps: with each one the apparatus creaks and cries from the stress of metal on metal accompanied by a low rumbling of shoes scraping on the floor.  It is as if the artist is herself impaled upon what would otherwise be seen as her own weapons of aggression, as if she is held captive by this epic of her own making. And yet this epic has no narrative, no beginning or end, no edges.  It defines a rotation, a circle or infinite cycle, a cosmic Catherine Wheel.

Again, we feel both pulled in and pushed away by the frame enacted by the artist harnessed into her own sculpture. The potential for phallic symbolism in this monstrous supplemental tongue goes both ways, is both amplified and imploded by the totality of the artwork’s enactment.  The spear that leaves her mouth renders her bound and gagged, while at the same time it extends her tongue as a projection of her intention to communicate something unsaid and unsayable. Pivoted on this apparatus, the artist rows in a circle against the force of some virtual flow, some unseen power of constraint.

Capturing in passing her wide-eyed nearly unblinking fixed stare of dismay, the gaze of the camera constantly shifts location, angle, and focal length—from shoes to pedestal to shaft to face to torso to helmet to back to feet, picking up the play of light from undisclosed sources against the surfaces of the body and its prosthesis—enacting the saccades visual observation would trace in the unmediated presence of the performance. In this way the video camera mediates more powerfully by seeming to absent itself from its own mediation. This “blankness” of the video gaze counteracts the plea issuing from the stare of the artist. Captivated by her own captivity, she returns the gaze of the camera back upon it while imploring the witness of this obscure self-torture for some mode of recognition, some wordless understanding that will complete the circuit of communication.

In a final mute gesture that concludes the video clip, the artist raises her hand to her throat and brushes it with a sensitive touch whose lightness belies the massive gravity of the apparatus and gestures toward the voice the apparatus has gagged. Despite the evocation of epic duress, however, the artist can still perform her circuit around the apparatus. In this as in all of her work, Araya is concerned to register operative positivities in the midst of counterforces. She creates massive impediments in order to perform the feat of eluding them.
 

References

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans and intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

William R. Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982).