IMMERSION INTO NOISE

Immersion Into Noise

Joseph Nechvatal

Open Humanities Press, 2011

Excerpt:

Some claim that art, as entertainment-spectacle, participates in the dumbing-down values that have proved useful to big business, values that address all communications to the lowest common denominator. I tend to agree. Therefore my feeling is that today art must indict—or at the very least play the role of the noisy jester who unmasks the quietly persistent lies of the powerful. Corporate and government propaganda is often designed to deceive and victimize us—and if art cannot rebuff and contest this by fueling the political will and imagination of resistance, I wonder why we need it at all. So for me, an intricate art of noisy resistance is increasingly valuable to an analytical social movement based on skepticism as it strengthens unique personal powers of imagination and critical thinking through self-perception, while undermining market predictabilities. Such art noise counters the effects of our age of simplification—effects that have resulted from the glut of consumer-oriented entertainment messages and political propaganda, which the mass media feed us daily in the interests of corporate profit and governmental manipulations.

This look at self-perception is the impetus behind this book.