Planet of Noise

About the work

‘Planet of Noise’ is a collaboration between media theorist McKenzie Wark and artist Brad Miller. Its title is drawn from Wark’s paper “Suck on this Planet of Noise” first presented in 1992 at a Cultural Studies conference at the University of Melbourne then at ISEA that year and reprinted in Simon Penny’s 1995 compilation Critical Issues in Electronic Art. In “Suck on this Planet of Noise” Wark looks at the place of Australian culture in the flux of global media flows: “When information can move faster and more freely than people or things, its relation to those other movements and to space itself changes. No longer a space of places, we move on to a space of flows” (Wark 1995). Wark captures the storm of intellectual curiosity, the excitement and concern felt in the mid-1990s regarding the transformative promise of the new technology and its threat of colonisation. “Electronic art” argued Wark in 1992 “is an experimental laboratory due not to the promise of new technologies but the new social relations for communications created by those technologies” (Wark 1995). She proposed that Australian artists and critics were already embroiled within a sense of antipodality – “a feeling of being neither here nor there” caught in a network of cultural trajectories beyond their control – and were well positioned to provide innovative critical work capable of cutting through the noise of the new regimes.

With its image of a floating orb, the CD-ROM ‘Planet of Noise’ presents a more literal embodiment of a Planet of Noise. The user is presented with a hypertextual but artist-controlled tour through a gallery of aphorisms reflecting on the new media saturated world of the late 1990s. Miller has created a space rich with discoverable sounds, slogans and snatches of image, from a moment in time when the act of discovery by ‘clicking on’ or ‘rolling over’ screen images was novel. In Contact Zones: the art of cd-rom ‘Planet of Noise’ is described as a work where:

Choice is absent. The user follows the pathways the artists make. There are different 'zones' on this planet, different terrains of experience. But once you choose one, the proceedings are determined by the artists. But things are not quite as they seem. The contents of the zones don't match their place names. Each describes a set of sounds, colors, words that is so fuzzy as to hardly qualify as a set at all. And so we have the two sides of noise, that lingering residue on the dark side of information: arbitrary order and the chaos of difference. But ‘Planet of Noise’ does hold out some kind of hope, even as it throws the user unaided into this bewildering world. The aim of this orchestration of color and texture, word and sound, is to provide zones in which to meditate on the experience of immersion in information itself. It is a map to a world that changes every second. It uses the writing techniques of the zen koan and the western aphorism to provide the jolt of misrecognizing who we are or where we are. It is a map, not for finding one's way, but for losing it” (Murray, 1999, https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/artists/millerwark.html.)

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