noise & silence

(2012)

Inspired by John Cage, noise & silence is a creative intervention on the theme of noisy information. As a graduate student in library and information science, I became interested of suggestions of ‘noise’ and ‘silence’ as they apply to theories of information retrieval and began to experiment with the text as visual poetry, sound, and characters of information.

Using Boolean operators and the language of online searching, the text plays with the word’s repetition, revealing subtle grids and patterns in a textual column that is the same size as a standard door — 2′ 8″ (81.3 cm) wide by 6’8″ (203.2 cm) tall — to enhance the aura of information as a portal of spatial entrance. Echoing Marshall McLuhan’s notion of neo-acoustic space as it centres on electronic technologies, noise & silence characterizes entropy, complexity, pattern and precision as embodied technologies, presenting an aural vision of information that is both simultaneously playful and profound.

noise & silence was realized in a 2012 exhibition at the Scott Library, York University during the one-day Interplay conference, curated by Adam Lauder and featuring IainBaxter&.

A limited-edition handmade chapbook of 25 copies was created to accompany the exhibition, featuring ten poems: “A Future Anthropology of Reading,” “Notational Hierarchy,” “Library Poem No. 1,” “The Lexicographers,” “The Chi Square of Life, Opus 2,” “A Theoretical Sampling of Existential Love,” “The LIS Index to The End of the World, A-Z,” “Some Important Characteristics of Standard Deviations,” “Knowledge Management,” and “Dewey’s Whores.”

The former Poetry is Dead magazine published noise & silence as a digital edition for 16 pages; a curated exhibition of digital chapbooks for the 2014 Vancouver Art Book Fair.

Read the chapbook here.

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