STROBOSCOPIC ARTS AND SCIENCES

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Abstract

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The secret of such ascesis lies in the power to be able to endure occurrences as ‘directly’ as possible without the mediation of a ’pre-text.’ Thus to encounter the event is like bordering on nothingness. — Francois Lyotard

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“Signal aesthetics” is a framework that attempts to situate historical and contemporary audio-visual artistic practices that present media signals as raw and direct, in the sense of being as close to their energetic sources and signaletic substrates as possible. The term describes a particular technological aesthetic that pays attention to, and cultivates awareness of, the agential materialities and vibratory instabilities of media, as signals. Tracing relations through twentieth-century scientific instrument histories, cybernetic research practices and sciences of consciousness and mind gives precedence to the role of stroboscopic light and optical phenomena as a linking technique and media technological aesthetic of this kind. The minimal media and immersive techniques achieved through stroboscopic light instruments and signals emerge in both laboratory settings and musical performances beginning in the 1950s. Our approach to this particular audio-visuality brings to the fore common investments in the arts and the sciences, toward media and creative practices that serve to dissolve and inquire into subjectivity, calling into question the sovereign autonomy of the self and the supposed constancy of the perceiving mind-body, as other bio-psychic discourses and practices have done (biomic, mycelial, matrixial, posthuman, etc.). The term “signal aesthetics”, of which stroboscopics are one type, loosely circumscribes a particular tendency, a mode of experiences in art, media, technology and science that reveals perception to the perceiver, acknowledging immanent agencies that arise as modulated intensities of energised matter. We point here to practices in which these volatile and contingent agencies, along with our control or mastery of signals, give rise to artistic and scientific modes of creativity and knowing. Through approaches and examples that span stroboscopic audio-visual artworks and cybernetic consciousness studies emerges a conceptual and historical framework for thinking about the relation between ‘the signal’ and ‘the self.’ 

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Keywords

media, performance, signal, aesthetics, activity, materiality, materialism, perception, sensation

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Introduction

How might we directly experience the materiality of media signals? A number of non-representational strategies in arts involved with media and technology are discernible: extreme abstraction and formalism, material decomposition and mathematical proceduralism, sensory inundation and deprivation. If the ‘aesthetic’ is taken as the physical and environmental configuration of sensation and perception (in its originary sense as aesthesis, or as when we take ‘aesthetic’ as simply the opposite of ‘anesthetic’) and ‘signals’ are understood as the metastable potentials of a constellation of energised material, we ask what signal aesthetics evoke as a historical description and provocation to contemporary practice. In describing media as a constellation in this way, we call into question the sovereign sanctity of human subjectivity, as we ask what unacknowledged agencies signals assert in aesthetic practice, or what a signal might ‘want’. As a central example, we look to stroboscopic light signals, a particular signal aesthetic used to arouse human consciousness, turning it in upon itself and probing its very nature. Further, perspectivist and hylozoist cosmologies can help us think of media signals as distributed action and agency of a broader combination of entities. Just as the raw, intermittent presence and non-presence of electrical, media signals produce particular sensory conditions for human observers, they also exhibit propensities, tendencies and predispositions as raw forms of non-human energy. As Nam June Paik writes in his understanding of Norbert Wiener’s insight as: “the signal, where the message is sent, plays an equally important role as the signal, where the message is not sent” (Paik, 2003, p. 229), and Friedrich Kittler tells of sociologist Nicholas Luhmann’s retort in a shared taxi to the airport: "Mr. Kittler," Luhmann said, "it has always been like this since Babylon. When a messenger rides through the gate, people like you ask about the horse he is riding and people like me about the message he is bringing with" (Kittler quoting Luhmann in Karavas, 2009, p. 465). Signal aesthetics concern the arts, sciences and material practices of the sent signal, and the Kittlerian horse. 

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”Frank E. Webner, pony express rider," ca. 1861
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One history of the development of the arts and sciences of technical media tells its story from the point of view of signals, that is the generation and shaping of electrical energies as the basis for aesthetic and sensory contrivances that probe the embodied, embedded and extended perceiving mind. Practices, both artistic and scientific, which play a part in this chronicle, often explicitly call into question the immutability and sovereignty of such a mind, of human subjectivity. Instead, we focus on the scientists and artists who have sought to create situations and develop experiences conceived as opportunities to conjoin individuals with their environment (including other human individuals, and non-human entities technological and otherwise). In foregrounding the extemporaneous agencies and volatile materiality of media signals, devoid of what we might call ‘meaning’ in any traditional sense, we elevate signals from “the lower threshold of semiotics” (Eco, 1976, p. 33) toward a Deleuzoguattarian possibility of an asignifying semiotics. Asignfying semiotics; “non-representational and asignifying, rather than linguistic and representational” (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 25). Signals can and do remain “reticent, hesitant, working only with the parts and their intensities, without imposing on them further form” (Genosko, 2008, p. 12). Signal aesthetics should and can usefully serve to “reveal the relations of power that condition [asignifying signals] and perhaps even expose that the network [of media production] itself is a system of representation that offers too much consistency and thus produces inertia“ (Genosko, 2008, p. 19). Looking at stroboscopic light-based installations, technologies and performance as they have been used as both artistic-experiential and scientific-analytical interrogations into the nature of perception and consciousness, we understand these asignifying modes of revealing. Signal aesthetics emerges from a thinking of signals, as in stroboscopic art and performance works, as creative practice that points to the liminalities between the perceiving mind, environments and media technologies. Signals produced and arranged in these ways can therefore be understood as indeterminate apparatuses (Agamben, 2009) that surround and define the experiencing human subject and at the same time reflecting and outlining a transhuman subjectivity as part of broader cultural and technological imaginaries.

Stroboscopic light is a media-technical, perceptible electrical modulation of matter that readily offers itself to perception at a conscious level. It is also a signaletic which alters, frustrates and enhances our immediate perceptual environment and cognitive functions. What often results is an audiovisual and phenomenal experiential condition that reveals to us the perceptual process itself. The symbolic, narrative or illusory signification for which media signals are most often employed is minimised under such conditions, and we become our own test subjects, immersed in the signal-environments created by the stroboscopic impulse. A stroboscopic light performance or artwork is, as such, a kind of psychophysical impulse response, involving artist and audience alike in a perceptual lab-test or ‘signal reverie’, inviting each and all to experience experience, or to perceive perception. A strobe light, driven with a ramped frequency from ‘off’ to ‘fully on’ produces not only a signified (the connotations of strobe lights in club music, for example) and affective (the emotional or qualitatively ‘felt’ response to the occurrence) experience, but also evokes understandings of how perception itself is working, as when specific speed thresholds are surpassed and the still-flickering light is perceived as continuously ‘on’. The direct experience of perception as environmental and media contingency goes some way toward dissolving the supposed fixity of the perceiving subject (as in everyday experience, scientific objectivity, or as ‘aesthetics’ is usually taken up in Western art-historical and fine art traditions). Stroboscopic media performances and artworks are an invitation to observe one’s perceptual mechanisms intermingling with other agencies, performing and instrumentalising media signals as both productive of aesthetic experience and as revelatory of how such experience functions. Through its rapid, intermittent full-bandwidth perturbations, the strobe forcefully introduces signals  and attention as objects of attention, calling to mind as well the signals within us, the metabolic and neurological signals which constitute consciousness.

 A powerful strobe light, dispersed or directly projected, produces an all-over, environmental ubiquitous media signal that is often impossible to ‘get out of’, even by closing your eyes. Therein lies a potential for disrupting the consistency of individual-address and for rupturing the inertia of the media spectacle more broadly providing and perturbing individual-communal affective experiences. From the mid-twentieth century psychological media experimentation, with and without psychedelic drugs, in contemporary art and architectural installations in which stroboscopic and flickering environmental media are used provide an atmosphere in which “the worlds of information and experience collide, intersect and multiply their contradictions” (Blau, cited in Dziekan, 2011, n.p.). Stroboscopic light is a media-instrument. Performance and installation artworks that use stroboscopic lights are means of ‘directly experiencing’ the materiality of signals as their media-output constitutes the ‘full excitation’ of the material substrate that make them possible. Electrical strobes are ‘full bandwidth’ in the sense of either being simply all the way on or all the way off, at varying speed and frequency. The strobe is saturated media, a maximal media that is at the extremes of both perception and apparatus. It is media as techno-material thresholding, as an articulation of maximal and minimal states, exploring the bandwidth of both technologies and consciousness. The vacillating intensity of stroboscopic technologies, experiences and environments are a fluctuating and complex mix of urgency and serenity, perceived and perceiver, subject and environment. The communications paradigm of signal-as-emitted and signal-as-received breaks down, forming experiential laboratories for perceptual enquiry, laboratories of experimental metaphysics, ontological theatres (Pickering, 2007), and chapels of extreme experience (Geiger, 2003).  “The liminality of the moment created by the strobe light negates both the infinite void of darkness and the potential referentiality of a reality outside of the field of perception” (Loayza, 2000, n.p). 

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A Flickering Chronicle

Strobe switching returns media experimentation to its pre-transductive  origins in communication, to a period before Oliver Heavyside (amongst others) gave us the subtleties of variable signal control, occasioning the revolution of continuous analog transmission beginning in the 1880s. Specifically optical, light-based flicker-induced experiences can be linked even earlier in the 19^th Century to when Jan Evangelista Purkyně explored a number of ways to stimulate vision including experiments with manual stroboscopic , producing internal, hallucinatory images, with the eyes closed. Purkyně’s dissertation, Contributions to the Knowledge of Vision in its Subjective Aspect (1819), begins with the following description: 

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I stand in bright sunlight with closed eyes and face the sun. Then I move my outstretched, somewhat separated, fingers up and down in front of the eyes, so that they are alternately illuminated and shaded. In addition to the uniform yellow-red that one expects with closed eyes, there appear beautiful regular figures that are initially difficult to define but slowly become clearer.  When we continue to move the fingers, the figure becomes more complex and fills the whole visual field. (Purkinjě, cited in Schwitzgebel, 2011, p. 139) 

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Purkinjě’s accounts from this period (1832, cited in Canales, 2011C, p. 231) insight various methods of waving a hand in front of open and closed eyes, as well as through the application of pressure directly to the eyelid. He was in this way able to create stroboscopic effects in the 5-25 Hz range, inducing “quasi-hallucinatory percepts” (Mommenejad, 2010, p. 15). He called this Augenmusik [eye music] and thought it to be worthwhile pursuing “as an independent genre of art” (Zielinski, 2006, p. 197) derived from Earth’s brilliantly ubiquitous media infrastructure—the sun. Purkinjě drew parallels between the visual oscillatory patterns he witnessed during his experiments and Ernst Chladni's figures created by sound waves; “The patterns appearing within the eye that I have described constantly bring back the memory of Chladni’s sound figures and especially the primary figures” (Wade, Brožek, 2001, p. 70.). Purkinjě also introduced electricity as a means of directly and physiologically generating visual images. By constructing a battery with copper and zinc plates he attached electrodes, originally made with guitar strings, to various areas of his head including the eyelid, thus producing and describing the effects as a series of drawn graphical plates depicting these subjective visual patterns of various kinds of fast flashing images (Zielinski, 2006, pp. 197-198). As such, we can see Purkinjě, physiologist and natural scientist, as the originator of a particularly idiosyncratically  form of raw, direct, and signal-based electronic audio-visual art. Purkyně’s work prefigures Gustav Fechner’s research in the 1830’s with rotating discs, and he  further documented subjective experiences of a hallucinatory nature, such as colours that are perceived when only black and white stimuli are present. 

Scottish scientist David Brewster, in 1833, noted sources of flickering phenomena available in our lived environments, citing the hallucinatory patterns and effects arising from “walking besides a high iron railing” (Brewster, cited in Canales, 2011C, p. 231). This solar naturalism of flickering light, and the interior-visions it produces, would also inspire psychophysiologist and cyberneticist William Grey Water, and in turn artist-poet Brion Gysin. Grey Water wrote in 1953 of the “intermittent flashes that appeared spontaneously in the rain forest” (Canales, 2011C, p. 231), and Gysin’s flicker experimentations followed just this kind of arborescent incitement, “a transcendental storm of colour visions” that overtook him on a bus to Marseilles in 1958: 

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“We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright colors exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was out in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me?” (Gysin, 2015, p. 113)

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PSM V64 D273 Stroboscope for examining vocal chord vibration

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Van Veen, F. (1977). Handbook of Stroboscopy. General Radio. p. 4

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Short-circuiting toward the long shadow of post-war stroboscopic light, we re-encounter these traditions of upending the containing relations of figure and ground, message and medium, individual and environment, by decomposing available signifying systems toward more basic material units. The media surround by Warhol, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, enacts a communications environment that decomposes experience through actual strobes, but as well through a stroboscopic signal aesthetic taken up by a variety of media artist: Nam June Paik, who twisted and warped the internal scanline of the television signal, La Monte Young, whose work atomised the traditional harmonic signifiers of Westerm music by devising microtonal sonic systems, and William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose stroboscopic cut-ups chopped and stuttered their way through visual, textual and temporal mediums of all kinds. The strobe was a perfect philosophical object (“objet philosophique”, Gottlieb, 2009, p. 13) for the extremes of intermittent on-off disconnection and full-spectrum atmospheres of noise that were the (de)compositional sensory deprivation and immersive strategies of this time. These are, as Branden Joseph underlines, not strategies we should associate only with the oft-presumed goal of “tribal unity” or “subjective self-possession” as people were as often as not “uprooted and disoriented by the incessant bombardment of audiovisual shocks” as the violent imposition of the discontinuity of experience and malleability of perception (Joseph, 2002, p. 91). Adrian and Matthews, two early EEG and stroboscope experimenters, likewise noted as early as 1934 how “extremely unpleasant” prolonged exposure to flickering lights were (Adrian and Matthews, cited in Canales, 2011C, p. 236).

 In 1961 the artist and writer Brion Gysin read Grey Walter’s book The Living Brain (1953) at the recommendation of friend William S. Burroughs. Gysin conceives and builds an object  called the “Dreamachine” with a young mathematician friend Ian Sommerville. It is designed as an inexpensive instrument capable of simulating an electronic laboratory stroboscope by means of a perforated rotating cylinder. The slits in the cylinder create a stroboscopic effect of between 8 and 13 pulses per second by repeatedly masking and unmasking a light bulb suspended in the center of the cylinder. The Dreamachine is, for cybernetics historian Andrew Pickering, “a material technology for the production of altered states,” as well as “a paradigmatic example of a technology of the non-modern self” (Pickering, 2010, p. 77). It was as explicitly an attempt that Gysin, Burroughs and Sommerville ever made to provide a concrete, physical tool for the masses. Pickering notes how “Gysin was also taken with the idea of the Dream Machine as a drug-free point of access to transcendental states, and had plans to develop it as a commercial proposition, something to replace the television in people’s living rooms, but all his efforts in that direction failed” (Geiger 2003 p. 66; cited in Pickering, 2010, p. 82). The Dreamachine as a commercial endeavour may have failed, but its specific optical and perceptual cut-up technique would infuse art-making with rich media-technical and conceptual fodder toward the production of non-objective and non-subjective understandings. There were the understandings of a “Third Mind,” Burroughs, Sommerville and Gysin’s “project for disastrous success” (Burroughs and Gysin, 1978, p. 44) that would move us beyond the day to day drudgery of maintaining an inviolate selfhood, allowing for wholly other kinds of asignified intelligence and insight, outside of language. “Drawing upon esoteric and scientific sources [the project] de-constructed sound and image and computer technology, sabotaging systems of ideological transmission and reproduction, dismantling and erasing the human image repertoire in the process” (Wilson, 2012, p. 1). This was to be achieved through a stroboscopic signal aesthetics, and a simple device for media-immersion and the melding of human subjectivities with non-human objectivities.

Burrough and Gysin’s work inspired and resonated with a host of artistic orientations and media-technical techniques through the latter-half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Throughout the late 1960s, cybernetic-kinetic sculptor Wen-Ying Tsai created movement sculptures lit by stroboscopic light. These are later written about with great admiration by media philosopher Vilém Flusser in Art International (Flusser, 1974). Boyd Mefford’s “Strobe-lighted Floor”, where fast-firing lights are installed under  Lucite panels in the exhibition environment, produced coloured after-images affecting the visitor’s sense of space and equilibrium (Magic Theatre, 1968). Mefferd’s strobe room was cited as a positive example of non-formalist Systems Art in Jack Burnham’s famed Artforum essay Systems Esthetics (1968), and the piece travelled to Osaka for the United States Information Agency (USIA) sponsored American Pavilion at Expo ’70. The Yale University based artist group Pulsa, throughout the late sixties and early seventies, installed a host of nocturnal technological alterations of outdoor and gallery environments, such as submerging fifty-five xenon strobe lights into the pond of Boston Public Garden, as a means of “linking the static ‘hardware’ of the city and its dynamic ‘software’ of information and energy flows” (McKee, 2008, p. 54). The Aleph group, comprised of artists and architects Jon Olson, Harry Fischman, Peter Heer, and Sam Apple, created their “Stroboscopic Crystal Waterfall Environment” in 1969. Gene Youngblood writes on Milton Cohen’s artwork “The Centers: A Ritual of Alignments” from 1968 in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema. Cohen constructed a translucent circular projection surface, and sound and strobe-light events are interactively activated variously throughout the performance area (p. 371-372). Goodyear (2008) notes that such works were a perfect celebration of the “combined power of the United States’ technological and cultural resources, in the context of the Cold War” and Nixon’s “bring us together” philosophy (p. 170).

Pamela Lee (2004) highlights as well that the artwork itself need not do any actual or electrical flickering, as much Op Art from this period was oriented toward similar, disastrously successful ends, such as in Bridget Riley’s 1964 painting “Current”. Lee writes how the work “plays with the terms of seeing and feeling, of eye and body, as starkly as it is rendered in black and white. Yet just as black and white admits to a vast range of grays in between… In time, the surface begins to flicker, like a stroboscope; or wave, like a lenticular screen. Look longer still, and surprising colours—psychedelic phantoms—emanate from between the lines… The eye is enervated while the body feels something else: nausea, perhaps, or even a blinding headache” (p. 155).

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Aleph’s “Stroboscopic Crystal Waterfall Environment” from 1969.

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Members of the Drop City commune in Trinidad, Colorado collaboratively produced “The Ultimate Painting”, a spinning canvas lit by high powered strobe lights. The work was part of the E.A.T. Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1968, and is no 

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Starting in 1984, Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans began exhibiting reconstructions of the Gysin-Burroughs Dreamachines (Evans, Pakesch and Graz, 2007). The cybernetic Second Coming that was the 1990s saw renewed interest in these kind of light works dealing with perception and extreme stroboscopic experiences. James Turrell created a number of portable “Perceptual Cell” works during the late 90s, many of which involved strobe lights, turned on and off evenly on the visual field, with subtly shifting frequencies leading to various visual phenomena (Pryor, 2014). Olafur Eliasson began exhibiting stroboscopic environments featuring waterfalls and fountains in 1995, including “Your strange certainty still kept” (1996), where streams and droplets of water appear to be frozen in space due to flickering strobe lights. Eliassons’ exhibitions of this kind echo Harold Edgerton’s experiment from the mid-thirties which he nicknamed the “piddler”, consisting of a small hose, a variable strobe light, and a yellowish fluorescein and water mixture (Edgerton Centre, 2016). Eliassons' stroboscopic situations were featured in the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale (“People meet in architecture”) with his work “Your split second house”, a long corridor space filled with strobes and flailing water hoses. Dziekan writes of this and other works in the Biennale as “giving substance to time (photographically, stroboscopically)” and “as controlled experiments variously involving acts of shaping space.” Citing Eve Blau, Dziekan further notes the stroboscopic atmosphere's ability to “reveal both the complex subjectivity of perception and the intersubjectivity of experience that is shared” (Blau, cited in Dziekan, 2011, n.p.). 

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Olafur Eliasson’s contribution to the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, “People meet in architecture.” 

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The flickering continues past the millennium mark, as Carsten Höller’s presents “Light Corner” (2000), a corner surface containing approximately 1800 light bulbs flickering at 7.8 Hz. (Rosenberg, 2011). In 2006, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer created “Pulse Room” wherein incandescent bulbs mimic the heartbeat pulse of members of the visiting public, converting it into flickering flashes shown by incandescent light bulbs. Carlson and Schmidt wrote of Lozano-Hemmer’s project as a “total field of flickering light [in which the] sense of local subject–object relation will most likely dissolve into a more ambient experience directed towards the entire, large-scale installation as a flickering surround” (Carlson and Schmidt, 2012, n.p.). Kurt Hentschläger’s exhibition installations “Feed” (2005-2006) and “Zee” (2008) are both room-sized works involving smoke and sound-filled rooms that are strobed by a high-powered lamp. These pieces by Hentschläger’s, which he describes variously as a “fluctuating organisms” and a “psychedelic architectures of pure light” have been temporarily closed due to visitor sickness and complaints (despite warnings to photosensitive epileptics outside the gallery). Chris Salter asks, after experiencing one of Hentschläger’s pieces: 

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How do these instruments produce these phantasms? The refresh rate of my eyes interferes with the room. Is it my eyes, is it in brain, is it in the world I’m thrown into? What does the room do to me as it recedes into memory, losing all dimensions? Do I doubt my visions? Is there really nothing there? No object, no subject. Just a single field of vibrating, palpitating, fluctuating nothingness. (Salter, 2015, p. 2-3). 

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At the start of 2008, Nik Sheehan released the documentary film “FLicKeR” about Gisyn and Burrough’s Dreamachine work, based on the book “The Chapel of Extreme Experience” by J. G. Geiger. This same year and for the next four, Idan Hayosh created several large-scale formations of high-wattage strobe lights, in which motion-triggered bursts of strobe and the sound of the electric current driving them are amplified in an enclosed space (ArtMag, 2013, n.p.). Laure Prouvost’s “AFTER AFTER” (2013) is a blacked-out room in which objects, other artworks and images are viewed under flickering strobes, creating what the artist calls a “different kind of 3D film” (Outset, 2013, n.p.). Ryoji Ikeda’s “Test Pattern” works, beginning in 2013, bring a decidedly digital flicker and noise to public and artistic spaces, worldwide.

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SU-22 display (2009) by Idan Hayosh. A formation of high wattage strobe lights, in which bursts of flickering light and electric current sound are heard and seen. The lamps are triggered by motion sensors.

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Carsten Nicolai exhibited a large-scale re-interpretation of the Gysin-Burroughs-Sommerville Dreamachine with his work “Rota” in 2009, consisting of a rotating stainless steel cylinder with perforated sides, enveloping a bright cold light. Much of “sensory anthropologist” Chris Salter’s work, such as the collaborative piece “Mediations of Sensation/Displace” (2011, with anthropologist David Howes), employs stroboscopic techniques, as part of media and sensing systems that bring bodies and environments into resonance (Salter, 2015, p. 16). Salter, Liveness, Hauser, and Lamontagne’s panel at ISEA 2010, “Enunciations of Nonhuman Performativity” also productively linked media-perceptual and environmental concerns with the non-human-technological, acknowledging how “we have enlisted them (the non-humans, the material, the machines, the technology) for more than our servitude – we have enlisted them as active creative collaborators” (Salter, Liveness, Hauser, Lamontagne, 2010, p. 3). 

Since 2007, the authors of this paper, Jamie Allen and Ryan Jordan, have developed and explored stroboscopic light in concert with high-bandwidth sonic signals. In 2012, they collaborated with other artists in MLBMLBMLB, a hosted residency, performance and recording project featuring contemporary stroboscopic noise artists Phillip Stearns, Yao Chung-Han, Jo Kazuhiro, Ryan Jordan, Loud Objects, Tristan Perich, Kunal Gupta and Katie Shima). This group presented contemporary circuit-based DIY performance evenings, for and by people interested in minimally electronic, high-amplitude light and sound (Allen, 2013).

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Group photo of collaborating in the MLBMLBMLB (http://mlbmlbmlb.com) noise and stroboscopic light residency, tour, and recording project in 2010, here pictured in the STEIM recording and production studios in Amsterdam (Allen, 2010, n.p.) 

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This selected chronology of works dealing with stroboscopic phenomenon deal readily with the materiality of signals, their use in atmospheric or environmental installations or with the history of psycho-mediatic phenomena induced by and with strobed media. As such, they are less “new media”, computational or “digital artworks”, but align more readily with media archaeological motivations, interested in esoteric, subtextual, subaltern scientific and material media trajectories. In some cases these works are quite literal media archaeological re-enactments (e.g.: Cerith Wyn Evans). Jussi Parikka highlights the media archaeologist's propensity toward engaging “with archaeologies of signal and signal formats” (Parikka, 2012, p. 154). The signal in most of the above works operates as an active aesthetic history, itself a signaletic and erratic ‘thread’ linking interests in perception and media. Signal aesthetics are both constitutive of, and produced by these works, instruments, technologies and environments. 

Most of the works outlined above are contingent on variables outside of any individual actor’s control. Audience interaction, environmental factors, variations in perceptual reception, and other purposeful  contingency factors are resident in hardware, or enabled through situational and atmospheric complexity. The contingency of media derived from a material driven to its highest energy state introduces an uncertainty that is not controlled or removed from these systems, but cultivated and appreciated as part of Signal aesthetics. The stroboscopic signal is a material performance in itself, as its intermittent energetics modulate structures already resonant : electromotive forces, ionic compositions, architectural features and the placement of bodies in space. Signals aesthetics brings about an all-over signaletic-experience, foregrounding the perceiving body’s place in a space of unsettled and unsettling media-technical signals.

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Signaled Attentions

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“One of the peculiarities of electric speed is that it pushes all the unconscious factors up into consciousness.” — Marshall McLuhan

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The importance of the materiality of signals, as the modulated, energetic composition of media, is downplayed in the practice and nomenclature of “digital media” and “digital art.” And yet it is these always-electrical signals, be they digital or analog, that run through all our contemporary media apparatuses, shivering through codec chips as they decode MP3 files and pulsing through the radio-frequency WiFi antennae as they upload images via our mobile phones and laptops. These seemingly insignificant signals are better thought as ‘asignificant’, layers of media conditioning the very possibility of communications and creativity, thought and activity. Media artists, just like their counterparts in engineering and communications, cultivate an attentiveness to the electrical signaletics of media and, as outlined above, stroboscopic light experiments and artworks express in particular this orientation in media art history, which continues into contemporary practices. Signal-aware thinking and doing contrasts with more representational or narrative- or phantasmagorically focused artistic genealogies, and with most of Western media studies, art criticism, history, and music composition. Gysin and Burrough’s Dreamachine, for example, did not construct for the viewer a particular image, but eidetic imagery arose from the constellation of consciousness, media and environment. Can we even call this “dazzling multiplicity of images in constantly altering relationships” ‘art’? Gysin didn’t think so. For him, the Dreamachine made “the ‘collages’ and ‘assemblages’ of so-called ‘modern’ art appear utterly ineffectual and slow. Art history as the enumeration of individual images ended with the direct introduction of light as the principal agent in the creation of images which have become infinitely multiple, complex and all-pervading. Art history has come to an end” (Gysin, cited in Geiger, 2003, p. 63). Artists exploring and reflecting the aesthetics of signals present non-presentational efficacies, co-producing with technologies and environment an effect that can be traced as a subaltern history of media art. It is a more inclusive history than its mainstream contemporary art counterparts, as well, enacting a kind of perceptual egalitarianism — the stroboscope elicits aesthetic experiences that are common to most perceiving (human) beings, requiring little prior knowledge of artistic genres, designs, formats, styles or theories. 

Signal aesthetics align with Russian futurist Viktor Shklovsky’s (1893–1984) concept of art’s purpose, which is “to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky, 1965, p. 28). This line of experimental media art  runs parallel, or counter, to the learned and standard histories of so-called aesthetic forms. Shklovsky’s thinking on art impedancematches  Hermann von Helmholtz’s (1821–1894) much earlier thinking of nerve signals as telegraphic; Helmholtz was one of the first to measure the response time of nerve conduction (Schmidgen, 2002, p. 143). Stroboscopic light enables constellations of media, material, space and perceiving bodies—a transmutation of electromagnetic signals arriving from an external-environment, and signals arising in perception and consciousness. 

Contemporary media scholar and ‘neuropsychedelia’ cognoscenti Erik Davis writes of media-historical developments, and of “electricity [as] an experience before it is a fact, a dream before it is a science” (1999, n. p.). Davis terms the cultural milieu enframed by the potentials and aesthetics of electrical signals, the “Electromagnetic Imaginary”— the thinkable thoughts and possible artistry that electrical signals help give rise to. Signal aesthetics, part of this electromagnetic imaginary, likewise highlights how signal dispositifs become “epistemologically productive in the constellation of a specific technology, a new theoretical framework, and a visual [i.e.: perceptual] effect” (Horn, 2007, p. 10). Signals pass through and pervade twentieth-century modes of thought. One putative example includes the way that signals served as an inspiration for Einstein’s thinking of relativity. As Canales suggests in her 2011 essay A Science of Signals: Einstein, Inertia and the Postal System, a milieu replete with signals was the media-apriori for the thinking of relativity by Einstein and his contemporaries. If “German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz had urged his followers to consider the world as a system of signs… Einstein urged his colleagues to think of it in terms of signals” (Canales, 2011A, p. 13). Canales indicates how Einstein’s relativity was in part the effect of this media-apriori, a reverie of travelling with or as a light-speed signal pulse. Our current view of the mathematical universe crystallizes out of these particularly stroboscopic “electrodynamics of moving media” (Canales, 2011B, p. 20).

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Signal Discourses

Conceiving media and artworks as the creating, mixing and redirecting of signals is an oblique, sly and humility-inducing shift of perspective for electronic arts and artists. The role of the performer or artist becomes simply that of one actor, amongst others, that of a non-central human-filtration switching-station for a panoply of feedback loops, syntheses, modulations, multiplexes and interferences that can run into, out of, and through contemporary media systems. If signal rawness is desired, energies are direct and unadorned, the interpretive sovereignty of ‘the artist’ is lessened, producing situations and environments of media perception that are more inclusive, involving all present in “the set of sensations, more or less rich, of the artists themselves… a certain contact with matter that is being transformed through work” (Simondon, 2012, p. 3). Anna Munster (2014) takes up Simondon’s notions of transduction (as the metastable, energic conversion processes that allow for individuation to occur) to suggest her own signal aesthetics, impelled by an activation of signals as “transmaterial becoming rather than as communicational” This is “time-matter’s becoming” given by a focus on signal energies (Munster, 2014, p. 163). For Munster, media is always “energetic and its force and matter persist outside our attempts to encode and decode it… The energetics of signal cannot be reduced to our digital encoding or decoding of it, cannot be completely accounted for by the labour we perform upon it” (p. 158). Signals are unstable, oscillatory, sudden, transmissive, saturating and shifty, providing a vehicle for what Christoph Brunner (2012, n.p.) has called “immediating processes,” in that they are not mediated in any of the usual ways we mean. They are uncoded, out-of-control, and untranslatable, asignification that is against representation, in the service of itinerance, perspectivism, and destabilisation of momentum of technocapitalism.

The irreducibility of signals to the activities we perform upon or with them leads us to question the questions: Just what is it that a signal is like? Or what is it like to be a signal? The electric and electronic indeed has its own predispositions and appetites, its own material and energetic ways of shape-forming the electromagnetic continuum. Both Gilbert Simondon and Eric Davis hint at a history of signals as desiring machines, with their own wants and propensities, calling forth certain arrangements, orientations and architectures in the world. Simondon wrote of the architecture of water and radio towers as needing to be at the top of a hill, a kind of ‘aesthetic’ predilection. In the world in the work of Anthanasius Kircher, Davis notes an ascribing of want as the identification of “certain vibrating musical tones as ‘magnetic.’” (Davis, 1999). Outside of the “digital,” beyond “code,” and inclusive of non-human energies and agencies, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen links signals to “new understandings of how identity patterns might be created” (Thomsen, 2012, p. 8). 

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Signals of Self and Others

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“[I]f our ears were ten times more sensitive, we would hear matter roar—and presumably nothing else.” — Friedrich Kittler

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In a late essay entitled Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Kittler outlines how signals dissolve forms of communicative subjectivity in acts of listening. If random acoustic noise, arising from the Brownian motion of atomic matter, harbours the very possibility of all audible messages then “the yoke of subjectivity has been lifted from our shoulders” (Kittler, 2014, p. 177). Kittler’s point is that this media-apriori already situates all subjective enunciations we might utter—white noise is all that is utterable. Human physiology has evolved attuned to particular sub-bands of a pre-existing electromagnetic universe. Vilém Flusser learnt and recounted a related lesson that he learned from his own hearing aid. This bionic appendage laid bare for Flusser the act of hearing, revealing the conditions of one's own contingent, permeable or even arbitrary physiology, as biological apparatus:

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“The unpleasant, even unacceptable thing about this apparatus is that one cannot see it. Therefore one cannot know who programmed it… My own hearing aid is visible. One knows who programmed it, a Japanese company. And this finally is an advantage I have in comparison to you. I can, better than you are able to, see through my hearing aid...” (Flusser in Mills, 2011, p. 339)

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Signal aesthetics highlight that human beings are but one type of asignifying and signifying meaning creators, one amongst many signal transmitters, modulators and receivers.

The genealogy of media signals gives us a number of moments where the folding of subjects and objects of perception into one another through media is pursued. The “psychophysics” experiments described by Kittler (2011, pp. 148-149) were of this variety, as extreme media conditions and self-experimentation on bodies in laboratories for the modulation or frustration of perception, resulted in the physicalisation of human consciousness and subjectivity, as a component in concert with material environments and electronic media. The work of 19^th Century physiologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, who experimented with sight by staring for excessively long periods directly at the sun, was in search of  quantitative, natural-scientific laws of perception and cognition. Fechner explored a cosmic media-relation, between himself and solar rays, imagined as conjoined energies between his own brain and the cosmos, arising in particular psychic states. The received signals of the world are reformulated by psychotic and neural abnormalities, as an immersive condition: 

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“A body, whatever it is, can defend its limit; it can refuse a particle from the outside, whatever it is. Among psychotic people, and notably among schizophrenics, this practically daily commerce with particles of the self or perhaps with non-living bodies, or bodies outside the self, does not pose a problem at all. It’s like a natural exercise. And if you don’t understand it, a schizophrenic might think of you as a bonehead: “Oh really, you don’t get it?” (Polack, 2012)

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Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (2013) includes Erin Manning’s retelling of the experience of an autistic Amanda Baggs, running her hands through water. By her account, this is an asignifying experience of water: “the water doesn’t symbolize anything. I am just interacting with the water as the water interacts with me” (Baggs cited in Manning, 2013, p. 9). Manning identifies this as Baggs’ ‘intensive relationality’—this heightened responsiveness to the rawness of perceptual signaletics—as a mischaracterisation of what seems like anti-social or unempathic behaviour amongst autistic people. As a perceptual  link to the media signaletic condition, the autist is in fact hyper-empathic, “in a conversation with every aspect of [their] environment, reacting physically to all parts of [their] surroundings” (Manning, 2013, p. 9). Non-normative psychologies and neurologies help us understand what it could be like to access or connect to every transmitting body, to receive the asignifying signals of the world and others. 

This kind of non-normative experience is pointed to by the reports of people engaged in practices such as possession trance. For the Nigerian Hausa cult of possession trance, their rituals are very much therapeutic and the 'best way to relieve feelings of depression, anxiety or frustration'. The rituals combine music, dance and, at night-time, light. There is typically a rhythmic drum and a melodic lute or flute. These are played from around 120 beats per minute to 200+. The faster they are played, the more intense and louder the sound. Performances held at night possess a visual sensory element as the bright white light of a kerosene lamp is kept close to the participants, most of whom seem to stare into it, eventually focusing on some point well beyond it (Besmer, 1983). In this sense the kerosene lamp can be seen as a simple media technology potentially re-creating similar visual experiences as those mentioned previously in the paper. Some participants in these rituals are referred to as the ‘horses’ in that they become possessed by a God or spirit, an “Other”, and are ridden like a horse. Sarah Goldingay's (2010) essay To Perform Possession and to be Possessed in Performance: The Actor, the Medium and an ‘Other’ is a comparison of the experiences of an established spirit medium and a professional actor—both figures who regularly allow the transmissions of an ‘other’ to enter them, as auxiliary- or co-existent. To do so they train for years to learn to surrender their own, liminal, “pedestrian selves” (Goldingay, 2010, p. 216). Both actor and medium speak of what Goldingay terms the “technical self”—a mediatisation or systematisation of perception and behaviour employed by both—which for modulation, transition and transmission of other selves. Goldingay quotes Austin in explaining the complex cognitive processes that work as a “conglomerate of subsystems, functioning in many separate, but interacting configurations” (Goldingay, 2010, p.216). Resonating with Austins statement, neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch says that beliefs in supernatural entities “are more or less endowed with cybernetic and circuit characteristics’’ (Bateson, cited in Hall 2015 p. 282). These become signaletic media technologies that allow for the navigation of subjectivity itself. The writings of Philip K. Dick are imbued with religio-mystical “self-causing loop(s)” of feedback and “flip-flop(ing)” circuits of contact with otherness. In his Exegesis, Dick writes:

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To experience truly, genuinely to encounter any other living entity in itself, one would have to be in it, and have it in one... One would share and inhabit its world, possess its perspective; at the same time the Other would possess what one has as a worldview. This might be close to a sort of energy symbiosis, an exchange of plasmas. One would not see the Other; one would see as the Other... A superimposition, greater than either had possessed; a total sharing within, and a total shared view of what lies outside.” (Dick, 2011, p. 44)

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The permeability of the self as Dick describes here is not a fusion into indistinction, but enacts a sort of energy symbiosis; a transduction of signals, conversing and converting. If we take up Timothy Morton’s expanded sense of the aesthetic as a way of conceiving of all “causal effects between objects and entities” then Signal aesthetic arts, media and sciences enact an explorative subjectivity, no longer a solely tautological, human proviso. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro works with indigenous theories “according to which the different sorts of persons—human and nonhuman (animals, spirits, the dead, denizens of other cosmic layers, plants, occasionally even objects and artifacts)—apprehend reality from distinct points of view” (de Castro, Eduardo Batalha Viveiros, 2004, p. 466). And each such point of  view presumably has its own ‘aesthetic’, its own way of creating, sensing and experiencing aesthetic worlds. Hylozoism (the doctrine that all matter has life) and animism (the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe) allow us to conceive of more heterogeneous “dances of agency,” (Pickering, 2008, p. 6), bringing to contemporary signaletic media arts an expansion of the sensed and affective field. This might include consideration for the ways that other materials, entities and agencies might be felt and experienced, or how they might in some sense feel or experience in their own right. Thinking this way about the media signal posits signal aesthetics as a way of shifting sovereign agency of human beings in the world, potentially linking Mcluhanist perceptual expansionism to the concerns of the Anthropocene. 

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Toward a Signal Aesthetics

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“...pure energy and information seem to be the essences of art;
all else is being dropped methodologically by the wayside”

— Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture

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Words, in particular words like ‘signal,’ are immediately recursive, they fold back onto themselves as material referents to what is pointed at, always signaletic, signified and asignified. Language is itself a signaletic aesthetic, containing mixed semantic and material ‘minima’ and ‘maxima’ in a singular atom, entity or moment. Stripped of context, and capable of being abstracted as a realm of general and asignifying utility, signals go ignored and denatured in their contribution to the transmission of aesthetic and cultural forms; they are the disregarded Kittlerian horses, glossed over for the messengers they carry.

The first electrical signals, now retrospectively denoted ‘analog’, are so named as they are precisely material similitudes, they are processes conveying information “about the behaviour or attributes of some phenomenon" (Priemer, 1991, p. xvi). A voltage, continuously varying with the temperature of a thermostat or the speed of an engine’s alternator coupling, is analogous to that temperature, that speed. The signifier-accentuating Shannon-Weaver theorems brought with them our epoch of abstracted communications, building a tower of signification so high we can barely trace its footprint, or stabilise its mast. And yet still, media signals, information and the aesthetics and thinking they render possible are only ever roughing out an electromagnetic substrate. Signal aesthetics attempt to traverse and topple the steeple of media abstractions, devolving analogic function and emphasising materiality. It is an aesthetic of electrons and/as phenomenal media, as far as it is possible directly modulated and perceived. In this, signals are in some sense liberated from their strict performance of useful (human) work and (human) meaning.” Signal aesthetics can never address perception directly, but exists along and is aware of a spectrum of media practices which impose meanings, compose environments and shape perception with media technologies, particularly evident in the use of stroboscopic light and practices involving acoustic noise. Signal aesthetics works strip away, to varying degrees and to the extent that such a thing is possible, canonical referents (classical, literary, narrative or otherwise), narratives and significations customarily imposed upon media signals, creating works that nonetheless articulate a particular sensory regime, perceptual relation and even social vision. It is a vision of altering an  individual’s perception of perception, as an experience of other beings, human or otherwise. It is a vision of how art might function to providing a heightened awareness of the self, others and the media technologies which, quite literally and materially, surround us. 

The continued fascination with and practices of stroboscopic signaletics attests to the insolubility and malleability of perception, suggesting media arts that flicker and strobe in a metastable liminality constituted by unequal parts matter, media, milieu and mind. We could speculate as to the futures we would all be living through today, had Gysin succeeded in domesticating his ideas, had he succeed in installing Dreamachines in the homes of millions. Nuclear families would sit together and contemplate consciousness and perception, instead of staring blankly at whatever is piped out of YouTube through our browsers (Geiger, 2003, p. 46). The understanding of media as a signaletic experience is key to new forms of inter-subjective and -objective awareness and relations. Stroboscopic and signal aesthetic media arts are technologies of this experience of self and others.

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The above essay is an excerpted version of a longer essay, published in full in OPEN FIELDS, Art and Science Research Practices in the Network Society, Volume No: 15, Editors: Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Armin Medosch in 2016.

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