Amy Ireland - Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde

• Using a passage from HP Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", Ireland introduces the basic cognitive operation of Enlightenment subjectivity. Using the classic model of communication theory, an alien city is viewed across a mountain range, which is reflected onto a visible distortion of ice, snow, and clouds, to the viewer of the phenomenon. The viewer sees the distorted reflection of the alien city as a real image. This image is an illustration of cybernetic noise, (as being a combination of both human and non-human sources), as well as representing the idea that modern subjectivity represents the object through the presumption of the subject, what Kant called synthetic a priori knowledge, which is knowledge that is both given in advance by ourselves, and yet adds to what we know.