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."

• Subjectivity varies wildly, but objective experience apparently exists through a priori cognition of events, a sort of external signal deduced as human intuition normalizing the comprehension of the world. "...phenomenal nature is not discovered, but made by us. "

• The modern individual results from a feedback loop between objective reality and the truth of being through intersubjectivity. Representation constitutes this relationship in respect to the modern, where there is no such thing as matter in itself, only experience through reproduction and representation.

• the set of conditions for modern thinking comes down to the premise of "the outside must pass by way of the inside", additionally, the inside is a condition known in cybernetic theory as noise  

• In Serres book "Parasite", the author postulates another frame of reference in regard to significance and noise. Para-site, in a literal translation, can describe adjacency to a more integral point, (beside the site). In cybernetic theory, this declares the mutability of the signal, receiver and noise as dependant on position.

• In order to place kantian consciousness within a cybernetic theory, the external and internal relationships to a system can be described from both human and non-human perspectives. In doing this, the concept of transcendent knowledge can be surpassed by immanence, thus allowing the interchange of observational perspective. From the inside out, (human perspective), inherent experience introduces clarity through knowledge, though from the outside in (non-human), this inherent knowledge is noise that degrades the external signal input, which distorts the message, rendering it unreadable and ultimately inaccessible to comprehend. Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it. As information passes through the human, in order to comprehend it, the human decodes it in manner that produces understanding, and in this process, noise is introduced to the information packet. Significance is built on a foundation of interruption and deformation. Kantian intersubjective experience reframes the objective as noise in the primary signal that comes from the unexperienceable world of things-in-themselves.

As a thought experiment, if the subjective experience comes from jamming the source signal of the external world, if this noise is removed, can the source signal be reconstructed?

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