DISCUSSION: CRITICAL LIMITS: COMPLEXITY, ALIENATION AND THE BORDERS OF SENSE

As every system now operates as an information system, noise – the shadow of information – has grown in significance beyond its origins in cybernetics and communication theory. This epistemological drift across diverse practical and theoretical domains (music, AI and computation, finance, biosemiotics and complexity theory) marks a fundamental transformation of capitalist rationality that calls for rethinking the meaning of noise. In conversation with scholar and translator Patrick Leftwich, the Noise Research Union members (Cécile Malaspina, Inigo Wilkins, Martina Raponi, Mattin, Miguel Prado & Sonia de Jager) will discuss how they challenge the common view of noise as a mere disturbance or patternless error by proposing a diagrammatic approach that considers noise a constitutive element of systems. A diagram, from this perspective, provides a conceptual tool to expose noise at the edges of political, cognitive or computational models.