In the photographic series Noise, viewers are confronted with the visual equivalent of silence: magnified images of television static. These abstractions, pulled from the random flicker of a screen disconnected from content, become arresting compositions that oscillate between absence and presence, signal and void. Each image captures a dense field of electronic noise—grain, flicker, interference—rendered with startling clarity through close zooming. They are, by nature, formless. And yet, they resonate.
The project’s conceptual gravity emerges through the titles, which were randomly generated and only later assigned to images through a process of intuitive pairing. Titles such as Dark Snow, Satan in the Hell, and The Beard Beyond offer a surreal, often uncanny layer of interpretation. These are not captions, but provocations. They guide the viewer to locate familiar shapes, moods, or imagined narratives within the abstract terrain. The human brain, hardwired to detect patterns and assign significance, responds eagerly. A cluster of white specks might become a flurry; a sudden dark streak, a silhouette. In this way, the series not only presents noise—it mirrors our instinctive need to organize chaos.
Adding another conceptual layer, individual image critiques were generated using AI, without any input beyond the title and the visual. This process mirrors the human impulse at the heart of the project. The AI’s interpretations, devoid of context, reflect how easily meaning can be manufactured from randomness when prompted by language. It is a closed loop of artificial suggestion and subjective response. The machine’s reading of the image is no more grounded than our own—and that’s precisely the point.
The aesthetic strategy is as significant as the conceptual one. These are not digitally manipulated collages or composited works—they are photographs of real, analog phenomena. The zooming, the only intervention, is both technical and philosophical: it transforms the mechanical by focusing in, not out. In doing so, it invites the viewer to participate in an act of sustained attention, normally denied to something so ephemeral as static. What is usually background becomes foreground. What is dismissed as noise becomes, paradoxically, the signal.
Formally, the images possess a tension between chaos and composition. The grain structures create micro-patterns that can resemble landscapes, constellations, or biological textures. In this way, the series echoes traditions of abstract photography, from Aaron Siskind’s wall textures to the grainy studies of early video art. But it also aligns with conceptual practices that examine the semiotics of image-making—particularly where chance and algorithm intersect.
Noise operates on multiple registers. It is a commentary on randomness and meaning, on analog decay in a digital age, and on the slippery boundary between perception and suggestion. In a cultural moment saturated with algorithmic content and AI-generated imagery, this project quietly reasserts the power of the viewer’s imagination—even as it reveals that power to be constructed, fickle, and easily manipulated.
In the end, Noise is not about static, but about projection—human, digital, and conceptual. It is about the irrepressible desire to find a face in the grain, a god in the glitch, or a story in the snow.
Essay written: May 2025
