The installation consists of various newspapers of different dialects, which are illuminated from within signifying means of visually recording the not so transparent media. The media is overloaded with the visual noise of our lives but the noise we experience everyday is the one that toils inside of us. At a time in our culture where everything is so easily made visible and transparent we often find the mediums that we choose to express ourselves are the ones making us invisible. By choosing to use a multitude of languages spoken in Mumbai (India) I have tried to erase meaning making systems, which could be comprehended by some people but totally irrelevant to others. This socio-­linguistic overlap is the noise of our culture – our acoustic ecology -­ the excess material left over after our cultural conditioning has churned it out as a surplus. All of the mechanisms for interrupting transmission and creating interference make noise and are as much a part of the installations content as the meaning of the messages conveyed. This zone of indistinction is not the negation of language but rather its field of emergence -­ not its unstructured opposite, but the event of its coming into being. The installation tries to highlight this unrest of our daily acoustic ecology through an immersive experience.

 

Noise, in its metaphysical guises, is often posted as the not-­yet-­meaningful or as that which lies beyond or below meaning; a whirlpool of chaos from which sense emerges. Nor can noise be distinguished as unwanted sound, since this posits it as a purely auditory phenomenon. To refer to noise as excess does not require it to come ‘from the outside’, a radical exteriority, nor does it come from a binarism between inside/outside. Rather, noise exists structurally or relationally; its presence relies on an assemblage of perceivers, generators, borders, vibrations, ideas, geographies, spaces and materials. Noise does in fact create a meaning, first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations frees the listener’s imagination.