Odi et Amo: Digital Noise and the Poverty of Experience

In the digital realm, noise is at once fought and sought, hated, and loved. We may wish to reduce noise in communications, but we require it to encrypt the very content we communicate. We may wish to reduce noise when recording sounds, but in fact noise is of paramount importance for the achievement of high-fidelity recordings. The catch is that noise is not always the unwanted, obscene, unpleasant, or unwelcome side of an otherwise coherent, pleasant, and delightful set of circumstances. We need noise, badly. And we do so, not only when concerned with the efficiency of our technological instruments but also when concerned with the experience we derive from them. In today’s increasingly technological world, all efforts to minimise noise make our demand for it ever more pressing. The case of digital art practices is perhaps the most blatant example of how our (experiential) need for noise increases the more we try to suppress it. Odi et amo, noise. The main contribution of this chapter is not to argue whether a phenomenology of noise is possible or not. Rather, the aim is to illustrate how an adversarial stance towards noise leads to an impoverished experience. The case of digital technology will be our main guide. The claim is that if the inextricable relation between noise and experience is missed, excluded, or bypassed, then any phenomenology is impossible, let alone one about noise.