#ex14

exercise 14 visual relationships / signal-to-noise ratio

Maeve, 9 April 2018 camouflage signal (with detail); add signal to noise; find pattern/significance in noise

exercise 14 visual relationships / signal-to-noise ratio

Sophia, 9 April 2018 (with model, fabric, digital projection)

exercise 14 visual relationships / signal-to-noise ratio

Gregory, 9 April 2018 created within game "space"

Greg explains the game environment in which he generated these images — The name of the game is Garry's Mod... it's not just a game it can be used as a tool. . What i did: I constructed a box out parts of a metal storage container and then changed its properties to act like a TV that shows everything my character can see in First person. the box was dark so there was no light source, however i used a feature that lets you apply overlay effects to change how things look. i was also distorting some of the images by warping in and out. Hope that makes some sense.

Greg also mentioned the game Dwarf Fortress — "The game has text-based graphics and is open-ended with no main objectives."

  some observations about the relationship of ground to figure, or of diagrammatic information to background (and details in the background) or, more generally, to relationship of signal to noise with regard to our exercise 14.

1 find pattern or significance in noise

noise is static, or in French, parasite. Parasite means, "to eat next to" —

mid 16th century: via Latin from Greek parasitos ‘(person) eating at another's table,’ from para- ‘alongside’ + sitos ‘food.’

we normally think of noise/static as formless, random, even a virus that eats away at the (clean) signal.

but might we find ways — even arbitrary ones — to find (or introduce, taking cues from elements in the noise) some pattern in the noise? some means of selecting out certain elements from the noise?

e.g., remove or color (red) all every typographic e in a random text?

on static, see the suggestive language in Isabella Winkler's discussion of Michael Serres, in her essay "Love, Death and Parasites" —

There is always a bug in the works. That is how it works at all. A wire does not have to be heated very much for noise to incrase. This excitement stops the message from passing. But sometimes it allows the message to pass, a message that cannot cross an unexcited channel... white noise is the condition of passing (for meaning, sound, and even noise), and the noise is its prohibitor or its interception. Noise, or, again, the parasite, is at the three points of the triangle: sending, reception, transmission. Heat a little, I hear, I send, I pass; heat a little more, everything collapses. We experience static as a nuisance; it interrupts the signal that carries the message. But, Serres suggests, it is perhaps only because of the interruption that we receive the message at all... 229ff.

2 camouflage signal by adding small-scale detail, or ornamentation, e.g., color/hue/value factors

This, from Bob Snyder his excellent Music and Memory : An Introduction (2000):

Blurring Pitch Categories : Ornamentation The function of categorization was described earlier in this book as the reduction or removal of small-scale detail, which can be viewed as a kind of perceptual “noise” (The term noise is here used to mean small-scall irrelevant variations, rather than a type of acoustical waveform.) In some musical systems, however, especially those having scales with few pitches, certain controlled types of small-scale variations are allowed precisely to blur categorical pitch boundaries. Called “ornamentation,” these variations may consist of a wide variety of trills, continuous slides, oscillating patterns, or even occasional stable pitches that are not part of the tuning system. All of these can introduce uncertainty into the perception of pitch categories. They are most typically introduced at the beginning of end of a stable pitch event, creating uncertainty either about what the stable pitch will actually be or about where it will lead. That is to say, they usually “attach” [ parasite!] themselves to a stable pitch event... (p143)

3 introduce signal to noise, and see what happens to both

We have already seen how introduction of one strong concentrated color, activates or causes resonance with other (less strong, more diffuse?) instances of a similar color. In typography, two weights of the same type, placed next to a continuous-tone (grayscale) photograph, cause a similar resonance.