David Stout and Cory Metcalf:The Art of NoiseFold

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David Stout and Cory Metcalf: The Art of NoiseFold

The Art of NoiseFold

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Jenny Filipetti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5–7

On the Art of NoiseFold . . . the buzzing of hundreds of tiny electronic beings may burrow

insistently . . . between one’s eardrums.

DaviD BaRD-SchwaRz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5–8

Flux: The Art of David Stout and Cory Metcalf . . . how often we catalogue things, filing them in our minds into

categories . . . this is this, not that, this is good, that is evil.

DaviD Stout and coRy MetcalF . . . . . . . 5–9

Standing in a Field: David Stout and Cory Metcalf on Noise Folding . . . what has become familiar reveals itself as something completely

new and you are shocked into an awareness of the long now.

works

noiseFold 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

el umbral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

emanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Shadow Box attractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Melt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

the autopoietic theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

4D home (Four Directions home) . . . . . . . . . . 22

iNTerview

MeloDy SuMneR caRnahan

Conversation with Steina and Woody Vasulka about NoiseFold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24–27

S: And that is why I am the mother of NoiseFold.

biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28–30

credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

David Stout and Cory Metcalf:

The Art of NoiseFold

W: And I husbanded.

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I begin this preface to David Stout and Cory Metcalf: The Art of NoiseFold by thinking how often we cata-logue things, filing them in our minds into categories (things belong here, not there; this is this, not that; this is good, that is evil, etc.) We have been catalogu-ing, categorizing, ordering things and experiences into binary oppositions for a long time. We have changed our minds in terms of how elements of binaries relate to one another also for a long time. Are they oppo-sites of one another? Are they each in different logical classes? Can they be reconciled, or not? And what are the consequences of both affirmative and nega-tive answers to such questions? We sometimes refer to mutually-exclusive binary oppositions as a particularly Enlightenment idea, after René Descartes. For him and perhaps for most of us, Cartesian dualisms mean that mind and matter are fundamentally different, yet cru-cially dependent on one another. And this difference informs a wide variety of binaries upon which every-day thought since the Enlightenment is based: good / evil, light / dark, part / whole, organic / inorganic,

David Stout We are standing in a field of potential. An empty screen is a screen nonetheless, in that it is a frame of expecta-tion: the expectation that heroic dramas, product launches, or maybe even “video art” will fill its void. A projection-mapped image falling across an urban topology becomes something else, suggesting that the entire world is a screen. This is no longer a frame in the conven-tional 2D rectilinear sense but a near infinite field, where the dialectic between surface and projected image hypothetically supersedes the importance of the images themselves—this idea has been keenly explored by artist Krzysztof Wodiczko in a sociopolitical context. What does this mean to us as an environmental condition, as an extension of both the built environment and landscape?

As filmmaking and video production practices have con-verged; as increasingly minia-turized cameras are embedded in every conceivable device; as we share ourselves over live chat networks; as streaming video and quick clip uploads to YouTube-Vimeo-Facebook-Vine are now commonplace—how many among us are

Generation to generation society finds itself renegotiating the place of the individual within the world. Politics change, economies mutate, events and knowledge destabilize or re-center entire value structures in vast systems of com-munication and control. Our charge as the most recent inheritors of this ceaseless succession is to situate ourselves within an ecological or network sensibility, not merely on the concep-tual but rather on the perceptual level. Vision is insufficient on a planet where vast numbers

still willing to refer to them-selves as video artists? This art world distinction is largely outmoded, as both expensive professional and inexpensive consumer grade HD (high definition) video is used across every conceivable discipline and demographic, culminat-ing in ubiquitous distribution opportunities to every avail-able screen on the network. Video as a medium is no lon-ger technologically or socially distinct from film to the gen-eral public. The words video and film are used effortlessly and interchangeably without a thought that these mediums were once distinctly different. Now we simply refer to this as a movie. It does not matter what acquisition medium was used, if the production bud-get was big, small, or nonex-istent, or if it is playing at the Cineplex or on your phone. Movies are everywhere and being used effectively to com-municate everything from how to unclog your bathtub drain to selling designer shoes. While porn purveyors were momentarily at the techno-logical forefront, demonstrat-ing the technical feasibility and commercial effectiveness of HD streaming, it is now commonplace to sift oursocial media feeds for salient content, from toddler antics to bloody street protests to clever art works or tours of celebrity dream homes. We are awash in content. The sheer volume of streams rain-ing down from “the cloud” becomes a kind of virtual extension of the built envi-ronment, both as an added

Jenny Filipetti

On the Art of NoiseFold

Flux: The Art of David Stout and

Cory MetcalfDavid Bard-Schwarz

Standing in a Field: David Stout and

Cory Metcalf on Noise Folding

David Stout and

Cory Metcalf

Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient being rides the crest of the world’s becoming, ever present and witness to that moment when the world is about to disclose itself for what it is. Thus in a sentient world, there are no objects and subjects of perception; rather, perception inheres in the creative movement of emergence, where ‘things become things,’ as Merleau-Ponty put it, and ‘the world becomes world.’

—Tim ingold, “Lines and the Weather,” Vital Beauty: Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technology and Nature, 2012

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and has been interpreted in different ways. Probably the most common association is noise music and, by extension, dense walls of piercing indus-trial sounds, painful volumes, atonality, and rejection of rhythm, meter, and melody. And this is not completely wrong. David and I agree that noise music is an influence, but the deeper investigation is about the nature of noiseas a perceptual phenomenon. Noise as the absence of dis-cernible or meaningful form within a field of stimuli. Noise as the unexpressed potential of all possibilities. Noise as the primordial soup, the prima materia. When organized, fil-tered, structured, or folded, the potential becomes expressed. The process of folding the noise can cause meanings to emerge, be clarified, amplified, or even obfuscated behind another layer. Filtering actively struc-tures the stuff of the universe,

of regulatory functions take place within hidden infrastructures and invisible networks. Stasis occurs on the order of microseconds if at all: to human time the world exists entirely in flux. With the compression of space by technology, we live in time more than ever before.

Against this backdrop of contemporary existence NoiseFold inducts its viewers into alternate modes of perception, drawing them into the flux and transmutable relations of a sys-tem-level sentience.

Already in the software we find process in place of place: Stout describes the infrastructure as an “environmental matrix” which emulates environmental conditions rather than objects like mountains or plateaus. From an identifiable point of departure, the NoiseFold topologies “end up in a strange world that we don’t neces-sarily have words for”—alien enough to prohibit the kinds of responses Lucy Lippard once called “anecdotal and Rorschach,” familiar enough to let us in as equal elements in this lurching, pulsing system, wondering without expectation where we will set forth to next. To experience a NoiseFold piece is to be swept along in sys-tems. Swept along but not away: one’s heart may race or stomach may drop; the buzzing of hundreds of tiny electronic beings may bur-row insistently and at first unwelcomed between one’s eardrums. And yet . . . we feel ourselves inextricably a part of these fluxes and flows, not subsumed by them. There is no object, no sin-gle sublime form to overwhelm us, only the flux of movement, the translation of waveforms, the call-and-response of sensors that exist as we do at the interface of these physical and virtual worlds. Image becomes sound becomes form and back again in feedback loops that perpet-ually regenerate themselves. The systems art of NoiseFold is pure process and endless interre-lation, an antithesis to teleology: to teleology and yet not to narrative, for these are not the

sound / noise, motion / stasis, representation / reality. I believe that we are living in a period of trans-formation in the early twenty-first century in which the nature of binaries is undergoing relatively rapid and radical transformation. The mutually-exclusive cohesion of binaries is giving way to loose forms of subordination, coordination, and transformation. Third terms are emerging. We are beginning to think, to feel, to experience the world less in the context of binary opposition and more as a stream of data into which art can intervene in a flux of images, sounds, objects. The NoiseFold installations and performances of David Stout and Cory Metcalf inhabit this world of data, flux, and strange objects that seem to flicker in our ears, our eyes, our skin, our minds somewhere between reality and representation—neither one nor the other, nor a synthesis, but a strange Möbius strip in which images and sounds become each other across inscruta-ble thresholds. The performances of Stout and Metcalf (and other guest artists) invite you into this world more actively; much as we identify with characters in film—think of Stout, Metcalf, and other artists as they interact with the visual and acoustic consequences of algorithms as surrogates for you the viewer, listener. While instal-lations pulse with an autonomous life of their own, the performances beckon with a wide variety of sen-sory invitations: serene, intensely expressive, vaguely threatening, cajoling, affectionate, abstract, representa-tional, organic, inorganic, and all of these adjectives blurred and smeared into each other. I’m fond of think-ing of Stout and Metcalf’s art as blurring the binary opposition between attribute and entity. Their work often seems like pure adjective, pure adverb, and at once pure noun and pure verb; just imagine these four functions pulled apart from one another, recombining, fusing, melting, freezing, exploding. Below, I will explore first one performance, and then one installation to show you what I mean. Take a look / listen to Alchimia. It’s a performance with Stout and Metcalf interacting with images and sounds that appear on screens—one surrogate each, as it were, for / of the performers. Try to avoid thinking about what action, sound, image causes an effect on another action, sound, image in this work. The binary cause / effect can get in the way. In Alchimia, I invite you to suspend, to move around, to bring together,

interplay with architecture and a hybrid expansion of the natural ambient field. l

Cory Metcalf We are stand-ing in a field of noise. Filtered noise is noise nonetheless. The capital Storyteller has been torn asunder, scattered to the populous. With it, our archetypes have become like Xeroxes: so like the originals, yet fragmented and faded. We tell each other stories because we can, because we always have, but we are like children in our fathers shoes; without the storyteller, we are still fig-uring out how to know what they mean. Our cell-phone videos, tweets, and mash-ups try to reassemble Osiris, but there are pieces missing. Perhaps new archetypes and fables are waiting to emerge from the trash heap of zero-view YouTube clips, viral cat fails, and recorded web-cams—Horus, with a screen for a head—but for now, it all feels like noise.

We have the tools and capability to create almost any imaginable images or sounds and to transmit them to count-less people in near real-time. Distance is immaterial. We have redefined the boundar-ies of space and time. This would have been magic at any other time in history. But how quickly magic becomes the sta-tus quo: normal to the point of obvious, void of mystery. The real question then becomes: what images and sounds will we create and in what spirit will we transmit them? What is the story of now?

NoiseFold: The name can

(Filipetti continued) (Bard-Schwarz continued) (Stout & Metcalf continued)

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sounds of homeo/static noise but rather a living score of the life of systems in all their striving. In Stout and Metcalf’s hands, the multi-sensorial landscape does move, and with all the intensities of intention—ebbs or steeps or crackles or falls, builds and transmutes or fades, pulling us into the unpredictable rhythms of emergence. And we, as well: we feel ourselves alongside NoiseFold’s virtual universes in process, becom-ing. One that is or is among the many, swept along in waves of possibility, caught up in sen-sation. NoiseFold reminds us that sentience is an alternative way of knowing, but unlike the phenomenologists before them theirs is an embodiedness that lives at the fascia, situated at that networked membrane between body and world, a sensorial knowledge devoid of concerns about consciousness. Machines could have this knowledge, albeit not this response. Nonhuman life forms might perhaps have both.

And so through their work we relocate ourselves at our interfaces, alive in the perpet-ual flow of energy and information that surges among bodies, objects, and environment. n

to dissolve, or to otherwise ignore the cause / effect binary because it inhibits the beauty of precisely a kind of simultaneity of the sonification of image and the visualization of sound. Try as well to go beyond the binary of part / whole. Works like Alchimia present to our ears, our eyes, our skin a wealth of impulses. Try to enjoy as many of them as possible, accepting the knowledge that the vast majority of them will slip past your apprehen-sion to be stored in your unconscious or sloughed off into the Real. You don’t need to know into what whole each stimulus, each sound, each image fits—like leaves that we know belong to a tree. Imagine looking at a wealth of strange leaves that belong to something both like and unlike a tree. And try doing away with fusing together, or teasing apart the binary noise / music. Let yourself enjoy whatever associations you have with the sounds of Alchimia, but let the work pull at, transform, and melt those associations away into something else. Take a look / listen to Melt. It’s an installation of audio-visual sounds and images—an embodiment of the third term beyond binaries such as organic / inor-ganic. In the work, shapes and sounds appear and disappear in a rhythm like strange beacons in the night sky, like strange flowers, crystals that bloom and impossibly unbloom. Sounds like flutes or wings of a bird call shapes of mountains of snow or blades of ice and flames of fire that fold and unfold in an energy that underlies both organic growth and decay and the movements of continents. And the work tells a story without an obvious sequence of logical actions (rise, climax, fall) and without language. Such narrative that leaves behind markers of character, plot, setting, and place lays bare flux itself as energy that moves, carries, leaves behind, carves, flows, dissolves. When you experience a NoiseFold installation in the flesh (such as Melt), realize that you and other members of the audience will be free to move around the spaces in which sounds and images are transform-ing one another. Your body and how you move it in space can have a powerful effect on the extent to which you open your subjectivity to the work’s images and sounds. When you experience a NoiseFold per-formance (such as Alchimia) realize that you and other members of the audience will be seated in more or

orchestra that would have made Luigi Russolo proud. Somehow the noise never really bothers me in the city but, nonetheless, I was looking forward to the imagined quiet of the rainforest. During my stay in Costa Rica what amazed me most was not the lizards, blossoms, vines, fig trees, dolphins, giant insects, scarlet macaws, tree-frogs, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, cane toads, toucans, sea turtles, snakes, or sloths, though these were all new to me in that way that makes you truly aware that you are alive. What stuck with me was that even in a remote village hours from any paved roads or anything remotely urban, the soundscape was every bit as dense as that of the city. Birdsongs of every color, buzzing insects flitting through the open-air houses, the waves washing on the shore, monkeys howling out their territory; everywhere I went it was the same: dense, saturated, too much to parse, and unlike the familiar sounds of the city, too new to ignore. Every sound demanded attention. When I returned to my desert home in New Mexico, I couldn’t sleep for days. l

David Stout At what point does music become noise? At what point does noise become music? It is the latter question that may be the most impor-tant to our work. Since we use the sonification of visual data as the basis of our sound, we are constantly involved with making compositional deci-sions that are simultaneously

so that oxygen is not clay and so that I end before my key-board begins. We are all and everything just noise, folded. l

David Stout I am taking a pause to listen to the “room-tone” in my studio. I can hear two distinct high frequency pitches, leaves clattering across the driveway outside, and a muted truck rumble in the dis-tance. Our environment is now filled by hundreds of hums, intermittent noise drones, and chattering machine rhythms. One just needs to pay attention to this to discern a spectrum of close and distant sonic threads that we habitually tune out; nonetheless, this field is woven into our consciousness every minute of the day. We are quite literally imbedded within an amalgam of noises and sounds emitted from a panoply of machine sources, living beings, and natural environmental processes. Taken as a visceral condition, without hierarchical distinction, we are both liv-ing inside of, and expressing outwardly, a conditional sonic state. l

Cory Metcalf For years when I would visit NYC I stayed with a friend in Sunset Park near an above ground Metro sta-tion. The call of steel on rails punctuated even the quietest moments of night, which were far from quiet. During one visit there on my way to the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, the downstairs apartment owner was sledgehammering down the walls of his apartment between the hours of 6 and 9 AM. It was a grand futurist

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less traditional audience positions of being seated in rows in your own space separated from the performers and the images and sounds with which they interact. The installations inhabit a world of third terms beyond binaries in reflective, auto-affective meditation; and it is into this space that you can metaphorically move as you physically move around the installation space. The performances invite you into a world of third terms beyond binaries in kinetic and at times explosive interactions of live performance and digital image and sound; and it is from this space that you are removed as members of a more or less traditional, disciplined audi-ence. Your work as audience member is to cross these thresholds in both installation and performance con-texts and to enjoy what happens when you do! By the way, I come to this essay on the art of David Stout and Cory Metcalf from Saussurian semiotics (and its aftereffects in literary criticism and cultural studies) and the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan and his interpreters, in particular Slavoj Žižek. From Saussure I came to understand structuralism as a binary opposition between latent, basic materials and rules of transformation that enable those materials to become manifest text—whether dream, poem, symp-tom, piece of music, or any text / object to be studied. From Saussure I also understood the basic structure of the sign as a binary opposition between signifier (mark on a page that points to an idea) and signified—a concept of an object in the mind. From Lacan and his interpreters I understood (to oversimplify slightly) how to see inside the spaces of those (and other) bina-ries. I loved the idea that experience occupies three registers—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Imaginary is the visual, tactile, and auditory world of binary identifications (black / white); the Symbolic is the world of language in which you never have the object of desire completely but you always have something incompletely (grey); the Real is that radical alterity beyond the Imaginary and Symbolic that supports both—a kind of cosmic pulp. n

together. Our work utilizes simulation and references to earlier video processing tech-niques to explore live cinema within a musical context. We also reference other narrative and theatrical influences as expressed through the kinetic, visual, and structural drama-turgy of our performances. We are intrigued by the give and take between autonomous processes and behaviors and the instrumental interactions of the human performer. We are further taken with a desire to manifest these performance works as an extension of our own bodies and as an inte-grated element of the physical environment. Thus far the lap-top as an instrumental interface lacks the kind of physical engagement that can be so sat-isfying to the painter, dancer, and acoustic instrumentalist. We continue to explore the possibilities and imagine step-ping into the simulation itself to play and touch the resonat-ing visual bodies with a much greater degree of virtuosity than is currently available. l

Cory Metcalf NoiseFold uses a custom software system, the nFolder, for all of our perfor-mances and installation works. Developed in Max/MSP over the last nine years, the nFolder is a real time audio/visual/3D synthesizer controllable by a wide range of possible inputs, from big data sets to midi controllers, sensor interfaces, computer vision, and acoustic input. The system visualizes 3D geometries and stores them as 2D matrices, much like a still image, but instead of RGB

auditory and visual. We use a number of different image gen-eration techniques, including the live mixing of two or more geometric models together, and then further rearrange or sculpt them through modulated 3D feedback processes. The result-ing sound can become quite literally white-pink-blue or jag-ged noise. We can filter, tune, and layer this noise in such a way that it is not merely a static artifact but instead becomes the material basis of our explo-rations of sound mass, noise clouds, tuned harmonic per-cussion, or impulse streams for physical modeling circuits that may render more traditional harmonic structures. We con-stantly play with this ebb and flow between the continuum of sound as an environmental state vs. sound as a foreground gesture. To achieve this we typically have to perturb the visual image by putting our hands, breath, bodies into the virtual circuit in some way. NoiseFold makes live cin-ema. So is that the same as a movie? Live Cinema draws from diverse historical roots, including the rich history of visual music, the development of performance-oriented light organs and elaborate theatri-cal projection effects, to the later efforts of artist-hacker-engineers who envisioned and built a wide array of analog video synthesizers in the 1960s and ’70s. Live cinema also references the larger field of pos-sibility drawn from the broad practice of “expanded cinema.” NoiseFold, by nature, tends to blend historic approaches and new digital techniques

(Bard-Schwarz continued) (Stout & Metcalf continued)

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becomes a quartet, making every performance something new, keeping us on our toes. Neither David nor I have any formal training in programming or 3D anima-tion, the nFolder being our first foray into either. While this certainly led us to an outside of the box approach to both, the earlier iterations of the nFolder suffered from a number of extremely limiting structural choices. The system started off rather simply with a lot of fixed relationships, so that process A always had to go through process B before getting to process C. While this worked for us for years, we constantly added on new elements and capabilities, each time expanding the utility but further entrenching the fixed relationships. By its sixth year we calculated that we were dealing with a parameter set of almost 15,000 elements. As the platform continued to grow, these fixed relationships began to define the ways that worked for better and for worse. 4D Home (Four Directions Home) is the first solo performance by NoiseFold that uses the recently completed nFolder 3.0, a highly modular version of our system that offers a number of advantages: rapid reconfiguration of the system; fewer wasted resources; no fixed signal flow limitations; improved interaction with acoustic input; ease of integra-tion of new modules using the nFolder SDK; vastly improved troubleshooting; modular foun-dations, so that major changes to the foundation of the system are recursively applied to all

pixel values it stores the XYZ location data. The conversion of the geometric space into standard pixel space allows the user to subject those geometries to a wide variety of novel pro-cessing effects taken from the history of video manipulation, including video feedback, manipulation of H/V sync, chroma and luminance keys, rotations and skewing, and many more. These processes result in 3D forms that seem to pulse, vibrate, dance, explode, expand, contract, and gener-ally behave in very organic ways. At the same time we are also transcoding the geometry data into sound. Again, there is a variety of techniques, but each of them seeks to create a direct relationship between the image and sound with a sense that the forms themselves are actually vocalizing the sonic material as opposed to simply being accompanied by music. The other layer of the nFolder is a robust networking layer that allows either performer to send or receive data to or from the other, with the ability to delay, scale, invert or remap it on the other end. A gesture from one performer might cause both screens to take on the same visual forms or it might cause entirely differ-ent behaviors across screens. This shared control is further augmented by semi-autonomy within the system itself, so that sometimes as performers we are trying to coax a behavior out of the forms that will only arise for a moment, and other times we are trying to keep the system in control, suppressing violent outbursts. The duet

have suggested elsewhere, with a proto-synthetic-life form? Certainly we could perturb a form and watch and hear its reaction. When we brought a surface closer to view or chose to actually travel inside of the 3D geometry the tendency was to revert to a familiar explana-tion of what we were seeing and interpret this as a kind of

landscape with a sense of grav-ity, horizon, and perspective. In a single gesture we could go from a small group of interact-ing cell-like forms to move deep inside a single cell full of rising and falling topologies suggesting a kind of vast geo-logical time-lapse film. In more recent examples we have nur-tured this idea of visualizing a vibratory landscape, bringing it to a new level of complexity and refinement. As part of this work we have found ourselves moving between relatively flat pictorial spaces to very pronounced 3D topologies. The “secret” here is that we are mapping the luminance scale of 2D genera-tive animations to control and

modules; simpler state saving and cataloguing of works; and much more. What excites both David and me the most about the nFolder 3.0 (and its previous incarnations) is the feeling of the system as an entire platform, not just a utility. It is a novel way of generating images, sounds, performances, movies, installations, and print-able objects. The system can be controlled by physical gestures, MIDI interfaces, traditional instruments, and scraped data, or it can be automated inter-nally. It is a wide field of play with unknown boundaries that is ripe for exploration. Entire worlds are nascent within the system, waiting to be mapped, unearthed, and translated into experience. l

David Stout In our earlier work we explored the generation, manipulation, and transforma-tion of virtual objects within an all-encompassing infinite black void. It is easy to asso-ciate this emptiness with a cosmological significance as an allusion to “deep space” even though such literalism was not a primary intent. As we pushed our material and became more familiar with the vocabulary we were creating it was a natu-ral outgrowth to begin to look at other visual approaches. Originally it would be hard to say just how we viewed the illusionary scale of what we were up to. Were these microcosms or macrocosms? Had we invested the still life with a sense of kinetic urgency suggesting that all matter is alive? Were we playing, as I

we are, instead of neither here nor there, but somewhere in between? These questions become all the more pressing when we can be tele-present with almost anyone, anywhere, anytime. In this always-on world, perhaps it should be no surprise that twenty-four hours of sunlight is so quickly just . . . normal.

This is one of the reasons I love making generative work, work that gives agency to the material. The machine becomes another performer, free to make decisions of its own. In semi-autonomous systems, each performance asks the performer to engage in actively being becoming. Like any good improvisation, it demands that you be com-pletely in the moment. The reward is the coaxing out of nascent behaviors as yet unseen; the fleeting cracks where what has become famil-iar reveals itself as something completely new and you are shocked into an awareness of the long now. n

reinterpret the overall shape and surface of the 3D models. It is an interesting process, as the 2D movies essentially become a kind of score for extruding both sound and 3D form, as well as providing the color pallet and texture for the resulting topological structures. After some time spent in this realm it became obvious that

we were in an interesting spec-ulative domain. While we are not interested in a systematic attempt to quote or emulate renowned landscape painters we are, at the same time, aware of aesthetic similarities that can spontaneously emerge in the making process. l

Cory Metcalf Twenty-four hours of sunlight—vast expanses of craggy rocks and gaping fis-sures blanketed in electric green under thick fog. Only a few days into my residency in Iceland and already it began to feel normal. The unknown, the new, is only so for moments. How can we stay alert, aware, raw? How can we remember the art of truly being where

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NoiseFold 2.0 is a live cinema and sound artwork consisting of an indeterminate sequence of animated movements or chapters presented as an extensible multi-screen video panorama. The work is facilitated by a complex audio-visual software system designed by the artists that generates or breeds a seemingly infinite array of virtual agents. These synthetic audio-visual forms result from the live mixing of a growing database of dynamic equations that are folded and recombined through a multi-threaded data feedback structure. The resulting sound is not a separate aural accompaniment but rather the direct sonification of the visual data itself. Thus the performers interact with autonomous visual forms to grow and sculpt the sonic content of the performance. The work has toured extensively and has been presented in a wide variety of venues from museums, galleries, concert halls, and cinemas to planetariums, botanical gardens, and black box theaters. The instrumental system was designed as an extensible network that allows for the interconnection of two or more computers feeding two or more projection displays. All data can be shared between performers, allowing for the artists to control their own individual screen, or perform inside each other’s screen-space, or adopt global control across all screens at once. Unlike a typical laptop performance, NoiseFold 2.0 explores the possibility of embodied physical control through gesture capture and acoustic sound input, which is further augmented by foot pedals and conventional control surface interfaces. The performers use small infrared cameras to track hand motions in much the same manner as a playing a Theremin. The IR sensors are capable of a high resolution data capture that facilitates very subtle gestural interactions that can be assigned to hundreds of parameter offsets guiding the behavior of the audio-visual forms. Handheld parabolic microphones are used to channel acoustic frequencies in the performance space back into the system to effectively cause the visual forms to grow or mutate. As an Artificial Life system, NoiseFold 2.0 can be viewed as a “parthenogenesis machine” that is able to produce a wide array of behaviors including exotic bio-mimetic forms. These virtual objects could be viewed as an artistic end, in and of

themselves, serving their purpose to visualize hypothetical geometries and compelling aesthetic abstractions. NoiseFold 2.0 pursues a more critical objective: As in a fairytale, this seductive visual language serves to draw the audience more deeply into the forest. In fact, Stout and Metcalf are working in a larger context of data dramatization that examines the nature and intent of human control within large chaotic systems whether environmental, biological, political, or social. The resulting abstract audio-visual forms or A-Life organisms are actually unstable structures that challenge the performers to maintain control or risk a variety of undesired consequences. The forms can emit harmful and noxious sounds. They can escape off screen. They can shrink and die. They can multiply in number, scale, and complexity threatening to choke all system resources, or they can explode with alarming sonic consequences. The NoiseFold performers have routinely been compared to necromancers and more often acknowledged as wild animal tamers, not only because of the grand gestures required to play the system, but because the system itself exhibits unpredictable and often hostile traits. One possible response to dangerous, unpredictable behavior is for individuals, communities, and nations to exert ever more invasive forms of control. This idea is adopted in the 2.0 performance in several ways. Over time the sonic elements are seen to transform from chaotic noise-based textures to become increasingly tonal. Simultaneously, the forms can move from isolated and individuated screen space to become communities or larger scale visual compositions joining all screens in a single form or image. In the final stages, the original lyric forms become increasingly architectonic, ultimately joining in a propulsive display of dystopian aggression. Interestingly, there is no libretto or designation of anthropomorphic characters, no text, dialogue, or illustrative music. Instead, the audience must meet the work halfway to assign significance—or not—to the emergent audio and visual codes at play within the performance.

NoiseFold 2.0 2009–2012

Multi-Screen Live Cinema Performance by NoiseFold

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El Umbral 2011

Video Installation by David Stout & Cory Metcalf

Umbral is derived from the Latin umbra, which means shadow and also “threshold” in Spanish. In El Umbral, two ten-foot video towers are placed in close proximity to imply a portal or gateway. This structure, conceived as a union of opposites, is at once a nexus between the masculine and feminine, past and future, fear and its absolution. Shrouded atmospheric formations, architectural remnants, and shat-tered structures caught in a perpetual exploding decay exist together in a continuous oscillating state of veiling and revealing. Disembodied eyes flock through the debris, dart furtively, or rise and fall like mechanistic clockworks observing any and everyone who passes. While El Umbral pays homage to twentieth century surrealism, the work primarily exists as a psychological anti-monument to the deepening surveillance state and the shadows of events past that cloud our way forward. The layered visual vocabulary, combining both photographic figurative elements and a variety of synthetic digital imaging techniques, draws freely from both eastern and western traditions. The work uti-lizes a networked digital system to generate both sound and image in real time. This enables the viewers to influence the structuring and behavior of both the audio and visual com-position as they pass to and fro between the monitor towers or “gateposts.”

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Emanations combines re-orchestrations of NoiseFold’s sem-inal live cinema works, Alchimia and Neu_Blooms, with newly created compositions developed in collaboration with celebrated cellist-composer, Frances Marie Uitti. The visual images synthesize fluid deformations of architec-tonic objects and oscillating vessels to meditations on uto-pian-dystopian futures. David Stout and Cory Metcalf of NoiseFold expand their audio-visual data sonification tech-niques to produce a rich pallet of electronic sound. The work is designed for multi-screen and multi-speaker con-figuration that provides opportunities for the trio to join in duets, perform solos, or share data between the individ-ual performers. Combining cinema, data sonification, and acoustic music as an integral whole, NoiseFold and Uitti seek to extend network media performance into the realm of contemporary chamber music.

The spectacularly gifted cellist Frances-Marie Uitti has made a career out of demolishing musical boundaries. She has developed new techniques (most famously, play-ing with two bows simultaneously), collaborated with a who’s who of contemporary composers, and pushed the cello into realms of unexpected beauty and expression. . . . Uitti showed why she might be the most interesting cellist on the planet. —The Washington Post

Emanations 2012

Visual Music Performance created by NoiseFold and Francis Marie Uitti

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Shadow Box Attractions is a three-screen animated video installation that utilizes a particle chamber simulation to explore novel generative drawing techniques. The software, conceived by artist David Stout, was realized in collabo-ration with interactive media programmers, Luke Dubois (USA), Cory Metcalf (USA), and Reiner Kramer (DE). The project shares an “imaginative corollary” to historic research in contemporary particle physics, while being an artwork

that seeks to dramatize the dynamic interplay of elemental forces. The system can best be thought of as a three-dimen-sional drawing instrument that provides the artist with the opportunity to interact in real time to control the animated behavior of autonomous particles utilizing reconfigurable “force fields.” The software instrument functions to produce artistic outcomes in the form of prints, animated films, and live interactive installations. These graphic artifacts are the

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Shadow Box Attractions 2012

Three-Screen Animated Video Installation by David Stout

result of many months of trial and error testing or “tuning” the system to reveal animated behavior that shares pro-found aesthetic similarities to dynamic pattern formations in the natural world. In a historic context, a number of important discoveries in the field of particle physics were undertaken with the development of specialized containment chambers such as the Bubble Chamber and Cloud Chamber, where the

behavior of subatomic particles could be amplified, con-trolled, and observed. This project is best thought of as a virtual chamber that facilitates the perturbation and obser-vation of semi-autonomous particle interactions. The live simulation allows the artist to place positively- or negatively-charged nodes at various locations within a virtual chamber to create complex force fields. These multiple interpenetrat-ing fields interact to yield intricate states of attraction and

repulsion. The resulting visual behaviors are rich and var-ied, from very slow accumulations of atmospheric clouds to swiftly multiplying branches or tree-like structures. In some scenarios the placement, positioning, and scaling of the charged nodes give rise to self-perpetuating feedback phe-nomena in the form of classic strange attractors. At other times isolated particles perform graceful arcs and swirls or vibrate in stuttering bursts between magnetic poles. Just as often the results can look more like clumps of dust that accumulate in the corners of a neglected room. No matter the outcome, at its core the project serves a poetic impulse to render unseen forces of rare and intricate power. In as much as the work exists as pure abstraction, its instrumental metaphor invokes cold-war era preoccupations. It should not be lost on the viewer that this project mines direct refer-ences to now historic weapons research. From an aesthetic perspective the resulting surface and visual tempo veers away from a recognizable “video-look” to suggest some-thing more akin to a graphite drawing on paper.

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Melt is an immersive installation that depicts a world in flux, where pure formal abstraction exists as a state of contin-uous fluid upheaval. The viewer-participant is drawn into an elemental vista of sculpted rifts, plunging crevices, erod-ing plains, crags, and caverns. These topological extrusions, resulting from the interplay of diverse digital techniques, are the artifacts of a generative system oscillating between moments of frozen stasis and swiftly accelerating change. This evocative audio-visual environment, suspended in slow glacial retreat, inevitably gives way to unpredictable climactic events. The work can be viewed as a kind of multi-sensory clock, marking heraldic events and providing the viewer a speculative glimpse into deep time. The result is a process that blurs simple distinctions between binary opposites: abstraction vs. narrative, sound vs. image, coher-ent form vs. noise, interactive vs. fixed media, sound vs. music, and viewer vs. participant.

Melt 2013

Three-Screen Interactive Video and Sound Installation

by David Stout and Cory Metcalf

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The Autopoietic Theatre is an interdisciplinary collaboration that pairs NoiseFold (USA) with the acoustic instrumen-tal ensemble, Trio KAZE (NL/DE), an acclaimed group of musicians adept in medieval, renaissance, baroque, and contemporary idioms. The project takes the form of an instrumental song cycle illuminating a series of rela-tional dialogues between diverse technologies, artistic mediums, and historical epochs. This visual-music hybrid combines theatrical staging, electronic music, and inter-active visualization technology with contemporary and historic instrumental techniques drawn from the fifteenth through twenty-first centuries. With a focus on the poetic proto-science of Alchemy, the music evokes a sound-scape of elemental power wedded to a fluid abstract visual vocabulary emulating chthonic undercurrents, natural trans-formative processes, apocalyptical visions, and revelations.

The Autopoietic Theatre 2014

Visual Music Theatre created and performed by NoiseFold and Trio KAZE

All the movements are co-composed by NoiseFold and Trio KAZE—Anna Stegmann, Miako Klein and Yoshiko Klein—unless otherwise noted below.1 Azoth—suge et irrue2 3P4TK [Three Paetzolds for Trio KAZE composed by David Stout]3 Aludel of the Dawns Albedo4 Templum Aqua Regia5 Alchemical Nuptialis [Trio KAZE arrangement of Puis qu’en oubli (Since I am forgotten) composed by Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377)] 6 Three Differences [improvisation developed by Trio KAZE with David Stout]7 Black Rain [audio-visual solo composed and performed by David Stout]8 Zlatý Strom (The Golden Tree)

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4D Home, a live electronic music cinema performance utilizing real-time audio-visual processes to re-imagine, mine, and plunder the visual “landscape tradition.” The performance blends unlikely media elements including sys-tem noise, signal glitches, and visual sonification techniques to emulate and interweave vivid states of consciousness in the form of hyper-kinetic data fields and sensuous topolo-gies, acknowledging the rich lineage of pictorial landscapes practiced by diverse global cultures: east, west, north, and south. The “landscape tradition” is often construed as an easy entry into the arts, a kind of aesthetic common

4D Home (Four Directions Home) 2014

Live Cinema Performance by NoiseFold

denominator bridging culture, class, and historical epochs through its depiction of pleasing pastoral vistas, effusive spiritual mythos, and familiar surroundings. Today we no longer view the landscape solely as a refuge, a pleasantry, or as an unending wilderness for the taking, since much of the world as we know it is under siege. NoiseFold infuses this new transfigured land of strip mines, chemical dumps, deforested expanses, and glacial decline with an elemental techno-animistic awareness—where the rocks sing, the light howls, and the vibrating world hums, while the familiar perspective, a distant horizon, shudders, rolls, and contorts.

The soft graphite blush of video noise opens into a chasm of fractured coal-lined gnashing teeth as undulating hills and distant clouds convulse in a red pallor and ice sheets groan and shoot upward in cataclysmic events. The pastoral and familiar slides away in successive waves of transformation unearthing a cascade of visual quotes from the luminous modernism of Georgia O’keeffe to early experimental scratch films and Chicago-style video glitch to the austere minimalism of Agnes Martin, the vibrant detailed mozaics of the Huichol people and the mysterious icebound expanse of Caspar David Friedrich.

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Melody: Woody, can you say something about your first encounter with NoiseFold?

woody: I told you never to ask me about the past. I have no past. Every morning I wake up, I have a present only. And then I cannot really tell you the names. . . .

sTeiNA: I can tell you your first impression of NoiseFold. You said, this is our title. We have a piece called Noise Fields. But then you said that NoiseFold is better because you always fold the fields.

w: No no, I meant, they improved it. They got it right!

s: Well, Woody and I have seen at least three perfor-mances before this last one at Currents 2014. You see, I am the mother of NoiseFold. They didn’t tell you that? David Stout visited when we did the “Techne & Eros,” here at the College of Santa Fe. A six-week seminar, also with Mort [Subotnick] and Joan [La Barbara], David Dunn, and Jim Crutchfield. It was quite an event. We had people coming from Brazil and all over. So Mister Stout came and saw the Image/ine software and he went absolutely crazy about it. He didn’t know how to continue with it in the fall, so he asked me if I would teach with him. And I did. I came to every class there for the fall season and sort of banged it into them. And Cory wasn’t there because he was

Conversation with Steina & Woody Vasulka about NoiseFoldinterview by Melody sumner Carnahan, santa Fe, New Mexico, 26 August 2014

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in Albuquerque. So, David learned it good, Image/ine. After all, it was designed as a performance instrument. He’s been several times to Steim—both of them have—where the pro-gram was developed. So that’s how I “mothered.”

w: . . . and I husbanded.

s: I once said to Cory, “So you are the only one who didn’t get into this Image/ine fever.” And he said, “Are you kidding, I was drying up in boredom and frustration down there in Albuquerque.” You see he was precocious so he got a special grant for tuition at UNM, and he stayed there until he realized that this was where the action was. He was very young and very beautiful. He didn’t actually go to my class, but he picked it up like that! He slaved over and over it every night, he didn’t sleep until the wee hours of the morning. So he was the most taken with it. . . . But the continuing story of Image/ine is that the director at Steim—then my co-director Michel Waisvisz in 1996—wasn’t very interested in the program so he kind of killed it. Then Tom DeMeyer, who wrote the program, moved elsewhere and that stopped all development on Image/ine. Tom went on to bigger and better things, unfortu-nately, because I still use this program. I think it’s fabulous. I invited Mark Coniglio to come to Steim but he at first thought that Image/ine was not for him and I understood that because the way musicians think differently from visual art-ists is astounding. You see, Tom was not a musician and he always looked at them kind of askance, you know those crazy people who are always retrofitting their musical instruments. He was a visual man, a photographer. And this was the first time that a visual instrument was put out as software.

w: I was always most interested in the signal whether it was audio or visual.

s: Yes, Woody got me into it. I didn’t ask Tom to make Image/ine for me. But he knew I was very interested in “displace-ment,” and he came to me one day and said he had already begun designing the software. I was so condescending, I said, “Yes, Tom, you do that,” because I knew it couldn’t be done. Then, when he did manage image displacement—that’s when you take the black & white properties from one image and use it in another, sort of like what the Rutt/Etra does—I said “Man, what are you doing!?” Things went pretty haywire from then on, even with the musicians, everybody

was so excited. Then, when Mark Cogniglio actually came to Steim—to do some retrofitting of musical instruments—he rewrote the program for musicians (Isadora) because the program was always meant to be equally visual and audio. In the case of NoiseFold, the audio generates video, and the video generates audio, or there is an external source that can create both. It has always worked on that principal . . . which we were also responsible for in a way. That was our fascination with video from the beginning. Woody and I had worked with audio recorders and that also came from an obsession with “signal.” So in that sense, I am the mother and Woody is the father, because he was more interested in the signal from the get-go. . . . Of course that was before he became a girl.

w: I am like a child now who listens to fairy tales.

s: It’s true . . . you never listened to me before.

w: It’s new to me. All totally new. I can code the names but I forget what the faces look like. All the people I have met in my life, I mean were they nice or were they stupid?

s: You only met nice people. You’ve only met good peo-ple in your life. . . . But anyhow, that’s how it started. In the beginning, David and Cory were too fast. Everything was allegro or presto and I was telling them to put in maybe an andante and largo . . . it wasn’t like they couldn’t hear me, maybe they just couldn’t do it. They were too excited. Like in that early performance at CCA, there was just a lot of hammering, it wasn’t as intelligent. I mean, it always had intelligence, but as it matured it became more so. Also, they added color. It was all black and white at first, like they were scared of color.

w: As far as doing what we invented, David and Cory have now gone way beyond that in certain ways. Are we talking tools now? You see, during the period when we were actually inventing, we all were inventors. People would suddenly appear and show us images and we said, wait a minute, wait a minute! We hadn’t seen anything like that before. So we not only invented, we adopted a lot. It was a whole community of adoption. Suddenly we started to really observe. You know, some people would take something from the world of traditional art and just bring a variation to it. I began to see that as an epigonical idea . . .

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w: It was a very beautiful part of our lives. We had a nice place in Buffalo. Students who were expelled from New York because they somehow didn’t fit in came to Buffalo and they were all geniuses. We never regretted that we spent time there. But after some years we decided, “We’re not going to die here in Buffalo!” So we took this trip around America and we ended up in this little village of Agua Fria, New Mexico. At that time we were working, strangely, for a new generation of the government, presenting video and the avant-garde art of America around the globe. The time was right for “instant” presentation, so we went about creating new materials, inventing new ideas, and we had a reason to do it because no one else cared about these things except for a few people who were organized in strange groups.

s: We always thought we were part of a huge community. It was an illusion. Really we mostly worked by ourselves. . . . But coming back to the boys. We have seen another NoiseFold that was really good. At a previous Currents. It was the one with the big room, three screens [Melt]. We thought maybe it should only be two screens, but it was really good.

w: Well, for me, it was fortifying to my extraterrestrial interests. Also, that three-screen presentation in an empty room was the first time they had left behind the images of nature and sky and entered another world. You never met another human being there. They always gave us credit for influence. They understood the Vasulka legacy. Now they are on their own.

M: To quote Cory Metcalf: “Distance is immaterial. We have redefined the boundaries of space and time. This would have been magic at any other time in history. But how quickly magic becomes the status quo: normal to the point of obvious. . . . NoiseFold’s work dances at the edges between the familiar and the novel . . . the not-this-not-that, but almost. . . . Form crystallizes out of chaos and just when you feel you can almost name it—architectonic, botanical, topological—it is sub-sumed, refiltered, redefined.”

s: What he is describing is what sometimes happens to musicians. The tone is right, the message is clear, and we are all playing in tune. Then suddenly comes this moment when you are just floating. What Cory describes there is the “abandonment” of the pitch and the notes and the tech-nique and the worrying about what the other computer is going to do. . . . They can now go into this abandonment

you become an epigone. I was always slightly a rebel. I ask my mind, “Is that acceptable?” and the mind says, “No-o-o-o. You must do something from a different cause.” So I had to discard the human part, which meant departing from the film school in Prague. . . . I’m just trying to talk about my interest in finding this new technology as the source of things I was thinking about, excluding people, excluding psychology. And then eventually leading to my latest inter-est—which is what I call “outside of earth.” Extraterrestrial. This is my last hope.

s: It’s interesting, because you were coming to understand the fact that you were a filmmaker but you hated actors. Then it was handed to us as a piece of signal on a tray. And we were already interested in signal in terms of audio, and suddenly there was a visual component. If you read our his-tory, the first four or five years, it is the story of the signal. And there were these characters at Cal Arts who were inter-ested too. You see, we’ve known Bob Campbell and David Stout for years, since the early eighties. They were our col-leagues because they also had an obsession with the signal.

w: Could I continue please? So, I’ve been having my morning discussions between my mind and my brain, and I’ve decided to discard my brain because it’s totally useless. I tried to figure out the relationship between why I would leave poetry, prose, and film behind, and I realized it was because I wanted to have something for myself. I didn’t want to be an epigone. I had been very much dependent on those three elements, and I was grateful that I was also a musician, by training and by band—I played trumpet with a jazz group. But you see, since I couldn’t read musical codes I had to memorize everything. So eventually, with the new technology, I had something for myself that I could phys-ically execute. I had this fabulous student, Jeffrey Schier, who could design anything for me. In the evenings I was wiring and by the morning he had a product and I would say, this is terrific! That was my entrance to a kind of priority of the medium.

s: Jeffrey would come in and say, well we are doing this and that and so and such and Woody and I wouldn’t under-stand a word—something about chip AMD751 and it can do this or that, which do you want? And Woody would always say, both!

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space and if it crashes no one is going to notice or care. You know, they were very nervous about this most recent performance because they hadn’t done it together for quite a while.

M: David Stout wrote: “As a live cinema group, NoiseFold puts an equal emphasis on the aural and the visual. We do not wish to trivialize our images by coaxing them to sing a hummable tune; rather we are interested in imparting a visceral tangibility to these virtual images by giving them heft, weight, and tactility through sound. . . . Occasionally our images may sing a pentatonic melody or align in a major seventh chord; just as likely, the listener may be wound in a spike-laden noise blanket that bends and shatters into a hundred spectral fragments.”

s: David is the one to talk technical . . . he’s very educated and he knows music.

w: I just want to say that I’ve studied this woman from the day one. I’ve noticed a change in Steina’s pictures, from the stills she did when I first met her. Back then, she couldn’t make a syntax out of it. Now when I look at her work, the music is always there. She takes from nature the movement of it. The music. And she uses these electronic sound-mak-ing tools that she can plug in so easily. She was always that kind of operator. At first I thought she was just seduced by nature, which I found very disgusting. But then I realized that she sucks it up and it brings her to extremes.

s: Well, you have to point the camera somewhere. . . . You see, at The Kitchen we had people who performed visual/audio works who didn’t know much about music. Cory and David didn’t really invent anything, they just do it better. They can’t do it alone, they need each other. David suffers. But Cory doesn’t really walk on the ground.

M: What can you say about the most recent NoiseFold presentation, 4D Home (Four Directions Home), at the 2014 CURRENTS New Media

Festival in Santa Fe?

w: This last performance they did together changed my life. It was extraterrestrial. Finally I have evidence. You know, I was always dreaming of it. But I never made it myself.

s: Why didn’t you make it yourself?

w: Because I didn’t have the tools.

s: We could have been The Flying Vasulkas!

M: Do you think there was an added emotional charge in this most recent performance at CURRENTS?

s: No, it was only because they slowed down the whole goddamn thing. Lingering with the pictures. You would notice one bit and wonder is it going to explode or just drift out of the frame . . . and that was fascinating!

w: You see, all my life there was this interest in literature. At the beginning, when I was trying to put it all together in my mind, there was poetry and music and prose. That was my way of emerging from childhood. Then, suddenly, I was supposed to make movies and I discovered that I could throw all that away. My new platform for creativity was to do something that I couldn’t predict. A surprise everyday. But then I got addicted to that—another surprising pleasure everyday. Now I am slowly assembling the voyage I have been through. And it gives me the idea to be grateful that I didn’t have the discipline to do film. I only wanted the sur-prise. I’m wondering now why itself accomplished itself. I was like a junkie for the discovery of a new tool. And I hoped others would use it too.

s: Do you think you enjoyed this recent performance more because you have no brain?

w: I recognize why it was so interesting to me. It was because they didn’t make it the global experience like they had before. What they did this time was completely new territory. And they didn’t even know it. I actually wonder if this performance had an internal pathos that they hadn’t intended. And that’s how the audience was drawn in. n

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NoiseFold is the collective identity of David Stout and Cory Metcalf, two artists work-ing at the digital nexus of cinema, music, and visual arts. The pair began their semi-nal work in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a famed art cen-ter, lesser known as the birth-place of Artificial-Life (A-Life). NoiseFold as a word is simul-

taneously an adjective, noun, and verb. The name can evoke an immediate reference to noise music with its loud, near unbearable volumes, radical explorations of extreme fre-quencies, disjunctive ruptu-res, glitches, and wall of sound dynamics. Metcalf and Stout do not discount these memes; however, their interests are lar-ger. NoiseFold exists as a fold or group who perform live data folding processes that reference both origami and the concept of protein folding. NoiseFold acknowledges noise as the field of all possibilities.

Noise as prima materia—an alchemical concept sometimes attributed to Aristotle, prima materia can be thought of as an elemental formless state. In this work noise exists simulta-neously as both a concept and a tangible material. Noise is manifest in various mediums, as a dynamic visual or sonic field, a data stream, as a collec-

tive cultural expression, as par-ticle bombardment, and as a chaotic condition of life. NoiseFold performed their world premiere at the Festival Internationale d’Art Video in Casablanca, Morocco (2006). Performances — including the UNESCO Creative Cities Summit, New York Electronic Arts Festival, Interactive Futures in Victoria (BC), REDCAT in Los Angeles, TEDx at the Denver Art Museum, and “Chinati Weekend” in Marfa, Texas — have garnered critical praise and a growing international audience. The group’s many

collaborations with instrumen-talists, computer programmers, composers, and filmmakers include recent projects with cellist: Frances Marie Uitti (NL); guitarist: Janet Feder (USA); and early music meets contemporary ensemble: Trio KAZE (NL/DE). NoiseFold rou-tinely performs in wildly dif-ferent contexts from concert

halls, art museums and gal-leries, to planetariums, rock venues, and even botanic gar-dens. This ability to cross generational, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries has enabled the artists to cultivate an expansive audience eager to experience new visual, cine-matic, and musical forms.

BIOGRAPHIES

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About NoiseFold Magicians: I always worry for the

lady suspended in midair at magic shows, floating precariously at the

will of the illusionist. No more than a slight tremble of her body or

a drop of sweat on the brow of the magician is needed to betray their

cool professionalism and make me hold on to my seat. Chaos theory

suggests that at some point all systems will fail. Part of me wants to

be there to see it all collapse. I can clearly visualize the hidden cables

and pulleys or other contraptions slinging across the stage with all their

terrifying, yet beautiful, potential for destruction. But it is the tension

between the image of the effortlessly floating body on the one side and

the gravitational push and pull on the other that allows for the real

theatrical, which makes me want to come back. —Jenny Vogel

david stout is a visual artist, composer, writer and perfor-mer exploring cross-media synthesis and interdisciplinary approaches across the arts. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Stout graduated from the University of Oregon (1980) and received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (1985). He is a recipi-ent of many grants and awards including the New Mexico New Visions Award (2007), the Harvestworks Interactive Technology Award, the Sun Micro Systems Award for Academic Excellence (2004), and a nominee for the USA Artist Fellowship (2008), International Media Art Prize (2004), and the WTN World Technology Award (2003). Stout previously founded the MOV-iN Gallery and the Installation, Performance & Interactivity project (IPI) at the College of Santa Fe. He cur-rently directs the Hybrid Arts Laboratory (HAL), a software development studio and instal-lation development space at the University of North Texas located in the Dallas metro-politan area, where he holds a joint appointment in the College of Music and College of Visual Art and Design.

Cory Metcalf is a moving image and sound artist, pro-grammer, and performer. Over ten years of experience with visual programming have given him the tools to create complex interactive software environments. Metcalf’s per-formance works, real-time media systems, and respon-sive installations question the primacy of the human per-spective, the anthropocentric western rational mind, and linearity of progress, arguing for deeper cultural investiga-tion into new ways of knowing and the re-evaluation of those forgotten, dismissed, or dis-carded. Metcalf’s recent focus is on ethnobotany and ethno-musicology in South America, drawing from the telling of history in the Andes through Quipu’s, a pre-Incan data sys-tem made up of knotted cords, to Icaros, the healing songs of Peru believed to have been taught to humans by plants. Cory currently resides in Denver, Colorado, where he teaches in the Emergent Digital Practices program at the University of Denver.

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GUEST AUTHORS david Bard-schwarz has degrees in English, Comparative Literature, German (foreign language certificate), Music Theory, and Interactive Telecommunications. He researches Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the arts. He teaches at the College of Music—University of North Texas, and lives with his wife Ania Bard-Schwarz in Denton, Texas.

Melody sumner Carnahan is author of twelve books, including her newest fiction collection, You Are Not Asleep (Teksteditions, 2014), and dozens of works published in anthol-ogies, recordings, and broadcast internationally in collaboration with composers, performers, and artists. She is editor and co-founder of Burning Books.

Jenny Filipetti is an electronic media artist, writer, and researcher interested in the concept of art as evolutionary striv-ing. Her own work investigates the notions of fragility and its ostensible antithesis, antifragility, as the nexus of a shifting state of possibility within contemporary network society.

steina and woody vasulka, founders of the original Kitchen in New York City, are among a small cadre of seminal art-ists who pioneered the use of video as an expressive art form. Their earliest experiments beginning in the late 1960s gave rise to a rich body of work that revealed a new lexicon for a dynamic real-time sound and visual medium where the attributes of “The Signal” itself became the fundamental vocabulary at play. Much like today’s programmer-artists or artist-engineers Steina and Woody actively sustained a practice to develop new hardware tools using analog, digital, and hybrid analog-digital techniques. Steina, origi-nally from Iceland, and Woody, from the former Czechoslovakia, currently live and work in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Jenny vogel is an artist working in video, photography, and computer arts, exploring the world as viewed through new media technology using web-cameras, blogs, and Google searches as source material. She is currently an Assistant Professor of New Media Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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David Stout and Cory Metcalf: The Art of NoiseFold is published in Limited Edition of twelve copies on the occasion of the exhibition at Cornish College of the Arts, titled 4X3: Data, Flux & Strange Objects: Video Pioneers and New Media Explorers, produced by the Institute of emergent Technology+Intermedia (iET+I), curated by Robert Campbell. The exhibition opens 29 October and continues through 20 December 2014, with special presentations throughout by the participating artists: Steina & Woody Vasulka, and David Stout & Cory Metcalf of NoiseFold.

David Stout and Cory Metcalf: The Art of NoiseFold © 2014 David Stout and Cory Metcalf, all rights reserved.

Copyright to each essay is retained by the individual author:“On the Art of NoiseFold” © 2014 Jenny Filipetti; “Flux: The Art of David Stout and Cory Metcalf” © 2014 David Bard-Schwarz; “Standing in a Field: David Stout and Cory Metcalf on Noise Folding” © 2014 David Stout and Cory Metcalf; “Conversation with Steina and Woody Vasulka about NoiseFold” © 2014 Melody Sumner Carnahan and Steina and Woody Vasulka.

ARTISTS / AuThORS: David Stout and Cory MetcalfBOOk DESIgN: Michael Sumner / Burning BooksEDITOR: Melody Sumner Carnahan

SpECIAL ThANkS TO:

Mariannah Amster, David Bard-Schwarz, David Bithell, Ivo Bol, Robert Campbell, Melody Sumner Carnahan, Luke Dubois, Jenny Filipetti, havestworks, Ben Johansen, Joseph klein, Miako klein, Yoshiko klein, Stephen Lucas, Andrew May, Stan Metcalf, Carol parkinson, gary payne, Frank Ragano, REDCAT, patricia Sauthoff, Daniel Schorno, Anna Stegmann, STEIM, Steina, Michael Sumner, Frances Marie uitti, Woody Vasulka, Jenny Vogel, Tim Weaver, Julie West, and John Westin.

For information on the artists and this book, please email: iotronik@gmail.com, and visit the NoiseFold website at: www.noisefold.com.

phOTOgRAphS COuRTESY OF: Robert Campbell, Ben Johansen, gary payne, patricia Sauthoff, Daniel Schorno, David Stout, Julie West.

FRONT COVER: photo by Ben Johansen, NoiseFold with David Bithell in the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theatre, Denton, Texas

p. 1: “protean Lace” digital print detail by Stout and Metcalf

pp. 2 & 3: photo by Robert Campbell, NoiseFold performing 4D Home

p. 4: photo by David Stout, Melt, real-time installation at the Contemporary Arts Museum houston

p. 5: photo by David Stout, i I i, real-time installation at the Contemporary Arts Museum houston

p. 6 & 7: photo by patricia Sauthoff, NoiseFold performing Alchimia at The Screen in Santa Fe, New Mexico

p. 8: photo by David Stout, El Umbral, real-time installation at the CuRRENTS International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico

p. 9: animation still from 4D Home by Stout and Metcalf

p. 10: photo by Julie West, NoiseFold performing at REDCAT, Los Angeles, California

pp. 12 & 13: photo by David Stout, El Umbral

pp. 14 & 15: photos by Robert Campbell, Emanations with Frances Marie uitti

pp. 16 & 17: digital print by David Stout

p. 18: photo by David Stout, Melt, real-time installation

p. 19: digital print by David Stout, pre-visualization of Melt, real-time installation

p. 20: animation still from The Autopoietic Theatre by Stout and Metcalf; photo by Daniel Schorno of NoiseFold with Trio kAZE

p. 21: photo by gary payne, The Autopoietic Theatre performance

p. 22 & 23: animation stills from 4D Home by Stout and Metcalf

p. 24: digital print by Stout and Metcalf, Rota Weave series

p. 27: animation stills from 4D Home by Stout and Metcalf

p. 28: photos by Robert Campbell, NoiseFold performing 4D Home

p. 29: photos by Ben Johansen

p. 30: digital print by David Stout, detail from Shadow Box Attractions

p. 31: public domain “noise”

BACk COVER: digital print by Stout and Metcalf, Turbulent Weave