Hacking the aesthetic: David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's new ecologies of signal

Abstract

Award winning Australian electronic artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's installation work is discussed as “signal-work.” Their work reconfigures signal within original assemblages involving subtle audio, high resolution video (both recorded and animated), kilometers of coiled copper wire, antennae or home-built electronics, electrostatic disturbances, the like of very low frequency radiation from the Milky Way, and cross-signal processing. The article develops a context for thinking about the work in terms of Whitehead's process philosophy, as this is relevant to media theory, as well as concepts of plural ecology and ongoing differentiation drawn from Bateson and Guattari. Signal processing is seen as key to all this. The article argues that in Hinterding and Haines’ signal-work new sensations are produced, outside of the normal “syntax” of some models of aesthetic experience. This challenges some aspects of thinking about both aesthetics and political ecology.Andrew Murphie is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He researches media events, social organization and theories of thinking processes. He is the Editor of the Fibreculture Journal (http://fibreculturejournal.org/). Recent chapter publications include: “Performance as the Distribution of Life: from Aeschylus to Chekhov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari,” “Deleuze, Guattari and Neuroscience” and, with Lone Bertelsen, “An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain.” Personal website: http://www.andrewmurphie.org/