Repetition and Noise by Jeres
Repetition and Noise is about the nature and path of creativity.
It is a shortlisted work in the Finnish National Gallery's Combine24 generative art competition remixing their cc0 collection/archive.
Details/Vote: [https://combine24.alusta.art/](https://combine24.alusta.art/)
Let’s start with a quote:
“All art is infested by other art.”
— Leo Steinberg in Art About Art
Infested sounds like a dirty word but let’s try again. Let’s think about it as adding depth, history or context.
This collection is about art as a conversation and how it may repeat itself—consciously or not—adding noise to extend, contest or mutate expression as the dialogue continues.
We repeat to pay homage. We repeat to better understand. We repeat because we don’t understand at all. We repeat to make something true. We repeat to show absurdity. We repeat because it resonates. We repeat to mock. We repeat because it is our nature. We repeat because we can only express what we are filled with.
We add noise to shape. We add noise to make it our own. We add noise to reframe. We add noise for perspective. We add noise to distort. We add noise to manipulate. We add noise to help read between the lines. We add noise to excavate the truth. We add noise because unfiltered it is too much to take. We add noise because the noise is us; our context and experience which is impossible to detach from.
Noise is way to say our consciousness or how we filter. We have our own as individuals and groups. Any idea that flows through us is affected by what we know or have experienced. We may add noise as we ingest to fill in the blanks… or as we attempt to express because our articulation or abilities may be incomplete, subconscious, messy, intentionally ironic, perhaps even misleading.
Are we sculpting this noise or is it assigned?
To repeat another way, is this noise subject to free will or is it deterministic?
If the universe is deterministic, as some believe, then so must be this noise. This can be extended to say that all art is deterministic (i.e., inevitable). If that is true, then even how we feel about that is based on how our version of noise was formed (and is deterministic).
Repetition and Noise meditates on this in a literal way by pseudo-randomly picking 3 pieces from the Finnish National Gallery’s CC0 (Public Domain) collection and recontextualizing it. While there is not one pixel in the resulting pieces that didn’t come from another work, they are not the same as in those “original” works (and the conversation continues).
The near 30k works in the Finnish National Gallery’s collection was narrowed down to 330 curated pieces for the algorithm to choose from for each output. It uses p5.js, glsl shaders and a bit of math to figure out what to show where, but the tech isn’t really important. Hopefully it just shows how reframing and distorting the works while combining them with others from different sources can create something novel and compelling, encouraging us to take any individual idea or object and consider it in the larger conversation of the universe, rather than just on its own.
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