About
Guillem Serrahima
Researcher and artist in digital technologies, interested in the history of cybernetics, artificial perception and media ecology. He is currently PhD student at the University of Paris 8 and research associate at NEST, UC Berkeley. He has taught at various universities and art and design schools, and is currently professor at BAU (Barcelona). Parallel to his academic career he is making a trilogy of medium-length films about the role of noise in contemporary technoecologies. The first film Noise Traffic (2022) was about the role of noise in automated financial markets and was partly made with AI. The second, Ubiquitous Noise, will be made in the framework of Re-Silence. He is also co-founder and co-editor of I.F Publications.
Artist Statement
Ubiquitous Noise is an audiovisual intervention on the dissonance within our technoecological continuum. Situated at the nexus of astrophysics, psychoacoustics, and the philosophy of technology, the project travels to one of the world’s few ‘quiet zones’, paradoxical sanctuaries erected against the ever-expanding electromagnetic cacophony. Navigating the sonic geographies of Green Bank observatory, this research-creation project opens up a dialogue between the distant echoes of the Big Bang and the immediate reverberations of technological ubiquity. Electromagnetism is becoming the principal node of communication and the condition of possibility for the immense circulation of data. The massive synchronisation of devices and minds are producing unanticipated forms of disorientation of the living. The other site of intervention, at the other extreme of sonic overwhelm, will be inside of an anechoic chamber; a hushed crucible where sound and electromagnetic waves dissolve into the void. Here I will experiment with different sonic repositories and my own body, as a conduit of biological rhythms. Finally, the project distils the temporal and spatial disjuncture into an immersive, polyphonic installation to be housed in a geodesic dome, taking the audience on a voyage from the body to the cosmos, and the cosmos to the body, traversing the technosphere.
Project : UBIQUITOUS NOISE
Ubiquitous Noise is a research-creation project on electromagnetic pollution, technological unconscious, and their psychosomatic and biological impacts. The investigation will travel to one of the world’s ‘quiet zones’ – areas free of electromagnetic interference – with the aim of providing an embodied experience of ubiquitous noise and its effects on the biosphere, via an immersive installation.