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Noise at the interface

Andrew Prior

Abstract
The notion of noise occupies a contested territory, in which it is framed as
pollution and detritus even as it makes its opposite1 a possibility - noise is
always defined in opposition to something else, even if this ‘other’ is not
quite clear. This paper explores noise in the context of ‘the interface’
asking what its affordances as an idea may contribute to our understanding of
interface. I draw historically on information theory in particular to initiate
this exploration.

Background
Noise can be understood in a wide variety of ways – most obviously as
unwelcome sound, either because of excess volume, inappropriate context or
inharmonic qualities of the sound. It can also be thought of outside of the
realm of sound - for example Information Theory defines it in contrast to
signal, which in turn is framed as the content of a message that one wishes to
communicate. Here, noise may or may not be sound; but it is the part of a
communication one does not want. Culturally speaking, noise has a particularly
interesting status – if we initially understand it as sidelined, unwelcome and
worthless; noise has, through these same qualities, also maintained an ongoing
power to express dissent from accepted norms, to question value, aesthetics,
hegemony. An understanding of Information Theory is useful here, as it was a
major factor in the development of the concept of ‘digital’ information,
together with some of the primary methods of dealing with such information.

The impact upon the interface within the context of Information Theory
In ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ (1948) Claude Shannon, builds out
from work on Pulse Code Modulation by Nyquist (1924) and Hartley (1928),
outlining a way in which any communication might be encoded mathematically,
stored numerically and decoded back into its original form2. Information Theory
developed out of this to encompass the mathematics and the material means, the
electronics, logistics etc. Shannon’s initial focus was on strengthening
signals for the improvement of mass-media systems (telephone networks in
particular), but clearly developing a means to deal with information digitally
has impacted far beyond this initial remit.

                                                                                                                                       
1
What is the opposite of noise? The range of possibilities indicate something
of the flexibility of this term: Signal? Silence? Harmony? Even these are
subject to interpretation.
2
Thanks to Morton Riis here for pointing out that such processes can also be
traced back to work on the Vocoder, also carried out in Bell Laboratories in
the 1920s - 30s. (Schroeder 2004:3)    

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Shannon’s paper begins by considering the problems of a generic communication

system diagrammatically (see above). The diagram shows engineering noise can
interfere with the transmission of a message and modulate its meaning - a key
problem for Information Theory was about finding ways to block or overcome
noise within the system.

Interfaces are points of exchange between two systems, though they are
concerned more with input than output (presumably every output of one system
is an input of another or by dint of not being an input elsewhere represent a
dead-end). Each of these boxes can be considered discrete systems – one can
think of interfaces between any two consecutive parts of this chain. Moving
briefly beyond the scope of Information Theory to focus on the characteristics
of the interface itself, one might invoke the process of ‘encapsulation’
within Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Encapsulation allows objects to hide
their internal methods such that only those methods that need to be accessed
outside the object are ‘public’. In effect an interface is the public face of
a (set of) processe(s) – to take an analogue example, the user of a Hi-Fi
amplifier doesn’t need access to the electronics that make it work, so only a
few controls are offered, the rest of its functionality hidden away inside the
‘black box’. Within OOP software interfaces, the encapsulation is quite
literal, a requirement of the process of coding itself. One can argue then
that whilst interfaces offer particular functionality, they also imply making
other kinds of interaction impossible, hiding away the workings within the
black box. Interfaces then, act as filters blocking out certain messages,
whilst privileging others for relay3.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point

either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.
Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated
according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These
semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.
The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set
of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible
                                                                                                                                       
3
Interestingly though, a number of other papers within this conference (Riis,
Jackson) take a different approach in which interfaces, themselves limited by
the affordances of the system cannot therefore be said to be actively
filtering or blocking particular interactions.  

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selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is
unknown at the time of design. (Shannon 1948:1)

In Information Theory, a well-designed system is one which allows an

appropriate spectrum of possibilities to be communicated (through resolution
bandwidth, and encoding), whilst differentiating sufficiently between noise
and signal by including enough redundancy to overcome any noise within the
channel.

Culture as Information
The impact of Information Theory can be found in so many areas because it
provides such a reductive and therefore highly focused way of considering
communication. Despite enormous strides forward in technology since
Information Theory was at the ‘cutting edge’ it’s legacy is one of literally
millions of interfaces based on this reductive logic. At this scale, the
question of what is noise and what is signal, what is an appropriate spectrum
of possibilities to be communicated and how signal and noise is differentiated
is thrown into stark relief, drastically altering our experience of
technology, culture and biopolitics.

If there is an informational quality to contemporary culture, then it might be

not so much because we exchange more information than before, or even because
we buy, sell or copy informational commodities, but because cultural processes
are taking on the attributes of information – they are increasingly grasped
and conceived in terms of their informational dynamics [... that is with the
relation between noise and signal, including fluctuations and microvariations,
entropic emergencies and negentropic emergences, positive feedback and chaotic
processes.] (Terranova 2004:7)

Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ (also known as the Fragment on General

Intellect) explores the notion that technology can embody knowledge – and that
the result of this process is a deskilling and further alienation of the
worker. Whilst encapsulation is a function of Object Oriented Programming
specifically and interfaces in general, it is information theory that first
provided a way in which any message could be translated into digital
‘information’. It is as ‘information’ that human relations are most
effectively subsumed in technology, and therefore as information that they
become subject to the filtering and relay processes of interfaces.

The ‘general intellect’ [i.e. knowledge as the main productive force] includes
formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities
and ‘language games’. Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as
productive ‘machines’ in contemporary labour and do not need to take on a
mechanical body or an electronic soul. (Virno 2001)

Such objectified ‘knowledge […] embedded in the automated system of machinery’

(Virno 2001) may not need a physical substrate, but as Terranova points out,
increasingly the transformations of technology are echoed in social relations
and culture elsewhere. The frustrating experience of ringing an automated call
centre exemplifies a situation in which systematization of human exchange,
requiring decisions to be made about priorities of service in advance, results
in only allowing certain kinds of interaction along strictly prescribed

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channels. Conversely, exchange outside these routes becomes impossible,

recasting potentially perfectly reasonable interaction as noise. Whilst
Information Theory is intended to operate at a micro level, encoding the
constituent parts of messages (such as letters or waveforms); one might argue
its logic results in a kind of scalar symmetry whereby operations at a macro
level of communication such as this call centre example, mimic its
reductionism, not only resembling it at the level of metaphor.

Information and Semantics

Digitality brings to media, and relations mediated by technology, a leveling
effect in which they all become information (which in information theory terms
means bits of information – binary digits, 1’s and 0’s); and as such become
subject to the assumptions that determine digital information. Once media are
encoded as information there is little ontological difference between sound,
text and visual media, or for that matter software.

Since the user interface to a computer program is always symbolic, and

involves syntactical and symbolic mappings for operations, it always boils
down to being a formal language. (Cramer & Fuller 2008:150)

Conversely one might argue that despite operating through symbolic operations,
our experience of media and technology never boil down to only being a formal
language: these are the means of transformation, but the transformed material
still maintains a complex matrix of meanings beyond grammars toward the
gramatological. Here is a tension between the immanence of media, embodied in
its material means, and an immediacy of media, in which meaning is
communicated even as the medium itself is effaced (Bolter & Grusin 1999).
Bolter & Grusin’s notion of hypermediation (referencing the former)
complicates the situation, as they argue that foregrounding material and
mediated qualities can, counter-intuitively, come to represent a very
immediate experience. This is a discussion beyond the remit of this paper, but
media as information are caught in a perpetual cycle of reconstituted
meanings, only made more acute by the collapsing of differences between
content and interface, one medium and another.

Information bounces from channel to channel and from medium to medium; it

changes as it is decoded and recoded by local dynamics; it disappears or it
propagates; it amplifies or inhibits the emergence of commonalities and
antagonisms. (Terranova 2004:2)

Warren Weaver suggests adaption of Shannon’s initial diagram to account for

‘Semantic Noise’ (1949), his assumption being that mathematics could overcome
not only engineering noise but also problems of semantic meaning - allowing
technology to faithfully communicate a message without itself modulating the
meaning. This notion of a transparent technology overlooks the encapsulation
processes of the interface, the way in which the design process must
necessarily premeditate the role and flexibility of the realization to
optimize its performance.

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To some extent these assumptions produce an interesting power reversal in

which the user, as presumed controller of the interface becomes subject to it:

Software has traditionally been understood to place the user as its subject,
and the computational patterns and elements initiated, used and manipulated by
the user as the corresponding grammatical objects. (Cramer & Fuller op cit.
p.151)

The affordances of media as ‘digital information’ mean that on the one hand
the possibilities to manipulate content multiply drastically, whilst on the
other encapsulation of the interface easily obscures the restrictions and
boundaries of functionality. The filtering tendency of the interface therefore
has a homogenic, normative result on our experience of media by reducing the
breadth of possible interaction into prescribed choices through a kind of
aesthetic quantization. In combination with the propensity toward repetition
underwritten by media as information, such homogeneity is magnified manifold.
Filtering is not only relevant to the signal that gets through – everything
that isn’t input is bypassed as unacceptable, creating a kind of modulus
situation whereby non-compliant input is automatically recast as noise.

Noisy Tactics
One obvious way around this normative effect is to go beyond, or beneath, the
interface – beyond with actions that break or subvert it (for example through
circuit bending); beneath by invention of new interfaces through programming,
electronics or physical design, a situation in which the ‘tool becomes the
message’. (Cascone 2010)

Interface design involves decisions around what functionality will or will not
be provided, acceptable ranges of interaction and so on. Through this process,
interfaces become representations of the operational logic of the systems they
act upon. Despite the tendency for interfaces to exclude unwanted noise,
obsolescence means they soon become the source of new noise, embodying
outdated assumptions, giving realized form to fragmented schema. Nevertheless,
whilst broken or obsolete interfaces may represent dislocated knowledge, once
repurposed they also offer the possibility of bricolage and revitalized
meaning, outflanking homogeneity even in the act of repetition.

The recent interest in glitch art, whilst part of a long tradition of the
aesthetic possibilities of chance, failure and openness, is in one sense a
response to the suffocating, self-correcting hydra of informational dynamics.
Beyond the repetition of information, the normative qualities of the interface
are a result of filtering, quantizing the breadth of possibilities through
which interaction can occur. Glitches and failures overcome the seeming
inevitability of systemized communication.

Nevertheless, even such strategies as these have the potential to be derailed.

Glitch as an aesthetic is always recouperable, monitisable. Whilst this is by
no means the fault of aesthetics, the role it has come to play makes this

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trajectory to some extent inevitable. The claims toward progress under a late
capitalist, post modernist, informational society mean that the nature of
revolutionary, antagonistic, or noisy aesthetics is always to provide new
territories for domination and control.

…the popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become

predestined and unavoidable … The procedural essence of glitch art is opposed
to conservation; … to design a glitch means to domesticate it. (Menkman
2010:6)

Interfaces are arbiters of noise and signal. Their influence when operational
is toward standardization, and when broken towards fragmentation and
dislocation. Their ubiquity demands attention, scrutiny and challenge. In
‘Glitch Studies Manifesto’, Menkman argues that only through focus on failure
as process, rather than outcome can such tactics overcome the normative
trajectories of culture and economy. Attali’s metaphorical noise is often
misread to equal signal noise: interference, distortion, dissonance; yet all
these prove to be as pliant and accommodating vessels for commodification as
consonance, harmony, clarity and so on. The trouble with difference is that it
implies an eternal connection to the very thing it negates.

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