“[a signal] the mark that creates territory, for territory itself presumes art…

the first gesture of art, its metaphysical condition and universal expression, is the construction or fabrication of the frame… Art takes a bit of chaos in a frame in order to form a composed chaos that becomes sensory, or from which it extracts a chaoid sensation as variety”

Deleuze and Guattari, in Elisabeth Grosz 2008.

Signals (and how to read them)

Events, rather than indicating the end-point of a given activity, infer potentiality, both of the past and of the future. A hole in the ground tells us something about its surface before the hole was made, the nature and texture of the now broken earth. We may see, if we try, the reasons the hole was made, it purpose present in the seed packet or coffin that rests beside it. It is a scene rich with clues that tells us what may happen next. As the theorists Brian Massumi suggests, events are concerned with the passing of energy from one state to another:

“Each phase of the event must in some way perceive the pertinence of the phase before it, in order to gather the prior phase’s momentum into its own unfolding. Even as it does this, it is already anticipating a subsequent phase, to which it will in turn relay the momentum of the events occurance” (Massumi, Semblance and Event, p.3).

What we perceive when we experience the world is not a final, complete state, but an ever-changing tableau – the objects of perception are not self-contained entities but abstractions from a longer entropic process. Rather than being ends in and of themselves, objects are signals that indicate momentum, energy - what has been, and what may become.

The reading of signals underpins many, perhaps even most, disciplines of study. Archaeologists peer through time at the traces of the past left in fossils, the layers of decay that tell them when some long extinct creature lived and died. It is a reading which demands a critical interpretation of material form: investigating these layers “introduces the distinction between signal and noise, and hence the position of the observer or medial device that distinguishes between the two, and of the human or nonhuman who will actually read our remains” (Pottage, 2019).  

The instrumenting(s) project argues that there exists a need not only to read the signals required for a specific discipline, but to find methods to detect intersectional entropic relations: to enable a way of seeing/hearing that permeates the tightly knitted structures of interdependency that defines situations at different levels. Is there, perhaps, rationale to develop not only instruments dedicated to specific disciplines – the surgeons knife, the fisherman’s rod – but a holistic tool dedicated to reading the energy of intersectionality itself. Our intention is to pave the way for the development of ‘geo-social’ instrument, imagined as both a concept and tangible device. Our initial strategy is to delineate a field of interactions, a ‘sounding’ ecology, through an instrument that can be calibrated to read (signals of) different structural (social) levels of informational (meaning) construction.

 Our research is focussed initially on three types of signal produced and enforced within the human ecology: legal signals, sonic signals, and environmental signals.

Legal Signals

The law, and the method of its enforcement, serve as resonance signals of the underlying conflicts and tensions within a given community. Notions of moral and ethical boundaries, as well as normative behaviours and expectations, are located within the structure of law. How then, does the nature of legislation serve as a signal by which we can read a given community and its direction of travel? How is protest a counter-signal that literally amplifies the rough-edges of legal processes and assumptions? And, in perhaps a more philosophical sense, how does incarceration - the sharpest edge of the law - infer a resonant ‘silence’, itself a signal of a lived dissensus?