Photo essay: Whitenoise

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/mvcr.2.2.183_7

“Whitenoise” is the name that Viennese artist Max Moswitzer gives to his ongoing experiment since 2007 – an investigation that revolves around creating non-human architecture in the metaverse and that has been implemented both through standalone architecture as well as woven into collaborative projects such as Roy Ascott's metaverse incarnation of ‘La Plissure du Texte,’ of which Moswitzer has been one of the creators. An analogue inspiration to “Whitenoise” is the Human Bone Chandelier of the 12th century All Saint’s Chapel in the Sedlec Ossuary ; where in Moswitzer's interpretation “the aim was to state a symbol and arrangement with human bones, which transgresses the borders between ‘le reèlle et le virtuelle.’” A hypothesis which Moswitzer heard as a student has followed him over the years: “If there are sufficient flickering black and white dots on a TV monitor, which are constantly changing it could be possible after years, after X decades that a meaningful image becomes visible (like a chair),” Accordingly, a further stimulus for Whitenoise is provided by Moswitzer’s fascination for the random signals of old Television sets, also known as snow. Moswitzer plays upon this inspiration by saying that “in the old TVs and Radios the snow and accompanying hiss is the sound of Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang.” Many of Moswitzer's constructs use the detritus of the metaverse, i.e., a collection of objects that have been gathered from the so-called ‘freebie’ markets and the junkyards of these virtual worlds. What gives this conglomeration its conceptual premise however resides in the circumstance that all of these found objects are set to a stark and pure white; thus creating unexpected affiliations with one another, bringing about the concept of ‘white noise,’ which the artist explicates as a reference to random patterns that are comparable to those provoked by snow blindness. A further clarification to the term also comes from the field of audio where 'white noise' is defined as a combination of sounds of all different frequencies, bringing together all the imaginable tones that a human can hear. Moswitzer's domains have been devised as the habitats of a large population of robotic avatars, or NPCs , who also stage performances such as the SemiAutonomous Puppet Architectonics of 2009, in which an amassment of these scripted agents created a system of persistent motion that was magnified through their attachments, by means of which gigantic vehicles and other assembled objects that dwarfed their wearers were moved through the exhibition space, creating vast arcs and trajectories above the heads of the avatar audience. Again, during the same year, a troupe of performers of Moswitzer’s own creation enacted an elaborate opera entitled “Whitetrash plays Whitenoise” in a designated theater building that the artist had built for the event. Thus, it can be said that “Whitenoise” is more than solely architecture; instead the concept revolves around a complex system that combines architecture with what resides in it, in effect materializing as an experiment of non-human existence in spaces that were created for non-human beings, through which the artist extends his own flesh and blood physical persona into three dimensionally embodied virtual worlds.