How does noise feel?

I, like all of us, spend so much of my time nowadays on the receiving end of so much noise. The accumulation of digital sounds, performances, and feelings that comprise the tsunami which engulfs me every single day. I cut from demure to Moo Deng to pager explosions to Eusexua to dance routines of remixed xenophobia — without even noticing how this noise is accumulating in my body with each scroll.

I’ve spent the last year trying to recreate these feelings of mine through computational experiments with video material. This project was born out of a class I took last year at the School for Poetic Computation where we learned how to manipulate videos through Python, computer vision, machine learning, and good old-fashioned cut-and-pastes. Amassing an archive of old news clips, TikToks, music videos, and more salacious videos, my final piece was titled BROWN NOISE. In this video performance, I tried to reimagine computational tools to restrict and refract the visibility and sounds that surround us. I want to see what happens when I layer multiple noises together — the sum of which might be the closest I can get to sharing my feelings.

Since then, I have been developing new tools to experiment with my ever-growing archive of videos — you can follow along (🔌) on Instagram and TikTok.

I was first introduced to Raphael Montañez Ortiz through Professor Chon Noriega and conservator Yesenia Perez — who are preserving his work at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

In the 1960s, Ortiz became known for performing ritualistic acts of destruction on objects like pianos — tearing them apart with axes or chainsaws during live performances. These actions were intended to challenge traditional notions of beauty, music, and art by turning an object associated with refined culture and high art into something visceral, chaotic, and noisy. He then turned to video destruction, manipulating video feedback and splicing, slowing, and layering footage to disrupt the visual and narrative coherence of film:

Video courtesy of Light Cone and Raphael Montañez Ortiz

Listening to these video experiments are deeply unsettling (here’s another if you can handle it). His video art questions how media constructs reality, while offering an alternative space for reflecting on identity, history, and the complexities of personal and collective memory. Ortiz’s noises rejects conventional modes of storytelling to make space for ambiguity and multiplicity, reflective of marginalized experiences that are often silenced or erased in dominant narratives.

This year I have been working as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence with the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

This has been an exciting opportunity to learn more about how film archives work and the role of the archival in 2024. I was on site in June plunging through fire-safe vaults that hold old equipment and canisters upon canisters of nitrate film dating back to the 1920s.

For my Residency however, I am focusing on the archival collections of the KTLA news station between 1958 to 1981. The archive consists of the “trims and outs” of the KTLA broadcasts — the footage that was edited out and discarded before it was ever aired. I am interested in not only about what the archive reveals, but also about what it leaves out — the stories of people whose lives were performed under the glare of the news camera, and the countless others whose stories were never told.

As part of this residency, I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few months about how analog televisions work. This 1961 BBC video has been a great resource. What’s really got me is the “white noise” that used to buzz between channels before we had an endless stream of content. That static, I found, is a record of the cosmic microwave background noise — light released around 380,000 years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled enough for atoms to form, allowing photons to travel freely. This faint glow, now in the microwave spectrum, is still visible in all directions and holds clues about the early universe.

The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from nine years of WMAP data. The image reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. The signal from our galaxy was subtracted using the multi-frequency data. This image shows a temperature range of ± 200 microKelvin. Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team

The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from nine years of WMAP data. The image reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. The signal from our galaxy was subtracted using the multi-frequency data. This image shows a temperature range of ± 200 microKelvin. Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team

What noise do photographs emit?

And what can these frequencies tell us about the lives captured within them? Tina Campt invites us to reconsider our relationship with archival images, asking what happens when we listen to them rather than merely look at them. In her work, Listening to Images, she urges us to engage photographs not as static records but as sites of “quiet refusal,” where subjugated lives hum with the desire for more than the truth imposed upon them. This approach to photographs, like the Ernest Dyche collection of passport images from Birmingham, opens up new ways of understanding the people behind them—those navigating colonial power structures while making futures unbound by those limitations.

Dyche Collection, Archives and Collections @ the Library of Birmingham

Taken in the 1950s, the Dyche Studio passport photos are a visual trace of the postwar movement sparked by the British Nationality Act of 1948, which granted Commonwealth subjects the right to live and work in the UK. These images show West Indian emigrants poised for mobility, projecting an air of respectability. But as Campt suggests, they do more than document — these photos emit a frequency of refusal, a quiet hum that speaks to their subjects’ defiance of the colonial order.

Listening to these passport photos, we hear the reverberations of Black mobility — the refusal to remain bound by the conditions of immigrant surveillance and colonial constraint. Campt’s approach allows us to recognize that even in their quiet stillness, these photographs are alive with a futurity that defies the restrictions of a colonial order.

“Neither silent nor audible, these photographs resonate just below the threshold of hearing.” (Campt 25)

I wonder if the artist John Akomfrah heard a similar noise on his childhood TV.

Born in Ghana, Akomfrah made his own move to Britain in 1966 where he grew up with a sense of belonging to a society that nevertheless considered him and others like him as outsiders. As a young boy in the 1970s, Akomfrah sat in front of the television, absorbing British life. But beyond the stories presented to him, he began to sense another layer of reality — “ghosts” hovering just beyond the frame, humming with their own kind of noise.

With these questions came the eerie feeling of living in a place populated by 'unseen guests'. I started to wonder: Why was there this sense of ghosting in one's daily existence? Why this sense of a phantom, a doppelganger called John Akomfrah occupying the 'outside' to my 'inside' of these national narratives? Why, for instance, despite the manifold efforts on my part to belong, does the spectre of difference stalk my every move? Why, despite all the mounting evidence to the contrary, was I endlessly told, 'don't be so sensitive; we're all the same. There's nothing wrong'. And then why, on my part, was there this sense that there was 'something wrong?'

John Akomfrah, “Memory and the Morphologies of Difference” in Politics of Memory: Documentary and the Archive.

The static on the television screen mirrored the fractures in the national narrative, where gaps appeared, and questions emerged. In the early 1980s, Akomfrah co-founded the Black Audio Film Collective, where video, sound, and archival materials were combined to create disarrayed landscapes of hyphenated life — stories that weren’t fully contained within one identity or one place. Identity as a constant becoming — opening up spaces for the unsaid, the unresolved, the ghostly to come forward. Akomfrah insists that the “sonic ways of knowing the world” are just as important as other ways. When criticized for the amount of noise in his works, he responds -

“Yeah, yeah, I like the vulgarity of it — that’s the point.”

John Akomfrah, Purple. Installation view Bildmuseet, 2018. Photo: Mikael Lundgren.