Feature Exhibition • 12 Apr 2025 - 11 Sep 2025
Adults $32, Concession $26, Child (7-16yr) $12, Child (under 6 yr) free
Free with museum entryThe Information Age is over.
Signal to Noise explores how artists work with, challenge, or complicate the relationship between signals and noise—disruptions, glitches or interference—in communication technologies and the messages they send. These technologies include the internet, telephones, radio and television, artificial intelligence, social media algorithms, and even the sounds of the natural world.
Artists are the buzz in the radio, the data that brings AI to a glitching halt. Instead of seeing noise as something to block out, artists in the exhibition reframe noise as a signal in itself— an opportunity for creative engagement.
Through international artworks, new commissions and technology collections, the political, social, philosophical and aesthetic possibilities for noise are examined: revealing the limits of technology’s capacity to contain noise, while embracing the inevitable and productive friction noise makes possible.
Artists
Nam June Paik
George Brecht
Lillian Schwartz
JODI
elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ
Craftwork
Rowan Savage
Mimi Ọnụọha
Machine Listening
Eryk Salvaggio
Curators
Eryk Salvaggio
Joel Stern
Emily Siddons
“The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.” — Rosa Menkman, 2010.
Internet Dream (1994) by Nam June Paik. Photo by ONUK, courtesy of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Exhibition partners
Program partners
“We will ultimately come to think of noise as an unthinkable freedom of choice.” — Cecile Malaspina, 2018.
Lillian Schwartz Working on a Computer at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, circa 1983. From the Collections of The Henry Ford.
