Inigo Wilkins: "Irreversible Noise"
Thursday, November 8 at 7pm Irreversible Noise (http://irreversiblenoise.wordpress.com/) by Inigo Wilkins Inigo Wilkins is a PhD student at Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies, his thesis is a transdisciplinary exploration of the concept of ‘Irreversible Noise’. He is also a research fellow working with Mute magazine and the Post Media Lab at Lüneburg University on the question of the subsumption of sociality. He frequently works with artists and musicians, and is engaged in several collaborative projects. He has an article published in Mute about the computational modeling of civil unrest, he is working on a paper about the political and ethical issues of modern scientific information exchange (such as genetic sequence data), and another on evolutionary economics and high frequency trading. “The concept of blackout resonates with my understanding of irreversible noise as incomputable randomness and appeals to me on two fronts. Firstly, in a manner that is relative to knowledge, in the sense that the occurrence of a blackout is unpredictable. Secondly, in the way that blackout relates to the second law of thermodynamics, which describes why every ordered system tends towards disorder. Taken together, they imply an amplification of risk or uncertainty that is correlated with the increasing complexity of energy extraction. The progressive precarity we are experiencing across many systems today is caused by the fall in available free energy (i.e. capital liquidity, clean water resources) and the build up of bound energy (i.e. toxic assets, waste, pollution). However, despite the ineradicable negativity of entropic degradation, alternative modes of social and material organization are possible – commons-based production of knowledge and maintenance of resources could take over from private and state control, buffering the contagious spread of risk through cooperative heterogeneity.” – IW