Exploring Noise as Information
Ruiyang Ding
Thesis Paper -Version #26
Professor: Randy Lee Cutler
Supervisor: Garnet Hertz
May 3, 2018

ABSTRACT

My art practice is based on the study of machines. Instead of focusing on how machines
usually work, I discover and explore the noise of machines – both visually and aurally. In my
work, I use a photocopier to scan and print the same image repeatedly, which results in the
original image becoming distorted and abstracted with noise. This work was initially
influenced by the distorted homework paper handouts I regularly received at the school in
China as a child – many of which were nearly illegible. In my practice, I explore the idea of
noise as information. To help provide background to this work, I discuss three main aspects:
glitch art, the actor-network theory, and how it connects to my work. Through my studio
projects I have explored how noise, which is often viewed as an unwanted by product, can
be used as the main content of a piece of work. Each form of communication technology
has its own types of noise, which has its own aesthetic and style – and my hope is that my
projects highlight the beauty and texture of noise that is usually only considered in a negative
way.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

1

Table of Contents

2

Background: A Child in School in China

3

PART I: STUDIO WORKS

4

Early Studio Projects: Broken Elements

4

Early Studio Projects: 3D Printed Cones

6

Thesis Project:
Part 1: Emotion: Despair, Happiness, Sadness and Delight

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Part 2: Timeline

13

PART II: CONTEXTS

14

Noise & Information

14

McLuhan and The Medium is the Message

17

Glitches in Art

19

Repetition

21

Object Oriented Ontology

23

Conclusion

26

Bibliography

27

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Background: A Child in School in China

I was first introduced to computers at the age of six. Like my classmates, I didn't think much
about the future role of computer technology in my life, much less consider that my
generation would be addicted to it. As a student with a traditional Chinese education, I was
assigned homework that seemed endless. The exercise books we were given included
examples such as old college entrance exams. Over the years, different teachers shared their
same handouts and made us do the assignments. After being passed around year after year,
the copies of the handouts were usually deformed or distorted in some way. Photocopies of
the text were almost illegible, and I was mesmerized by the markings on the page. This
memory has informed my interest in photocopies, repetition, and the deformation and
distortion of texts through constant duplication. I became intrigued with the idea of taking
this duplication to its logical extremes and wondered what a page of words would look like
after many, many copies. Would the text become an image? Was there an end to copies and
distortion?

It wasn't until college that I realized my interest in the failures or glitches of technology. In
one digital media assignment, I was asked to make artwork and found myself focused on
how the repetition of a page distorts words and turns them into images. I found these things
beautiful because they possessed their own poetic aesthetic.

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Part I: Studio Works
The works with photocopy machines that I created during my study at Emily Carr University
of Art and Design all employed the same approach: changing and extending the normal
function of the photocopy machine. Although everything has a default setting for use, I
believe many possibilities can be discovered through this method. Grounded in this
philosophy, my approach continues to focus on exploring the potential of the photocopy
machine as an artistic medium. Additionally, the text no longer functions as a language. It
has become an abstract image that can no longer be read—it has become neither a picture
nor a word that people would recognize.

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Studio Project 1: Broken Elements

Figure 1. Broken Elements, 3D scan from handheld 3D scanner, Ruiyang Ding, 2016.

This project consists of a square image with a black background with pieces of photographic
elements organized in strange, grid-like patterns. The image is split into four quadrants, and
each section has imagery that is based on its own separate three-dimensional (3D) scan,
which I did in January 2017 using an Occipital Structure Sensor on an iPad mini 4. Each

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section constitutes a “texture map” of the scan, which can be defined as the method for
wrapping a two-dimensional (2D) image around a 3D object (Catmull, 1974). In other words,
the 3D scanner captures both 3D shape information and 2D image information: the images
I used are the 2D image texture that is wrapped around the 3D shape. The texture map
images are organized in a machine-readable format, with facets of objects divided into
sections and organized by size.

The top left section of the image was made by scanning the hand of Ben Reeves, a faculty
member at Emily Carr University. The image shows a hand from many different
perspectives and directions and includes parts of the table on which Reeves’ hand was
resting. This image has many fragments. It almost looks as if there were a colored sculpture
of a hand that fell on the ground and shattered, with the broken pieces then taken and
organized into rows and columns. There are approximately two hundred small, skin-colored
and table-colored irregular ovals. The second section on the top right is based on a 3D scan
of the head of my female classmate, Adiba Muzaffar. Instead of being split into several
hundred pieces like the first quadrant, this image is more “complete” and more blob-like.
Some details are clear, like the eyes, nose, and an ear, but the machine has put them together
as a blended whole, like a melted face. Unlike the first section with facets that have hard
edges, this scan has edges that blend into each other.

The third quadrant is based on a 3D scan of my face, which was done with the help of my
graduate supervisor, Dr. Garnet Hertz. In this image, my full face is clearly visible as a single
piece, while fragments of my purple and black hair and the collar of my white dress are
scattered around the image. The fourth and last section is a 3D scan of my cat. The scan

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shows his dark brown, black, and tan fur, along with chunks of the sofa on which he was
sitting in my home.

After I created this piece, I started to think about the connections between mistakes and
information. For example, in 3D scanning, the machine organizes the texture image in its
own slightly surreal organization and format—it does not look like a normal picture. In these
images, the message is difficult to recognize. However, this does not mean that the image
has no information: even though people may interpret the image as being full of noise, it still
makes sense to the machine. In other words, this project gave me a new perspective on
noise—perhaps noise is information that we do not yet understand. Therefore, we should
not ignore things that seem wrong at first—maybe we just need more time to understand
and digest the information underneath. From this project, I learned that although humans
and machines may be able to “remember” 3D images, the ways in which they store
information are radically different.

Studio Project 2: Cones

This project consisted of taking a single 3D printed shape—a cone—and using a 3D scanner
to re-scan and then re-print the shape. The process was then recursively repeated, and the
shape gradually became distorted through each successive generation.

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Figure 2. Cones, Ruiyang Ding, PLA 3D printing of 11 objects, 2017.

The original cone at the front of the picture (Figure 2) was a 3D printed model exactly 15
centimeters tall and 10 centimeters in diameter at its base. I scanned and reprinted the shape
10 times, resulting in a total of 11 objects. From a technical perspective, all the cones were
made with polylactic acid (PLA) filament and printed on a re:3D Gigabot 2.0 3D printer,
which produced a horizontal texture because of the layer-by-layer printing process of the
machine. I scanned the first cone by using an Occipital Structure handheld 3D scanner with
an iPad mini 4.

Through this recursive process, the cones gradually became smaller and smaller through
each generation, and the top and bottom parts became distorted and less sharp than their

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parents. The tops became rounded, and the bottoms became distorted—the cones started to
look somewhat like a crushed soda can. In this project, I wanted to discover and play with
the differences between 2D and 3D repetition and to explore the influence that recursively
scanning a 3D object had on its shape and aesthetics.

Thesis Project
Photocopied Book Background: Shadow of a Machine
In 2015, I started working with photocopy machines by taking a single page and continually
re-copying it. As a result, the text on the pages became increasingly blurry and abstract
before totally disappearing. For my very first copier-based work, titled Shadow of a Machine
(Figure 3), I used a blank paper to start and copied it repeatedly. Finally, dust and enlarged
mistakes covered the whole paper.

Figure 3. Shadow of a Machine, Ruiyang Ding, black and white inkjet print on paper (2015).

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Photocopied Bookwork 1: “Emotion: Despair, Happiness, Sadness and Delight”

Emotions: Despair, Happiness, Sadness, and Delight is a project that consists of four customproduced hardcover books (Figure 4). Each book has a single Mandarin Chinese character
on the cover, hand-cut into a white dustjacket wrapped around a plain black synthetic leather
hardcover. When opening the books, the first few pages show the same Chinese character as
the cover, but as the viewer flips through the book, the images become increasingly distorted.
By the end of each book, the original Chinese character has been completely degraded by
photocopy noise and is unrecognizable (Figure 5).

Figure 4. Emotion: Despair, Happiness, Sadness and Delight, Ruiyang Ding, series of four custom books with
digital images (2017).

The content of the project consists of four Chinese characters that represent the four
primary emotions in Chinese culture—delight, anger, sadness, and happiness. In Chinese
culture, all emotions are seen as an extension of these four fundamental variables. For
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example, higher-level emotions, like anxiety, can start with the core emotion of sadness. In
addition, the four Mandarin characters for delight, anger, sadness, and happiness as a whole
are simply translated as the single word “emotions.” The four characters together are also
used as a phrase in Mandarin: saying “happiness, anger, sadness, and delight” can be
translated as “that’s the way life goes” or “life has many emotions.” People use this saying
after finishing a period of work (like completing a degree or project) and giving a recap of all
the different emotions that they experienced during the process.

Figure 5. Emotions (sadness), black and white print on paper, Ruiyang Ding, (2017).

In this work, I continued to explore the process of “collaborating” with a tool like a
photocopier and to define the influence of the technology, which has its own bias, on the
image, which is magnified through a recursive copying process. Additionally, the topic of
emotions was chosen to highlight how emotions and memories can shift, fade, or warp over
time. In other words, the grainy noise of a photocopier is a bit like human memory:
emotions and memories can be distorted over time by continually thinking, rethinking, and
re-remembering an event.

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Photocopied Bookwork 1: Viewers, Culture and Interpretations

During the fall 2017 semester, at the critique of my work Emotions, the most interesting
feedback I received from a professor was the importance of understanding the work’s
viewers. I chose words from my own cultural background that I understood well. However,
I ignored the fact that the viewers of my work would not necessarily read and comprehend
Chinese characters. As a result, the work was not accessible to part of its audience because
the Canadian viewers generally lacked the background language knowledge of Chinese. In a
gallery space, it is essential to have an awareness of the audience and whether they—as
people who may be from various cultures—can understand the content of the work.

Using Chinese characters in an English-speaking context is not a new phenomenon,
however: there are other artists who make English-oriented artworks with Chinese
characters. For someone like Xu Bing, the concept is to unite English and Chinese letters.
For example, in his work New English Calligraphy, Bing reorganized and transformed English
letters to make an English word look like a Chinese calligraphy character. The characters on
figure 6 mean “friends of peace.” In this example, both Chinese and English speakers can
understand a part of the language, but not all of it. In contrast, my piece Emotions: Despair,
Happiness, Sadness and Delight (2017) works exclusively with Chinese characters as images
rather than text. I do offer the viewer some understanding of the words, but this is not the
core idea of the work. It is about machine repetition and what is gained when legibility is lost.

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The image has been removed because of copyright restrictions.
This image contains a picture of Bing Xu's calligraphy writing.
Figure 6. Bing Xu, New English Calligraphy, ink and paper (2001).

Photocopied Bookwork 2: “Timeline”

The project Timeline is a continuation and expansion of the working process implemented in
Emotions and also consists of a custom-made book with the interior pages comprising
recursively photocopied images. This project has one key difference in terms of the process,
however: each successive copy has new content added to it, thus producing an additional
layer of chronology to the image.

Figure 7-8. Timeline, Ruiyang Ding, black and white inkjet print on paper (2018).

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In Timeline, a date was written on a piece of paper—the first page consisted of simply a
handwritten “January 1st.” The page was then scanned and re-printed, and then “January 2nd”
was printed to the right of the first date. This process of printing, writing a new date, and rescanning was continually repeated. By recursively repeating this process, the page gradually
filled with dates—although most of them are severely distorted. The book shows the gradual
progress of the distortion step-by-step from January 1st until June 30th, when the page
became fully filled with dates. As a result, there are 186 pages in total in the book.

I started the first page with the date of January 1st because it is the first day of a year, and I
thought it would be interesting to let the paper and my size of writing decide the stopping
point – that the book would be done when the page was full. I chose letter-size paper as my
primary material because it is the most common size of paper in daily life.

Using handwritten text on each page allowed me to have more interaction with the
photocopier and made my project more like something created by two artists: the machine
and myself. For example, the photocopier tended to distort the images in a downward-left
orientation: writing the dates by hand allowed me to follow and interact with the distortions
introduced by the machine.

Also, there were some decisions I had to manage in working with the photocopier. I allowed
myself to make mistakes just as my co-worker (the copier) did. While creating the piece, the
dust in the machine became a larger and larger ink spot, and I just kept the dot on top of the
photocopier and watched the dot generate more ink spots repeatedly. During the process of

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copying, I felt as if I had become a photocopier, too, because of my mechanical and
repetitive working method.

From a studio process perspective, the piece took one week of scanning and printing to
create. I spent approximately three hours per day to write down a date, put the paper on the
scanner of my HP DeskJet 3630 All-in-One Printer, press the photocopy button, and reload
the paper tray again and again. In total, I spent approximately 20 hours of scanning and
copying to finish this piece. One might imagine the whole process to have been boring and
dull, but its organization and efficiency made me feel happy, as if I were a kind of hightechnology robot completing the work quickly and professionally. Photocopying made me
think less, and I felt relaxed in this situation. On the other hand, the machine and I
sometimes experienced fatigue. Both my mind and my body needed a break after one hour
of the repetitive activity, and the machine also needed a break after nearly overheating from
its continuous operation: after continuous use, the machine would print out a factoryprogrammed warning message that it was at risk of overheating and that it needed a break.
Just as humans need to rest, eat and drink, the machine also needed to cool down, “drink”
ink and “eat” paper to continue working.

In this work, I expanded on the idea of collaborating with a photocopier, and saw the
distortion as a metaphor for human memory. This project used dates to bring the concept of
time into focus and highlighted how time shifts and manipulates memories and experiences.
Things can be forgotten over time, and doing things repeatedly over time can result in a
“shape” of time.

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Part II：CONTEXTS
Context: Noise & Information

“However noise is defined, its negative definition also has a positive consequence: it helps to
(re)define its opposite, which is the world of meaning, the norm, regulation, goodness,
beauty and so on.”1

In a general context, “noise” is often defined as an unpleasant and unwanted artifact that is
created by mistake—it is an error. Although noise is usually a derogatory term, I see it as
something neutral that has the potential to be developed. Individuals identify noise in a
derogatory way primarily because it is psychologically inconvenient for them. In other words,
the identification of noise seems to be quite subjective. A normal sound can become a noise
if it is continually repeated or if it is played at a loud volume. In my practice, which works
with the photocopier, the noise of this machine has been enlarged or exaggerated by each
successive copy, and the noise in this process makes every copy different and unique.
Different from noise, repetition is a conscious action that I perform to create the result of
“noise.” Therefore, I am using repetition as a method to achieve the goal of highlighting
visual patterns that are challenging and perhaps difficult to consume.

As a result, the enlarged noise becomes a kind of information that viewers can read and
understand. Information is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “facts provided or

1

Hegarty, Paul. Noise/Music. P.3. 2007.

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learned about something or someone,” which represents the main way that people
understand it: information is usually understood as a useful fact transmitted between people.
However, the Oxford English Dictionary also has a lesser-used definition of information as
“what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.” This
definition is considerably more complex and represents a more nuanced understanding of
how information works in my studio projects. Information is not just a fact: it is constantly
transformed, distorted, and manipulated through communication technologies and our
memories. Consequently, noise is a kind of information that depends on how human brains
receive it. For example, in experimental sciences noise can refer to any random fluctuation
of data that hinders perception of an expected signal.2

Based on this identification, I started to think about the connection between information
and my work. A fact is an objective thing, but information is not. Information is the product
of facts after they are understood and digested. What this means is that facts mean different
things for different people. In my practise, I compare the methods and results with how
humans and machines receive and output information.

Context: The Medium is the Message

Different from a message, information is a source for people (and machines, in this case) to
understand, while a message could be already digested. I want to suggest other ways in which
Mariam Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noise. Retrieved
2018-05-03.
2

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my work might be understood. In addition to the importance of noise, noise as information,
repetition, and glitches, I am also interested in where meaning resides in my practice.

Marshall McLuhan’s dictum “the medium is the message” provides some insight into my
work. In his book Understanding Media, McLuhan writes that people focus on the message
itself but ignore how other messages can be carried by the medium. He states,
The light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the
message.” A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper
has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social
effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime
that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. (McLuhan, p.8)
He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content, something that “creates an
environment by its mere presence” (McLuhan, p.8). In my work, the text itself is not the
most important point I want to communicate to the audience; rather, the point is to
highlight the distortion and auto-correction the machine does on its own. The method of
enlarging the medium itself—not the message—is the main point.

In my Emily Carr MFA studio practice, the “noise” is both the medium and the message – I
want to highlight to compare and contrast human and machine. In daily life, machines are
considered more logical and dependable than humans. When I ask a human to copy a word
one hundred times, the handwriting will never be identical, no matter how careful the writer
is; however, the meaning of the word will stay constant. This is because the human typically
perceives the meaning of a word as the crucial information to be gained by reading or
conveyed by writing. In comparison, when a photocopier makes one hundred copies of a

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document with one word printed on a page, the most critical information for the machine is
the shape of the word. The scanning function of the photocopier, as a primary daily life tool,
is intended to accurately record and transmit the information on the page; the meaning of
the shape being scanned and printed is extraneous information to the machine. Therefore,
the position of “noise” and the “information” could be exchanged, depending on the angle
and methods to filter and identify desired information.

Context: Glitches in Art

The term “glitch,” a relatively new word in the English language, is believed to have
originated as a result of the Space Race during the 1960s in America. Some of the earliest
references to the term include John Daly discussing the concept on the CBS television panel
show What’s My Line, where he refers to it as a term used by the American Air Force at Cape
Kennedy. During the launching of rockets, Daly claimed that “it means something’s gone
wrong and you can’t figure out what it is so you call it a ‘glitch.’” 3

The idea of glitches and noise being used in art predates this, however. Len Lye’s 1935 film
A Colour Box (Figure 9) can be viewed as initiating the history of using glitches in art—
although the work was produced by directly painting on film, not using electronics.4 By
showing abstract shapes, colors, and ‘glitches’ as experimental artwork, a new direction was
demonstrated for artists—errors, noise, and random shapes could all be part of artmaking.

3 Zimmer, Ben. "The Hidden History of Glitch." 2013.
4 Echo, East. https://indienova.com/indie-game-development/glitch-art/ 2017.

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The image has been removed because of copyright restrictions.
This image contains a picture of a capture in the film "colour box", which
shows a directly painting on film and play it in a film player.
Figure 9. A Colour Box, Len Lye, film still (1935).

Many contemporary artists explore glitches through digital technologies, and this is
sometimes referred to as “Glitch Art”. 5 The Dutch artist Rosa Menkman serves as a good
example of this contemporary style of work. It is often by artists/designers manipulating
their digital files, software or hardware to intentionally produce these ‘mistakes.’ “Glitch art
is the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting
digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. In a technical sense, a glitch is the
unexpected result of a malfunction, especially occurring in software, video games, images,
videos, audio, and other digital artefacts.”6 Aesthetics and deliberateness are the biggest
differences between glitch art and glitches. In Menkman’s works, she makes images appear
broken by deleting the source code, which is sometimes referred to as ‘data bending’.7

The most obvious connection between glitch art and my research and artistic practice is the
abstract results that a machine creates. In my work, I do not attempt to create an intentional
glitch; rather, I simply try to enlarge the existing mistakes that tools make. I do not force the

5 Echo, East. https://indienova.com/indie-game-development/glitch-art/ 2017.
6

HiSoUR (Hi So You Are). Glitch Art. https://hisour.com/glitch-art-21221/. Accessed May 3rd
2018.
7
See https://docpop.org/2014/01/a-glitch-primer-editing-image-files-with-text-editors/for more
information on databending.

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mistakes to happen, and this is the main reason why I don’t consider my work as fitting
within the category of “Glitch Art”. Also, my mistakes are created by both the photocopier
and myself, and the mistakes relate more to repetition and time than coding or directly
manipulating the digital data.

Context: Repetition

Repetition causes and enlarges the noise made by glitches in my work. It is a common theme
throughout my studio projects, whether words, shapes, or images. To create these pieces, I
typically repeated my actions with the machine. The repeated action appeared the same, but
each iteration produced tiny differences. After many copies, the small mistakes were enlarged
and became an entirely different and new thing. Repetition is used extensively in art practice,
and it is useful to look at a well-known historical example, such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell
Soup Cans from 1962 as a point of comparison. Repetition was an important factor in
Warhol’s printmaking process. In Dawei Wang’s article “Repetition Is Not Simple,” he notes
that “the charm of repetition is the slight differences between each piece.”8 Each of Warhol’s
cans looks similar, but the differences between them are essential and make each can unique.
It is ironic that a mechanically produced image is producing uniqueness.

In my work, the role of repetition and the differences that are generated in each object or
image are based on the previous generation. Although my work and Warhol’s work are both

8Dawei Wang,

Repetition Is Not Simple. p.101, 2011.

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primarily formed out of repeated components, Warhol’s series is more like variations around
a single theme, while my work is a recursive copy that continually copies itself: in my work,
repetition is a symbol and representation of the passing of time and the distorting of
memory, and in Warhol’s work copying is used as a symbol of mass culture. In my thesis
project, the changes are often difficult to see after only one or two copies and are only
evident after many generations. As a result, my work is more focused on memory and time.
Every repetition is like a memory of the previous generation. When the dates written on
paper has passed, the time of me working with machine is also passing: the two reflect each
other.

During my childhood, the glitchy noise I got from my photocopied school examination
sheets made me think about the reliability of machines. This curiosity motivated me to start
my discovery about the noise that a photocopier makes. In this way, the introduction of
noise over time is similar to how memories work in the human mind: “Memory is the faculty
of the mind by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved”9 – and as time
progresses, memories become less like facts and more like blurred feelings.

In my practice, I consider an individual’s memory to be like his or her personal database.
When we are doing things we have done before, our experience helps us to make decisions.
However, memory is subjective and changes over time. I believe the action of every
photocopy builds up the machine’s memory. Humans generally think that machines are

9 Lauralee Sherwood, Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems. P.157, 2015.

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more reliable than humans, but the distortion in my work shows that a machine’s memory
can be distorted after many recursive repetitions.

During my childhood, I learned how to write Chinese characters by copying the same word
again and again, which reinforced my memory of what the character looked like, how it
sounded, and what it meant. The action was mechanical, but my understanding of the word
was gained in increments.
My work can be used as a method to reflect on how language and communication
technologies work. When humans copy a sentence by using a pen, they reproduce the
meaning of the words, so the shape of the words can be changed in many ways without
changing the meaning. However, when the photocopier is copying a sentence, it only copies
the shape of the word, and it does not care if it retains the meaning of the word. Therefore,
after many generations of photocopies, the meaning becomes lost. With photocopying,
which is a relatively old-fashioned technology, this resembles an elegant type of film grain or
static noise, but with new computing technologies that understand words and meanings, this
is fundamentally different. In many ways, a photocopier is a more innocent and neutral type
of thing than a computer system. I think part of these projects is about me remembering my
childhood and a time when communication technologies were simpler.

Sometimes I feel as if I am a photocopier when I repeat an English sentence I do not
understand. As a foreigner, when I first came to Canada, most of the words in a sentence
were just noises, and the meaning only became clearer after many repetitions.

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In addition, the differences between the repetition of each copy’s generations can be seen
from two angles: from the machine’s aspect, the distortion is “noise” created and enlarged
by each duplicate; on the other hand, from the human perspective, the difference between
each piece of work is the root cause of the value of the work. In the thesis project, the
development and distortion of each page is the noise, and the information that makes each
page unique and valuable. Nowadays, the communication technologies is the most
interactive object faced by humans. In my thesis project, I want to show that even a
photocopier, an apparatus that does not seem necessary for everyone in life, could have
information that we do not know. Much information in other devices has been treated as
noise that is ignored.

Context: Object Oriented Ontology
Object Oriented Ontology is also useful in understanding some of the motivations behind
my work. In essence, it argues that humans are not the center of the world and that every
object has its own point of view.10 Ian Bogost explains it as follows: “Ontology is the
philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at
the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that
everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, sandstone, and Harry
Potter, for example. In particular, OOO rejects the claims that human experience rests at the
center of philosophy, and that things can be understood by how they appear to us. In place
of science alone, OOO uses speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact.”11 In

10 Harman, Graham., 2002, p. 1

11 Ian Bogost (2009). What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A definition for ordinary folk.

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my work, it is essential to start from the machine’s point of view—to listen to the alien voice
of the machine. Artist Pati Hill works in this area, and she has valuable experience in
building artwork oriented around the biased perspectives of devices. Hill chooses certain
things to put on top of a photocopier and scan. Thus, this work presents objects from the
perspective of a machine. In my own work, I try to use the machine’s perspective to “forget”
the text by copying over it again and again. The machine devotes time and labor to “forget”
things, and this process of forgetting is unique in that humans cannot study or copy it.
While using the photocopier, I tried to treat the machine as a “co-worker.” Instead of using
it as a tool and dictating its operations, I allowed the machine to make some decisions so
that we co-created the work together. I tried to use minimal personal preferences to create
the artwork, so the abnormal elements created by repetition were mostly caused by the
machine. In other words, I wanted the machine to “think” independently. As a result, I made
myself more like a machine and made the machine more like a human. Hence, the work that
“we” created together is a hybrid form based on a compromise between a machine and a
human being: it reflects the creativity of a machine and the mechanical repetition of a human.

On the other hand, to treat the machine as a co-worker I needed to communicate and
collaborate with it. For example, in my photocopier pieces, I tried different photocopiers to
determine the differences between machines: each machine has its own “personality” of
noise. The concept of machines having personalities is important for my research, because I
want to argue the point that machines are not just tools but can create something new based

http://bogost.com/writing/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog/

25

on the input humans give them. For example, contemporary artificial intelligent can run
programs by themselves and even fix bugs automatically.12

Therefore, the glitches that humans see as “noise” while machines produce something could
be valuable information, such as a tool they use, a language they talk, even the art they create
and enjoy. For example, the appearance of a printout could be influenced by many factors:
the temperature, the quality and quantity of the ink, the speed of the nozzle, etc. Accordingly,
I put myself as a part of the system too, such as positioning the paper and keeping the
scanner clean. All of the elements form the result of the printout, and no one is in the
dominant position that controls everything.

As a result, my work is also about control. With most technologies, we think that we have
control over them: we use technology to do things for us. In my work, I partially give up my
control to the machine by letting its voice be multiplied until it is louder than mine. I also
push and control the machine to do things that technologies normally would not be forced
to do. We push and pull against each other; we move together in a strange and slow dance. It
is important to understand that control is a big part of technology.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I started my research about the information hidden behind a photocopier’s
“noise” based on my childhood experiences and memories of degraded school handouts.
First, I experimented with both 2D and 3D printers, scanners and copiers. In my work, I
12

Yingfei, Xiong et al. (2017). Precise Condition Synthesis for Program Repair. ICSE '17:
Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering. Pages 416-426.

26

have found McLuhan and Object Oriented Ontology to be helpful in providing frameworks
to better understand how the medium of photocopying can communicate a message, and
how we can consider the perspective of objects when developing artwork. Also, I have come
to understand that my work has specific differences from most work that is categorized as
‘Glitch Art’ since my work does not actively introduce errors – it is more about repetition as
a symbol of time and memory.

In the future, I plan on continuing to develop the idea of using the machine as a co-worker
and collaborator: I feel this has been a productive method for my studio work. In my
practice, machines are more than just a tool because I attempt to amplify the “personality”
within each communication medium – I am interested in exploring noise as information and
producing more studio work to help others listen to the poetic voice of communication bias.

27

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Betancourt, Michael. Glitch Art In Theory And Practice. 1st ed., New York, Routledge. 2016.

Bu, Weiwei, and Yun Cheng. "The Definitions Of "Information" And Its Philosophical
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Carroll, Noel et al. "Service Science." International Journal Of Actor-Network Theory And
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Harman, Graham. Tool-Being. 4th ed., Chicago, Cricket Books, 2002.

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