‘The information age has ended, and we have entered the age of noise,’ declared Eryk Salvaggio at ACMI’s Future of Arts, Culture and Technology Symposium (FACT) 2024 on Wednesday (14 February). In the session titled ‘Looking at the Machine’, Salvaggio assessed the state of digital and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in relation to how we consume images, sound, knowledge … everything that’s “out there”.
Salvaggio explained: ‘We moved from the noise of billions of images taken from our noisy data-driven visual culture, isolated them and dissolved them into the literal noise of an empty jpeg to be recreated again into the noise of more meaningless images generated by AI, among the noise of billions of other images – a count of images that already overwhelms any one person’s desire to look at them.
