Semantic Noise is a generative artwork that explores the emergence of failure and glitch in semantic, text based environments. Acting as an audiovisual imaginary interface, it presents an evolving sequence of abstract animations and typographic scenes, drawing on the visual language of low-level terminal aesthetics, malfunctioning devices and early net-art experiments.
Inspired by the behaviour of such devices, the piece continuously generates unstable digital landscapes where fragments of language, symbols, digits, and colourful structures reorganize themselves into broken narratives, and incomplete schemes of communication protocols, where the observer can reconstruct only partial meanings of these readable messages.
Built entirely from typographic elements, the work operates within a minimal, terminal-like environment that has some underlying algorithmic processes, causing movements, repetitions and rhythms that oscillate between coherence and collapse. The monospace characters are distributed on a low resolution grid, which becomes the fundamental material of the composition by organizing the character sequences according to simple computational rules.
The semi-readable texts and digits are originating from messages between different communication protocols that are trying to establish a connection with the network. The resulting fragments suggest machine reasoning without ever fully resolving into stable meaning, exposing the hidden uncertainties, biases, and hallucinations embedded within digital networks and contemporary AI systems. The sound is made with realtime audio synthesis, using basic audio building blocks like noise, sine waves, filters and envelopes. As opposed to traditional musical structures, the overall soundscape acts like the sonification of the interface, indicating the raw activity levels of the apparatus. In this sense, the artwork operates somewhere between machine logic and the semantic uncertainty of the human observer, where the boundaries between signal and noise, intention and accident, become increasingly eliminated.
Created with Javascript, Canvas 2D, WebGL, p5js, WebAudio Synthesis.
Project Page | Instagram | X | Bluesky
