Pink Noise

For Pink Noise, the Franco-German trio present ambitious new installations and other works exploring relations between sensing, environment, and technology. At a time of climate crisis, and social instability attending digital change, Troika underlines how a blurring of machinic and human imagination ushers in new worlds. 

Today, the human sensorium (touch, sight, hearing, etc.) converges with sensors, machine vision, and more. Pink Noise explores how our perception of ‘nature’ is calibrated to digital media’s frequencies and spectra. As new technologies overturn previous limits to what can be perceived, how does our environment change? And what blindspots obtain? Curated by philosopher Dehlia Hannah and art historian/curator Nadim Samman, Pink Noise foregrounds Troika’s artistic reflections on mediated nature and our dis/orientation within it. 

Pink Noise refers to an acoustic condition that contains all frequencies in the audible spectrum. The intensity of this noise diminishes where frequency increases (at a rate of three decibels per octave), making it sound even. This frequency spectrum is recognizable in the gentle rush of waterfalls, heartbeats and wind in the trees; indeed, it is a statistical signature of natural systems. Easy on the human ear, pink or fractal noise is used to tune concert sound systems and lull babies to sleep. Environmental sensing, in human machine form, operates through aesthetics attunement to these patterns—and their critical disruption.  

The interface between virtual and physical domains is a key issue for ecological thinking. Cutting-edge Climate Science is underpinned by sophisticated computer models. Real-time updates to such models also require mechanical sensing systems. But the ways in which these systems make ‘sense’ are different to our own. In Pink Noise Troika unfolds this topic, through a series of immersive artworks, showcasing the limits of embodied human perception, and the ways in which supplementary vision and sensing technologies contribute to contemporary environmental culture.

Pink Noise spans media as varied as AI, painting, sculpture, film and sound. Running throughout, leitmotifs of liquid, crystal, and frequencies of light calibrate visitors’ sensibility to machine vision. As the sequence of works plays out, both inside and outside the building at Langen Foundation, commonly held distinctions between the natural and artificial, real and the romanticised, AI and human, ‘us’ and the ‘other’ appear to blur. The result is an exhibition that moves beyond the topic of what has been lost, with respect to an environment changed by technological enterprise, to what is coming into being.

– Dehlia Hannah & Nadim Samman

1 September 2024 — 16 March, 2025
Langen Foundation, Neuss