How are we to make sense of the relation between images and interference? On the one hand, it would seem, we are faced by the spectre of a vast and endlessly proliferating machinic economy of the image, in which precisely visibility is at stake, in which images circulate but no longer appear, in which the flow of the image-signal displaces any possibility of contemplative, critical reception. On the other hand, in response to this dilemma, we have a suggested artistic strategy of interference, which struggles to avoid the language of images, but hopes, nonetheless, to somehow manifest things clearly – if nothing else, to make apparent the absence, any longer, of images. Strangely then the strategy of interference is positioned as a means of obtaining clarity and perspective, whereas the flow of ordinary images appears as a form of interference.
The notion of interference suggests meddling, obstructing, even sexual molestation, but it is most closely associated here with the more technical sense of noise affecting a communication channel. Claude Shannon famously conceives noise as an intrinsic feature of any form of telecommunication. Information, the signal proper, is embedded in noise. Information entropy provides a statistical measure of the level of undecidability of a message linked to the complexity of the message, available bandwidth and the ratio between signal and noise. In this sense it is difficult to see how interference can simply be harnessed by art, how it can be regarded as some kind of neatly exterior corrective to an otherwise pure-flowing signal.