NOISE: Error in the Void

Early work by Shaw and Trossell, and arguably the genesis of the named studio, NOISE: Error in the Void interrogates the illusion of perfection within digital replicas created with terrestrial LIDAR technology, celebrating the mistakes made with modern machine vision. They present an unedited view of the world as seen through the eyes of the LIDAR machine, revealing near-fictional landscapes comprised of analogue and digital points and process.

Two films, NOISE//01 and Noise//02, take us on a series of orbits around a single, unedited scan captured in Berlin in November 2013. The camera journeys through the droning spheres of error and cataclysmic arrays of inaccurate points. Reality is shrouded in a cloud of mistaken measurements, confused surfaces and misplaced three dimensional reflections.

The dome is almost full; the sky thick with points. The city surface is multiplied and reflected. Echoes of bridge and facade are manifest out of place. A column of overlapping points burns overhead. An axis of stainless steel railing, water and glass slices through. Fenestration bursts and loops. Infrared wavelengths dictate distance. The noise here is grided, aligned and perfectly wrong.

Berlin Oberbaum Bridge - The Spree

Fenestration burst from railings and glass

Dense and burning layers of points

The scan sees more than is possible for it to see. The noise is draped in the colours of the sky. The clouds are scanned, even though out of range. Everything is flat; broken only by runway markings. Traces of dog walkers spike up into the cloud. The ground falls away to the foreground in ripples. The horizon line is muddy with the tones of the ground and the texture of the sky. The center is thick with points, too dense to see through. Underground only the strongest noise remains.

Berlin Tempelhof Airport

Ripples visible of the floor surface

Bursts of colour from site fade in and out