> N01SE
> a series of linked exhibitions about information and transformation
>
> o o o in Cambridge < 22 January to 26 March 2000 >
>
> «information and transformation»
> @Kettle¹s Yard, Castle Street (Tu-Sun 11.30-17.00) www.kettlesyard.co.uk
>
> «the digital and its discontents»
> @Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Free School Lane (Mon-Fr 13.30-16.30, Sat 11.30-17.30) www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple.html
>
> «digitisation: earth and sky»
> @University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Downing Street (Tu-Sat 14.00-16.30) www.cumaa.cam.ac.uk
>
> «digital images»
> @The Fitzwilliam Museum (Tu-Sat 10.00-17.30, Sun 14.15-17.00, until 16 April) www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
>
> o o o in London < 27 January to 19 May 2000 >
>
> «transforming sensation»
> @The Two10 Gallery, The Wellcome Trust, 210 Euston Road (Mon-Fr 09.00-18.00) www.wellcome.ac.uk
>
>
> NOISE is a series of linked exhibitions in galleries and museums round Cambridge and London about how we perceive and how we communicate our perceptions in the digital age. In each exhibition the work of artists and scientists, past and present, is intermingled.
>
> Digital technology seems to offer the means of ordering, preserving and transmitting information - open access and use - no scratches, no crackles or pops. It can generate a view of the world from space without a cloud in the sky, images of the surfaces of molecules, acoustics better than the best concert hall, and may even change smells into pictures and sounds into colours.
>
> NOISE showcases and questions this digital world. It features cutting-edge digital technologies used to make exciting new artworks alongside digital imagery from modern astronomy, particle physics, information science and molecular biology. Luc Steels' team has set up a group of 'talking heads', intelligent computer systems which can be accessed directly or via the Net so that visitors can program the system in newly coined languages. Marc Quinn has created a tactile Œphotograph¹ of a head using the same technology which has produced exact replication of the Altamira caves, and an entire digitally-routed section of the caves will be exhibited at the Archaeology & Anthropology Museum.
>
>>From the Cavendish Laboratory and other major physics labs come CCD-generated COBE images of the whole sky, and carefully-scanned images of particle tracks. Satellite images of the Earth's surface are turned by Tom Van Sant into visions of the whole planet and of the human eye; a video of Richard Feynman's talk about Van Sant's work will be screened during the exhibition.
>
> Alongside exciting digital interactives and video installations, N01SE shows the long history of digitisation across a range of sciences using many original artefacts. The very first printed images from microscopes, including Robert Hooke's Micrographia, are placed alongside early digital code systems, such as those of Louis Braille and Samuel Morse. The Whipple Museum demonstrates one of the few surviving sections of the earliest viable computer, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, built in the 1820s; Kettle's Yard displays a section of Babbage's own brain, lent by the Royal College of Surgeons, and a replica of his coloured logarithm tables, designed to test pattern recognition.
>
> C T R Wilson's cloud chambers and C E Wynn-Williams' particle counters are on show. Digitisation in bioscience is also featured, including William Bateson's century-old plant hybridisation experiments which gave birth to genetics, one of Cambridge's first double-helix models of DNA, and recent CAT scans of the human brain.
>
> Noise is thought to be a nuisance, interfering with the real message. But this exhibition celebrates noise as the essential excess, the chaos from which information can be drawn, and through which it can be transformed and communicated. Noise explores notions of a universal language, the ancient dream now brought up-to-date that somehow a digitized system would enable perfect communication; it showcases synaesthesia - such as the transformation of colour into sound - and pattern recognition - taken as unique to digital computing but shown to be common to all human communication. Noise shows how digital technologies provide resources and also problems for many, by simulating the experience of cochlear implants, and by showing the use of sensory technology by the visually impaired.
>
> NOISE has been devised by the artist Adam Lowe and historian of science Simon Schaffer. The 192 page, all-colour, book of the exhibition includes contributions by distinguished artists, historians, physicists, musicians, geographers and many others.
>
> Further information about publications, talks, concerts and other special events from [log in to unmask]
>
> NOISE has its own website at www.kettlesyard.co.uk/noise
>
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