Signal to Noise
This commissioned installation was created for the National Communication Museum in Melbourne as part of their 2025 exhibition Signal to Noise, which explores how artists engage with technological disruptions and distortions.
Developed specifically for the National Communication Museum as an expansion of Ancient Futures, this work is an experiential woven installation that responds in real time to the emotional content of stories shared by visitors. Using AI-driven sentiment analysis, fiber optics, and traditional weaving techniques, the installation visualizes data through shifting light and color. Craftwork was invited to explore how emerging tools—such as machine learning and soft electronics—can extend the long history of textiles as vessels for memory, coded language, and collective experience.
The Information Age is over.
Signal to Noise explores how artists work with, challenge, or complicate the relationship between signals and noise—disruptions, glitches or interference—in communication technologies and the messages they send. These technologies include the internet, telephones, radio and television, artificial intelligence, social media algorithms, and even the sounds of the natural world.
Artists are the buzz in the radio, the data that brings AI to a glitching halt. Instead of seeing noise as something to block out, artists in the exhibition reframe noise as a signal in itself—an opportunity for creative engagement.
Through international artworks, new commissions and technology collections, the political, social, philosophical and aesthetic possibilities for noise are examined: revealing the limits of technology’s capacity to contain noise, while embracing the inevitable and productive friction noise makes possible.
Curator’s Note
"Simultaneously evocative of the transmission of signals over telephone, while touching upon the origins of computing in the Jacquard loom into the modern era of computation, Ancient Futures opens Signal to Noise with an acknowledgement of collected stories meant to be communicated silently, in light. Signal can be found in silence.
As the textile travels and encounters more people-more stories, its surface will become more dynamic and complex. In traveling around the globe, we hope this textile will be able to capture a sense of what it is like to be a human in the world right now, using the ancient wisdom of textile coding and the futuristic potential of digital technology.
Ancient Futures also delves into the realm of artificial intelligence, incorporating tools like ChatGPT to process and interpret the emotions of our visitors. By integrating AI into the operation and evolution of this piece, we explore new, pervasive technology as well as the intersection of human emotion and machine learning. While the use of AI in this context might suggest a capacity for nuanced understanding, here "nuance" emerges less as precision and more as ambiguity—a kind of poetic fuzziness introduced by the machine's attempt to grasp human sentiment. Rather than clarifying meaning, the sentiment analysis becomes another layer, refracting visitors' stories through the imperfect lens of a language model. In this way, AI contributes to a dynamic visualization that embraces uncertainty, misreading, and interpretive slippage.”
Credits
A Craftwork Collective project.
Oddly Good, Armature Fabrication & LED Enclosure Design
Photos by Phoebe Powell, courtesy of NCM, Signal to Noise, 2025.
Exhibitors
Special Thanks
Qiqing Lin