White Noise - exhibited 6-13 February 1998, The Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London
Installation by Spore; Fashion by Simon Thorogood
White Noise, was Spores first collaborative installation; commissioned to complement the couture collection by Simon Thorogood. The White Noise installation draws on the unique garment design process as practised by Thorogood. The work addresses issues concerning generative systems and chance procedure in musical composition fused with an aesthetic of primitive computer graphics.


The installation consists of forty vintage Apple Macintosh SE30 and Classic IIs; machines dismissed by an insatiable digital industry as techno-junk. The work utilises the slow processing speeds, low resolution and minimal memory to their advantage. Each machine has been programmed in the C language to weave binary threads and random texts that cycle asynchronously. References to weaving in the programming refer to the ties that bind a history of computation to that of the textile industry. It was the punch card of the Jacquard loom that so inspired Babbage and thus the processes of weaving cloth and computing are inextricably linked.



In 2003 I converted the code to run as a director app.
Click on the Apple SE30 image to launch.