Noise poetics & the open line

1/  EVERYTHING is noise. that's the fundamental idea.  given any item X, it is noise until an item Y arrives to transform it into a relevant and meaningful thing. however, Y in turn needs Z so that Y could be understood and used to convert X into the opposite of noise. but Z also needs the item A, which would need B, which needs C, and so on. thus, at any given moment, any item X is certain only insofar as it is part of a network of other known things.

IF this network is finite, this can only mean that X can become anything else in another network. in short, what is and is not noise is determined by a systemic process, and cannot be named thus without this nominating support. we cannot know what is meaningful and meaningless, what is not and what is noise before this event. if everything is noise, then we lose all ability to identify it. noise, after all, cannot be meaningfully indicated, without that indication becoming the opposite of noise. it is when we begin having difficulty assigning it that it starts to infect everything else. to qualify something as noise means losing its meaning; to identify something as noise is simply to clothe it with a symbolic value. the same thing happens when we make chance; we cannot create that which happens anyway with or without us.

2/  AS a purely non-symbolic gesture, we cannot create noise. noise creates itself. but noise also creates the symbolic, by passing through us, hiding in our anxiety for meaning, and creating a name for itself. disguised more deeply, it succeeds in producing the first language.

AS a symbolic gesture, the production of noise will always court the inescapable binaries. what it produces is both more noise and more language, or both less noise and less language, yet ultimately neither one nor the other. in this scenario, where conscious effort is within and without noise, the best that could be done is to do nothing else except that minimum effort required to get things moving. that is, the goal is simply to keep it moving, more or less, by doing nothing else.

3/  SINCE everything is an echo of the big bang, everything is a part of its movement, everything is a rule. On the surface, Otto Zitko's chaotic network of entangled lines (not without the occasional strange attractor) seems to be going anywhere and nowhere. yet, there is no error, there is no mistake in all this entangled mass. everything is simply an event in all direction. every gesture, every stroke is an affirmation. his extreme "art of the open line" consumes every angle, and exhausts the full energy of the unbounded line. "as calligraphic expressions of non-literal writing" (Herbert Lachmayr), Zitko's lines crisscross the dimensions of both symbolic and non-symbolic noise, avoiding the language of literal writing through the evocation and evolution of the line into something other and greater than itself.

BY dreaming (Klee), the known line becomes at the beginning a meaningless scribbling, or what appears to be symbolic noise. Pursued further along, however, it becomes something more and something else entirely. neither settling as proto-writing nor as symbolic noise (scrawl, the opposite of the legible), la ligne en libre parcours becomes an event in itself, without ceasing to evoke in its wake the shadowy gestures of a proto-writing that dissolves itself as if by being over-written: proto-writing gives way to noise, which gives way to the event.

Otto Zitko : "The art of the open line" -Herbert Lachmayr