The age of information is over, AI researcher and artist Eryk Salvaggio says, and an age of noise is upon us.
"We used to really want information and now it's everywhere - it's seeping out of the radio and fibre optic cables," he said.
The Signal to Noise exhibition at the National Communication Museum is for anyone who feels overwhelmed by this flood of data and wonders where it might take us.
New York-based Salvaggio, who helped curate the show, proposes that one way to deal with the deluge is to embrace the glitches and disruptions that come with it rather than filter them out.
Noise is any interruption to a signal or flow of information - from cross-talk on a telephone line or radio static to the failures of artificial intelligence.
It's always been viewed as an obstacle and has been filtered out by technologies such as social media algorithms.
But what if the noise itself could be the message?
"We have to make our own sense of the things that we're encountering that confuse our sense of the world, that we're treating increasingly as pollution - maybe there's possibility hidden in that noise," Salvaggio said.
The exhibition opens with screens showing 12 million images that have been used to train AI technology - some we can understand, others shown at the speed of computer processing - in an inundation of visual information.
Walking inside, visitors can add their information by recording their story, which is processed into changing colours displayed across a tapestry of fibre-optic cables.
Signal to Noise also features several seminal works from global pioneers of computer-based art.
Nam June Paik's video sculpture Video Dream from 1994 is on display: a monumental bank of screens that uses television - a one-way linear broadcast medium - to create chaotic scenes that point to the turmoil of the internet age.
One of the first computer-animated films, by Lillian F Schwartz with Ken Knowlton, has been loaned from the Henry Ford Collection in the US: UFOs from 1971 uses digital shapes to suggest flying spaceships - a work that helped inspire a movement of computer-generated art.
The Melbourne museum, which opened in 2024 in a restored 1930s telephone exchange building, seems to have come at the right time.
"This exhibition is pretty exciting for us. It's quite a bold, provocative, forward-thinking show," museum co-chief executive and artistic director Emily Siddons said.
"It's our job to reflect on these massive transformations and shifts in society. We are living through one of the biggest technological revolutions since the beginning of industrialisation."
Salvaggio's video installation SWIM, 2023 mixes archival footage with failed AI-generated images - exploiting the fact there are some things AI can't do.
Because the technology works by processing a sea of digital noise, asking it to produce an image of the noise itself creates a glitch, according to the artist.
Salvaggio has turned these glitches into video art, mixed with a vintage reel of actress Nini Shipley, who seems to be swimming and dissolving in a sea of data.
For the artist, it's soothing to watch.
"I'm in that space too, I think - constantly navigating between noise that's falling apart, noise that's emerging," he said.
"We're all just swimming between the two."
Signal to Noise - curated by Salvaggio, Emily Siddons and RMIT University's Joel Stern - opens at the National Communication Museum on Saturday.
