Hacking the aesthetic: David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's new ecologies of signal

Award winning Australian electronic artists David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's installation work is discussed as “signal-work.” Their work reconfigures signal within original assemblages involving subtle audio, high resolution video (both recorded and animated), kilometers of coiled copper wire, antennae or home-built electronics, electrostatic disturbances, the like of very low frequency radiation from the Milky Way, and cross-signal processing. The article develops a context for thinking about the work in terms of Whitehead's process philosophy, as this is relevant to media theory, as well as concepts of plural ecology and ongoing differentiation drawn from Bateson and Guattari. Signal processing is seen as key to all this. The article argues that in Hinterding and Haines’ signal-work new sensations are produced, outside of the normal “syntax” of some models of aesthetic experience. This challenges some aspects of thinking about both aesthetics and political ecology.