“If Image Renders Noise”
The New Media Artspace presents the solo exhibition Colleen Asper: to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice, a video performance in four acts. The title, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphosis,[1] refers to the mythological plight of Echo, a character Asper investigates in this work. In myth and textual interpretations, Echo’s significance is often relegated to second seat, after the more famous object of her love, Narcissus. But Asper’s feminist intervention revivifies Echo’s role. Echo is elevated as the sonic counterpart to Narcissus’s visual repetition. Lacing tragedy through comedic misunderstanding and cruel deception, might Echo be a female protagonist film noir detective traversing loyalties to operate on her own terms? Or could she be a foil for psychoanalytic structures of subject-formation that lean too heavily on visual mimesis (notably, the mirror stage and Narcissus complex)? Vitally, as her figure bounces between playing these parts, Echo becomes an allegory for Noise: a cast-out other who doesn’t occupy the position of speaking subject, but who is nevertheless necessary to substantiate information circuits, particularly those of digital media. As Noise, we find Echo echoing forth into the present day.
Combining performance, painting, viola, video, writing, and a zine, to catch the sounds consolidates Asper’s interdisciplinary practice while troubling the distinctions between these mediums and the sense-worlds they enfold. Asper’s compact script deploys words with energetic elasticity to probe Echo’s tragic situation, while her artwork’s striking visuals complicate the scene. The performance Echo: Anticipating Mouth, Answering Ear transpires behind a wall supporting two paintings, of a mouth and an ear, that literally set the stage. Before the wall, a visible violist (Lauren Siess) performs an atonal composition written for the performance by Julie Harting, marking the intervals between acts. But throughout, Asper remains visible only in fragments glimpsed through holes in the paintings’ oddly-shaped surfaces. Just as Ovid’s myth portrays a sonic failure of communication that comes about when Echo’s speech is limited to repeating the last thing said by someone else (her curse is not silence, but the inability to initiate speech on her own), Asper’s performance construes the communicative conundrum visually by reversing painting’s representational function twice-over. Indeed, where the painting is present it hides: Asper’s live body is always obscured by its partial portraiture. Moreover, where the painting is absent it distracts: the paintings’ holes house an optical illusion. Dramatic, color-clashing moiré effects “fill in” their negative space, rendering the visual as vibratory as sound itself. Oscillating between presence and absence, like Echo must, the image renders noise.
to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice centers on Asper’s new four-part work, Echo, which remediates a 2021 performance. At the New Media Artspace, reedited video documentation is displayed as four acts in the four screening rooms, intended to be viewed sequentially. Additionally, Asper produced an exhibition-specific zine that shares the exhibition’s title. Inspired by Echo’s repetition, Asper invited 22 practitioners from different disciplines to respond to the prompt “How do you think about repetition in your work?” The in-person exhibition is contextualized by enlarged prints highlighting several interior pages. Zines are available in-person to borrow or as edited takeaways. The virtual version of the exhibition also includes supplemental images from this body of work and a zine download.
“she left no gap”
In a grey rectangular field, two orifices—a painting of a mouth and a painting of an ear—float in nondescript neutrality. Against the tall monolith, the paintings’ frames are crudely cut, offering oases of irregularity in the noncolor of nonspace. Their improvised edges contrast the meticulous rendering of flesh, of teeth, of close-cropped silver hair, a tantalizing tuck of an earlobe, a highlight twinkling a nose tip. These intimately observed fragmented features are interrupted by voids. The paintings are cut full of holes, with perfectly parallel diagonal stripes staking their surfaces, punctuating their cavities, creating negative space in a physical sense, and marking it as such. Are these images meant for seeing or for seeing through? This is the performance’s set.
Each act is initiated by a melancholic viola solo performed by Siess and written by Harting for the work, followed by a slow, stuttering, transfixing reveal. Portions of what appeared to be the still image behind Siess begin to move. At what would be the chin, in a missing hole beneath the mouth’s parted lips, the stripes start flickering as gold and violet—colors Ovid associates with dawn—rotate upward. The herky jerky moiré effect overwhelms a vacant nostril and saturates the non-face surrounding it like a glowing aura. Rising with the music, the visual disturbance soon infects the ear’s stripes, too. Moiré turns to cross-hatching, flirts with herringbone, and passes back to moiré, with inharmonic hues causing color theory collapse. Matching the atonal music, blue and orange pulse so strongly that their interference positively radiates. The vibrational effect intensifies till we catch monochromatic relief: black and white striped legs appear at nose-level, and with an arm aloft, tufts of Asper’s hair lurk past the lobe. She begins to speak.
In Echo Act I: Sophist or Gossip, Asper glosses in words Echo’s dilemma as a lover of words and a wielder of words, before she is reduced to a borrower of words—her eponymic burden. When Asper reads the line “she left no gap for the listener to misunderstand or interpret,” one might notice that the negative space of the ear’s empty cavity (filled with stripes) is the same shape (though mirrored) as the positive space where the mouth appears (surrounded by stripes). Those concentric curlicues could cuddle. That mouth fits this ear. They would leave no gap. What force parted these two?
The grey stripes that are the source of so much visual intensity act as filters. That is, they are designed to reduce intensity. The stripes prise apart mouth from ear, speaker from listener, two lovers who should perfectly couple, should fit into one another. Filters add distance between the source and the destination of a message.
“what escapes is speech”
Each new act begins with a repeated refrain, after Asper executes an analog set change, revealing the source of the moiré as rolls of material she hoists by hand. Siess’s viola returns, the same but different, the moiré color play dazzles again, and once more Asper reads.
In Echo Act II: Detective, Femme Fatale, Analyst, Asper questions Echo’s motives. Echo’s curse is her punishment for using her verbosity to distract Hera from Zeus’s affairs. Imagining a backstory that would justify Echo’s deceit, Asper ponders Echo as a femme fatale or a detective or a double agent with divided loyalties. Surely, these archetypal tropes and plot ploys are themselves repetitions—their cultural recurrence is what makes them tropes, after all. Can Echo’s justification offer her no role outside a predetermined genre? Has she no choice in the matter? Soon Echo is even more bound up in repetitions and her choices are even more constrained. When Hera condemns Echo to repeat the last words spoken, she becomes “unable to initiate action.”[2] Her motivation is mute. But even with her agency in question, Echo cannily chooses what and how she repeats, still managing to communicate her love to Narcissus as she intends:
[Narcissus, lost and fearful,] cried
‘I want you to come here! And Echo made
The gladdest of replies: ‘I want you, too!
Come? Here!’ To aid these words, she left the wood
And threw her arms around his longed-for neck,
But he took flight and, fleeing, cried, ‘Hands off!
I’d die before I’d give myself to you!’
Her sole response: ‘I’d give myself to you!’[3]
Echo carefully toes the line to obey communicative protocols and issues her messages measuredly. As Asper puts it, from the impossibility of Echo’s situation “what escapes is speech.”
Musician Drew Daniels draws on psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s observation that the ears are the body’s only orifice that can’t be closed, calling sound “an involuntary solvent of the self.”[4] Media theorist Marshall McLuhan makes the point more starkly: “we simply are not equipped with earlids,” he writes, and because the “ear favors no particular ‘point of view’” we can’t help but find our selves dissolved and diffused into sound’s distributions.[5] Echo’s body dissolves shortly after the involuntary reception of sound (hearing through always-open ears) is magnified to include her production of sound (speech through modulating mouths), so with so much unbidden how does speech escape?
Asper’s orifices are simultaneously barred shut and propped agape by interference patterns that jam communication’s channels. The stripes are like an army of toothpicks in fighting formation wedged in the mouth of an alligator to prevent deadly closure; or, like the same toothpicks used to prop open the eyelids of a B-movie brainwashing victim; or, like the villain’s spiraling hypnotic moiré from which that victim cannot look away; or, like a box of toothpicks dropped to create a random all-over camouflage print; or, an equally dazzling femme fatale’s seductive leg either of which misleads attention to provide cover for the great getaway—escape. These stripes are interference and interference offers Echo an aperture to escape in ambiguity. Even dissolved, she is as unsolved as a detective mystery, trope or not.
“cast out of a loop of representation”
Highlighting what media theorist David Cecchetto calls incommunication that communicates,[6] in the narrative worlds of stock figures populating Act II, misunderstanding is fundamental, from the “benevolence” of rom-com misunderstandings to the “deadly” threat of understanding in noir. In Echo Act III: Representation Plays Peek-A-Boo, Asper turns from these mass media figurations to psychoanalysis, rehearsing the infant’s primal shame when not mirrored by the caregiver. Shame, Asper warns, is first and foremost “a response to being cast out of a loop of representation.” If the loop of representation is a mimetic loop, it is also a loop of repetition. How is Echo simultaneously cast out and tied in?
Echo becomes dissonant with herself. Harting’s sound soothes, so that the “harsh” quality associated with dissonance is displaced into the moiré’s optical effect. Asper’s manipulation of the material jars our eyes. Flickering interference embodies dissonance defined as a “combination of tones causing beats” proving that dissonance needn’t be sonic; it can also play as a visual “note which in combination with others produces this effect.”[7] Again, while Echo artfully wades through the dissonant inextricability of response and no response, image renders noise.
“the sound of an impossible color”
Asper’s analog paintings hum digitally when Echo speaks “the sound of an impossible color.” Asper uses this phrase to describe repetition itself, which she calls “a strategy of defamiliarization” that presents “a way to take what’s known and give it back.” That is, to locate difference in repetition rather than to use repetition to propagate the status quo.
Echo’s challenge: Deploy an existing pattern to divert it. The alchemy in this swerving contortion is Asper’s mechanism. Repetition interferes with the norm so that repeating stripes produces something extraordinary. The status quo is established: an on/off alternation of presence/absence, painting/hole. (Handily, the stripes iterate the diagonal forward slash of this either/or logic!) Yet stripes plus stripes don’t make more stripes. Doubling the striped status quo produces something abnormal, extraordinary, mythical, not more of the same. Stripes plus stripes produces a blinding echo, a colored dissonance, breaking what (Ovid’s perhaps most radical) translator C. Luke Soucy calls the “pattern-colored glasses” that perpetuate the same (old tired, often wrong) interpretations of classical works, sapping their power.[8]
All this alchemy occurs in the coy peek-a-boo of the paintings’ cut-outs, until in Echo Act IV: Interregnum, Asper makes her big reveal—at least partially. The video shows Asper repeatedly restocking her magic show, rearranging, preparing, hanging, straightening the roles of material she has been erecting all along. By putting onstage the off-time between acts, Asper—still partially hidden behind the set—shows her hand. She pulls back the curtain to reveal actual curtains. The magic is fabric by the look of it, metal and wood by the sound of it. She makes quite a racket: noisily breaking the illusion she has so carefully staged.
If Echo is Noise
Somehow, the moiré’s mediation still speaks in a digital vernacular, even though we know it is anything but. The interference’s pixely flicker, the color’s hyped-up saturation, the action’s containment in a screen-like rectangle, the vertical orientation’s callout to phone-inflected digital imagery, the stripes’ mathematically regular binary interval—all suggest that something informational is in play.
Philosopher Cécile Malaspina has elucidated the counterintuitive gesture at the heart of information theory.[9] Although most people associate information with certainty—commonsensically, the more information you have the more certain you are—information theory rests on the opposite definition. If all you have is certainty—no freedom of choice in a message—you have the co-constitutive inverse of information, namely noise.
Both modern information theory and the digital technologies that flow from it build from Claude Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, a foundational text that defines information as the measure of uncertainty. A message is informative when we aren’t certain what it will be, which only happens when a choice of what to send is possible. Technically, this freedom of choice is constrained by the particulars of a communication system (its language, protocols for conveyance, infrastructures, etc.). Information is uncertainty, quantified as “freedom of choice” or the extent to which the sender of a message can decide what message to send.[10] For Asper, this recalls Jacques Derrida’s description of undecidability: “if something is decidable then there is no decision to be made. Only when something is undecidable is decision at play.”[11] Uncertainty means that the message is not determined in advance, so certainty is information’s opposite: a message known before it is sent, determined a priori. Noise is incapable of novelty. As cybernetician Gregory Bateson puts it, “information is the difference that makes a difference” so as information reversed, noise is too certain, unchanging, and redundant with what we already know.[12] To be sure, this is Echo’s condition: constrained by repetition, she cannot choose what to say, so that anything she does say is doomed to be deemed uninformative, nothing new, just noise.
For this reason, I read Asper’s work as casting Echo, not as a femme fatale, nor as an analyst, but as the allegorical personification of Noise. Echo is the allegory of Noise, because Echo can’t be
information. Noise is physically incarnate in media (and allegorically in Echo) so Echo-as-Noise is here to remind us how noise has always had its ways of being heard. What Echo says, and all she says is always noise. Her out-of-place redundancies resound noisily, even when they communicate her feelings. So too, we can understand Echo’s pre-punished speech as noisy when she interferes in Hera’s business and uses her voice to run interference for Zeus.
In all of these senses, Asper’s interfered images converge to render Noise as a more complex understanding of communication, one in which anything said is “always caught up in something that at once exceeds and conditions it.”[13] So, rendering Noise, Asper’s images give Echo back her body and her power.
Colleen Asper: to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice is curated by Katherine Behar, Professor in the Fine and Performing Arts Department in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College, CUNY and is designed and produced by the New Media Artspace Student Docent Team and Gallery Manager, Maya Hilbert. The exhibition is made possible by support from the Newman Library, Student Technology Fund (STF), the Baruch Computing and Technology Center (BCTC), and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences. All images appear courtesy of the artist.
Artist Bio
Colleen Asper is a painter, writer, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. She has had solo and two person exhibitions at galleries that include 17Essex, New York, NY; On Stellar Rays, New York, NY; P!, New York, NY; Art Production Fund Lab, New York, NY; The End, Atlanta, GA; Gallery 650, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA; and Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and abroad at institutions that include The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Art in General, New York, NY; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; The Luminary, St. Louis, MO; New Galerie, Paris, France; OED Gallery, Cochin, India; Kunstverein Langenhagen, Hanover, Germany; and Lošinj Museum, Mali Lošinj, Croatia. Her work has been reviewed in publications that include Artforum, Art in America, frieze, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Additionally, she has contributed writing to publications such as Art Practical, The Brooklyn Rail, Lacanian Ink, and Paper Monument. Asper has been a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Wendy’s Subway (with the Art Workers’ Inquiry), Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and the Jentel Artist Residency.
Footnotes
[1] Ovid, Metamorphosis, translated by Allen Mandelbaum (Harcourt, 1993) 92.
[2] See C. Luke Soucy, “Commentary: Book 3,” in Ovid, Metamorphosis, translated by C. Luke Soucy (University of California Press, 2023), 426.
[3] Ovid, Metamorphosis, trans. Soucy, 102: 3.385–392. Translator C. Luke Soucy has pointed out that Ovid was the first to combine the myths of Echo and Narcissus, in what Soucy calls a “brilliant Ovidian innovation.” Asper’s work treats us to many more such complementary combinations. See Soucy, “Commentary: Book 3,” 426.
[4] Drew Daniels, “All Sound is Queer” The Wire Issue 333 (November 2011): 44.
[5] Marshall McLuhan and Quetine Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Penguin, 1963): 112.
[6] On “incommunication” see David Cecchetto, Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press, 2022).
[7] Dissonance. Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/dissonance.
[8] “This pattern only holds, however, so long as one wears pattern-colored glasses.” See Soucy, “Introduction,” 7.
[9] Cécile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018).
[10] Shannon’s collaborator Warren Weaver, in introducing their theory, used “freedom of choice” to define entropy, which for Shannon and Weaver is synonymous with information in its full unpredictability. See Warren Weaver, “Some Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication” in Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois, 1963).
[11] Colleen Asper, personal correspondence, February 23, 2026.
[12] Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1972).
[13] Cecchetto, Listening in the Afterlife of Data, 3.