The content and the structure of the web project "Signal-to-Noise" evolved in an iterative, associative, and aleatory process. By employing techniques of visualization borrowed from Artificial-life research, self-reflexive Boolean search mechanisms and random selection, "Signal-to-Noise" explores conceptual parallels between:

o Cellular Automata models of physical systems

o Deleuze and Guattari's "molecular" sexuality

o Michel Serres's La Belle Noiseuse extrapolated from Balzac's "Gillette"

o Thomas Pynchon's paranoid construction - the "Trystero" an alternative postal network in The Crying of Lot 49

o Richard Powers' self-reflexive fictional neural network character in Galetea 2.2

o Slavoj Zizek's description of the symbolic order via "Hitchcock's Universe"

All of these examine, either directly or indirectly, the emergence of global systems from microscopic, associative, random or interpretive interactions. For example, Deleuze and Guattari's description of Molecular Sexuality parallels Cellular Automata models of the physical world in its fundamental assertion of discreteness, difference and separation. Instead of the psyche, the subject, and the Self, Deleuze and Guattari believe that we comprise many small "I's" which never attain the unity of the "self" achieved by the Ego. The discrete values of a Cellular Automata system, like the "micro-organs" of Deleuze and Guattari's molecular sexuality, form connections in which parts continually refer to other parts outside of themselves, without closure, without beginning or end. Just as complex images and patterns emerge in Cellular Automata models, for Serres all form, all language, all expression emerges from the "masterwork" - a multiple and chaotic sea.

Video images, based on Serres's description of chaos or La Belle Noiseuse in Genesis, were processed with the Cellular Automata Machine designed by Thomaso Toffoli and Norman Margolis. This system uses iterative steps to processes data in real-time. Each pixel in an image may "behave" independently at each "step" based on a table of rules, for that behavior and a given initial condition. The table of rules is a set of definitions for the behavior of each pixel or cell in relation to the state of each neighboring pixel or cell. Therefore, a global state - a pattern or image -- emerges from the local interactions of discrete entities in an iterative and constantly evolving system.