The Signal Before the Noise

The Signal Before the Noise ATOTAL: Sound, Light, and the Collapse of Order

Edward Patrick Kranz, October 2025

"Before the lights collapse, you must learn to listen."

When sound sculpts light, you enter in near-dark. Air holds its breath. A low hum threads the room and finds the edges of your body. The first pulse lands. Light answers. Not as decoration, but as a presence that rearranges how you see. You register your heartbeat as a metronome. The walls appear to inhale. Your eyes recalibrate.

What arrives is not spectacle. It is a proposition that your senses are about to stop agreeing with each other. Sound pushes. Light resists. Perception sits between them and begins to shear.

This is the signal before the noise. Read slowly. Revisit as needed. Bring ears and awareness.

A night where a global practice touches a local nerve

Atotal is an audiovisual performance built as a system in tension. Sound does not illustrate light. Light does not obey sound. They begin in lockstep and drift apart until the illusion of total unity collapses. You do not watch this from a distance. You inhabit it.

The piece unfolds like a controlled experiment that chooses to un-control itself. Early minutes offer crisp synchrony. Later, phase slips and micro-delays appear. By the time you sense it, alignment has already moved on. The final state is not chaos for its own sake. It is a sharpened awareness of how quickly certainty dissolves when systems exceed their limits.

If you pay attention, you will feel the moment when your eyes and ears stop working together. It is small at first. Then it becomes the point.

The artists behind the fracture, the composer, a media artist trained through practice and pressure. His path moved from guitar and electroacoustics into modular systems, granular processes, saturated distortion, and abrupt silence. He does not chase genre. He sculpts force. The low-end threat is intentional. The brief respite in quiet is precise.

In Atotal, he builds the sonic architecture that can hold a collapse without disintegrating. The bass is tectonic. The high noise is surgical. The middle frequencies carry breath and grit. When synchrony begins to fracture, listen for his hand in the rate of descent.

The visualist: a generative artist working with motion, code, and emergent behavior. With roots in systems design and autonomy, he treats algorithms as agents, not tools. A flicker is not an effect. It is a decision under constraint. A line becomes a behavior. A delay becomes a form of resistance.

In Atotal, the visual layer does not follow sound. It pushes back. It stalls and lunges. It concedes and then revolts. Meaning lives in the slippage. What you see is not just an image but a negotiation between precision and drift, between anticipation and refusal.

The composer builds pressure that you feel in your ribs. The visualist builds logic that resists alignment. Together, they stage a dialogue where no single system prevails. The result is a performance that sharpens your senses and teaches you to notice when agreement fails.

Atotal belongs to a lineage where artists treat sound and image as materials that think. One path runs through Pierre Schaeffer’s concrete listening, where recorded sound becomes object. Another traces Iannis Xenakis, who drew music as architecture and treated noise as structure. On the visual side, the roots lie in kinetic and cybernetic art, where movement and feedback created works that behaved rather than appeared.

Generative art added a new proposition. Code could hold rules and probabilities instead of fixed frames. A piece could be a system rather than a script. Atotal inherits this framework. It constructs a total image only to reveal why such images must eventually fail.

The point is not to memorize references. The point is to recognize that Atotal belongs to a history that asks perception to do more work.

The simplest way to prepare is to understand how the piece moves.

Phase one: the lock Sound and light agree. Hits match flashes. Geometry tracks rhythm. Your nervous system relaxes into correlation. This phase is necessary. Without agreement, divergence has no meaning.

Phase two: the hairline, tiny delays appear. A flash arrives slightly too late. A bass impact lands without a visual partner. You begin to question what is leading. Your eye wants to blame your ear. Your ear blames the room. The system blames neither.

Phase three: the break. The rate of misalignment increases. Patterns that felt stable begin to wobble. You cannot predict the next point of contact. Anticipation becomes effort.

Phase four: the slide Coincidence dissolves. Light bleeds. Audio smears. The center cannot be held because the center has revealed itself as an agreement that no longer serves.

Phase five: the residue Silence changes weight. Fragile tones carry more meaning than the earlier volume. Your eye takes longer to trust the dark. You exit with a body still in the process of recalibration.

None of this is random. The system was tuned to fail in a way that you can feel and remember.

FEED Media Art Center positions Erie as a portal into global media art. This is both a poetic idea and a practical truth. Work like Atotal often appears in major festival circuits or capital cities. Bringing it to a mid-sized lake city changes both the work and the city.

A smaller room increases contact. A diverse, mixed-experience audience shifts the social field of the piece. The conversations that follow often carry more discovery when fewer assumptions are shared. For residents, this matters. The world is not somewhere else. It is in front of you on December 13.

For FEED, the series around Atotal is not merely a booking. It is an editorial project that treats time and context as part of the art. The work arrives. The community prepares. The encounter lands. The reflection continues. Erie learns how to hold that cycle.

December 13, 2025: Why this night is a hinge. Treat the date as more than a calendar entry. The performance arrives with a history of prior iterations and an audience that has been invited to prepare. That combination is rare. It is also fertile. The strongest moments in contemporary art do not rely solely on novelty. They rely on shared attention. They rely on readiness.

On the night, expect a room calibrated for listening. Expect light without ornament. Expect the opening minutes to reward pattern-seeking. Expect the later minutes to ask you to release that reward. Expect silence to feel expensive.

What you carry out will not match what the person next to you carries. That difference is intentional. The work provides a structure. You complete it.

A short field guide for experiencing Atotal

You cannot rehearse a perception. You can tune it. These steps may help.

Arrive early. Give your ears five minutes of quiet. Let high frequencies settle.

Pick a stable seat. Avoid frequent head movement. Small shifts can disrupt your sense of sync.

Notice your breath. It may try to entrain to the low pulses. Let it. Then break it.

Attend to edges. Peripheral light often holds the first signs of drift. Keep the center in view, and monitor the margins.

Allow uncertainty. When misalignment arises, do not attempt to resolve it with attention. Let the discrepancy remain.

Stay after. Two minutes in the dark following the performance will preserve more than any recording.

These are not rules. They are ways to build capacity for a performance that rewards patience.

Example moments you might recognize:

A descending tone vibrates your sternum while the screen holds a static field of pixel grit. Your eye begs for a corresponding fall. It never arrives. You learn something about expectation.

A tight rhythmic cell and a flashing square enter perfect coincidence. Over sixty seconds, the square begins to ignore the beat by single frames. You cannot prove it. You can only feel it. The square wins. The beat sounds lonely. You learn something about control.

A wide-band noise bursts at a high level. Instead of white, the room goes almost dark. Your brain registers absence where it expected saturation. You learn something about substitution.

These moments invite participation. The piece moves through you.

The first time the composer performed in a small New York venue, the usual arc was expected. The build, the break, the flood. It did not arrive on schedule. Instead, a hum turned the air into a hinge. When the loudness came, it was not blunt. It felt shaped. A breath was held to see if the silence would respond. It did.

That night revealed that listening could be trained like a muscle. Atotal continues that training. It offers a place to practice releasing certainty.

Practical knowledge for newcomers to generative work For those unfamiliar with generative art, consider this. A painting is a final state. A generative system is a set of rules that produces changing states. The artist defines parameters, then lets the system run under guidance. The goal is not to erase authorship. The goal is to compose behavior.

In Atotal, sonic materials inform visual rules. Visual behavior returns emotional data into the act of listening. The loop is human, not only technical. Your response completes it.

Name what you feel before naming what you think. Sensation moves faster. Trust it. Ask what is being tested. Synchrony, attention, fatigue, pattern-seeking, trust. If you can name the test, you can stay with it longer.

The ideal of a perfect total artwork promises relief. All senses align. Meaning arrives wrapped. The viewer is freed from the task of construction. The problem is that this relief can resemble manipulation. When a system closes every gap, it also closes the space for questioning.

Atotal chooses a different route. It begins with the power of agreement, then dismantles that agreement through carefully tuned stages. This dismantling restores your ability to decide how to perceive.

The message is not that unity is false. The message is that unity should be temporary and earned.

A media art space that treats curation like a conversation with its community.

This feature is the first in a group of writings designed to expand context and deepen experience:

• A profile of the composer focused on pressure, texture, and the art of controlled demolition.

• A profile of the visualist on code as actor and the aesthetics of motion under constraint.

• A technical and conceptual guide to Atotal’s system, written for non-specialists.

• A local context feature that traces why Erie is a meaningful host for global work.

• A post-performance reflection that captures the live night and the conversations it sparked.

Each piece adds vocabulary and lowers the threshold for entry. Each invites preparation, participation, and reflection.

You can lean in before the night. Listening to recordings by the composer will sharpen your sense of pressure and release. Viewing documentation of the visualist’s generative works will train your eye to track behavior across time. Ten minutes of either will bring you closer to the piece.

If you teach, bring students. If you create, bring sketches. If you document, capture the posture of those standing after the lights return. What stays in the body may tell more than the screen ever could.

It might be the first clean lock of beat and flash. It might be the moment it begins to slip. It might be a tone so low it altered your stance. It might be the silence afterward, which did not match the silence before. Any of these may be enough.

This work is not solved. It is carried. You will know it succeeded if light behaves differently on your walk home or if a traffic signal seems to pulse to a bassline from a passing car. The system will have rewired a small part of how you relate sound to sight.

Closing on December 13, the room becomes a precise experiment in how order holds and how it breaks. Your task is not to understand. Your task is to notice. When the lights collapse, listen for what remains. That is the signal. That is where the work continues after the room returns to ordinary.

Before the lights collapse, you must learn to listen.