Le bruit et le signal (Noise And Signal) is a collective performance created by Nour Awada in collaboration with Luca Giacomoni during a six-month residency with Ekimetrics, the leading European company in data science.

The overabundance of data and the emergence of volatile phenomena have brought about a feeling of great instability. Projecting ourselves beyond this saturated and noisy present is a natural human necessity. In the face of identity-related tensions, the questions raised by our current financial system, and the environmental crisis, knowing how to distinguish signal from noise is a major advantage in understanding the current time. To foresee is to be one step ahead of others. Ekimetrics’ response to this issue, through algorithms, collecting and sorting billions of data from the past, is an attempt to spot the signals within that flow of information.

Between March and November 2019, Nour Awada and Luca Giacomoni im- mersed themselves in one-on-one interviews and weekly workshops with Ekimetrics employees, focusing on one central issue:

When confronted with interpreting data from the past, which information is valuable and which is unimportant? In other words, how can we tell noise from signal?

The final performance of Le bruit et le signal, given by Nour Awada and thirteen Ekimetrics data scientists and collaborators at the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, took place in November 2019. The artist was granted the creative research residency after receiving the 2018 Prix International Françoise pour l’Œeuvre Contemporaine.