Joe Banks - (Disinformation, Rorschach Audio)
Disinformation project by Joe Banks emerged in London in the mid 1990s, exploring electromagnetic (radio) noise radiated by live mains electricity, lightning, magnetic storms, highvoltage plasma discharges, industrial, IT and laboratory hardware, railway and metro systems, and the sun. The Disinformation brand name allows for a critique of corporate identities and modern communication. Disinformation’s imagery was strongly driven by research into fields including military research and development, space physics, psychology of perception and illusion. In 2012 was published the book Rorschach Audio: Art and Illusion for Sound exploring the relation between techniques of recording and mechanisms of perception, through figures as diverse as parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive, Jean Cocteau, and the art historian and wartime intelligence eavesdropper E.H. Gombrich. Joe Banks is a former Honourary Visiting Fellow at the City University in London, an AHRC-sponsored Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College and the University of Westminster, and author of the book “Rorschach Audio – Art & Illusion for Sound”. Joe has written for Art Monthly, Cabinet Magazine, Sound Projector, Shoppinghour Magazine, Strange Attractor Journal, The Psychologist (published by the British Psychological Society), for the Slash Seconds, MIA Journal (Moving Image Artists), Drawing Matter and Clot Magazine websites, and for Leonardo Music Journal (published by the MIT Press).
In his book "Rorschach Audio – Art & Illusion for Sound" he argues that "the earliest form of sound recording technology was not a machine but was written language" nad the book explores relationships between recording techniques and mechanisms of aural and visual perception, demonstrating fascinating and sometimes bizarre psychoacoustic and optical illusions.
Joe lives in London, near the set of traffic lights which inspired physicist *Leo Szilard * to conceive the theory of the thermonuclear chain reaction.