Eryk Salvaggio

About Me: The Age of Noise

The information age is over. Today we live in the age of noise. Where information was once scarce, today it’s overwhelming. Awash in information, we struggle to understand our world or make decisions. Generative AI (Large Language and Diffusion Models) has arrived to fill this gap between information overload, decision paralysis, and the pressure to optimize: it will sort it all out on our behalf — for a monthly fee.

Diffusion models (the tech behind generated images) are built on noise on a genuine technical level: it’s a machine that takes the images we made for each other and dissolves them into fields of arbitrary pixels. It then walks the destruction backward, based on a single internally generated image of random static, and adjusts them toward the constraints of our prompts. This is also a social sequence: dissolve communication into a sea of noise, and then algorithmically reconstruct something that resembles communication.

The distance between those points fascinate me. What gets dissolved is context. An archive is curated, contested, and answerable for its gaps; a dataset is an archive with human relationships stripped out and reassembled by different means. What shape does that take?

I work inside that tension rather than at a distance. Through a critical technical practice, I work with AI systems to explore the gaps they instantiate, the accountability they displace, and the intersection of our cultural world with the machinic interpretation how meaning means. Through films, installations, exhibitions and creative inquiry, I work with and against the technical and social noise of AI to make sense of it, often by misusing the systems until they fail in revealing ways.

Affiliations & Work

Human Movie (2025) is an award-winning film (sometimes presented as a performance). It premiered at the National Communication Museum, Melbourne, and has screened at Fotografiska Stockholm and the Jeu de Paume, Paris. SWIM (2024) premiered at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and took home a prize from the CVPR conference, a gathering of computer vision researchers. Flowers Blooming Backward Into Noise (2023) has been shown internationally as a film and exhibited video art piece; notably it was performed with live score by Dublin Sound Lab and shown at the CCCB, Barcelona. Earlier work or talks have taken place at the New Museum, the Photographers' Gallery, the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the AI Village at DEFCON 31 and SXSW.

I'm a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where my PhD research on noise and the archive sits in critical AI, media theory and the digital humanities. I am an Affiliated Researcher with the Max Planck Institute's Machine Visual Culture Research Group in Rome, run by Leonardo Impett. There, I organized a conference on Noisy Systems, as well the Temporalities of AI.

I write the Cybernetic Forests newsletter and have previously worked as the Emerging Technology Research Advisor to the Siegel Family Endowment, with fellowships with the Flickr Foundation, Harvard's metaLab, and Tech Policy Press.