Eryk Salvaggio

About Me: The Age of Noise

The information age is over. We live in the age of noise — where once information was scarce, the information age has been so succesful that we’re driven to retreat from it. Awash in information, we struggle to make decisions. Generative AI — Large Language and Diffusion Models — have arrived to fill that gap between information overload, decision paralysis, and the pressure to optimize.

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

The distance between those points are what fascinate me. What gets dissolved is context. An archive is curated, contested, and answerable for its gaps; a dataset is an archive with the relationships stripped out. Somewhere along the line of AI training, we stopped saying archive and started saying dataset, we gave up asking questions of curation. The images that come back are haunted by what the data could not measure.

I work inside that tension rather than at a distance from it. My films engage in critical technical practice: I place archival footage in dialogue with the noise AI uses to make sense of it, usually 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.