4. NOISE FARMING  A closer inspection of the roadside environment – where the tarmac stops and the grass embankment begins – reveals a wild and fascinating landscape, full of the detritus of city commuters, and rich in plant and animal life thriving in the nitrogenous air. These stormy, secret gardens, constantly bombarded by material from the roadway, offer a wide variety of textures for those willing to look: patterns of dust and dirt, geometric fragments of glass and plastic, the exotic shapes of burnt-out tires, intertwining vortices of litter and dead plant matter. Just as householders tend their gardens to improve the outlook, residents of Edge Town can adjust the position of electronic sensing machines to better capture the ethereal turbulence of these roadside ecosystems. Physically austere, but with points of vulnerability (the sensors), these machines sample flows of roadside materials – the rate of dirt build-up, the shapes of pieces of dust, the rhythm of passing cars – and then transmit these samples in data streams, or display them in light patterns. In a well-tended ‘garden’ these transmissions are received by noise broadcasters, machines which re-transform these pieces of electronic data into images, sounds and shapes of different resolutions.  Exhaust inhaler animation Particle catcher animation Dust vectoriser animation Solenoid hedging animation Cellular noise-maker animation Local landscape channel Holding-loop radio audio  Noise farming machines paper prototypes  Cellular noise-maker working prototype
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