When Zero, the hero of our story, stumbles upon a mysterious manuscript, they're thrown into a journey across centuries, continents, and concepts. They travel throughout the Muslim world, from Sumeria to India to Baghdad. They learn about Europe as other and outside. They're guided by the cryptic mirror the manuscript provides as it traces a history of the number zero. At the same time, another story falls from between the pages of Zero's: the story of boteh, which weaves together technological and cultural histories relating to binaries of self and other. Anahita Jamali Rad's No Signal No Noise is a playful poetic hybrid, sitting somewhere between philosophical treatise and experimental novel. No Signal No Noise is the first installment in a series that traces the origin of the binary (self and other, good and evil, 0 and 1) in relation to technology, identity, representation, class, orientalism, and nationalism.
No Signal No Noise