Light (in the range that can be perceived by human eye) and sound flow like a wave. Reflection is an inherent to the phenomenon of waves and as such constitutes a fundamental principle in photographic and recording devices. These devices provide a basic technical model for capturing, transmitting and preserving  information contained in light and sound. Sound waves are created by oscillations with different components, which are perceived as a tone when these are at a constant frequency. If oscillations are of indefinite and inconsistent character, human sound receptors perceive them as noise. Depending on the environment of manifestation or  the reference to a particular receptor, there are different types of noise. Although we are more likely to associate the word "noise" with sound, it is equally valid for  the visual. The image of noise (on a frame, negative, photo, or in a file) represents inescapable or inappropriate ‘sneaked in’elements. We can define as visual noise the elements of image that  "sneaked in" with the help of devices (for image preservation and reproduction) which are capable of transforming it by making changes (removing from or adding to it) and modifying it.

The problem with the noise in a photo is from the dawn of photography. In color photography, the noise turns into small dots of different color. The amount of "small dots" is dependent on the sensitivity of the material being used (tape or matrix).

Whenever shooting under less than ideal conditions, noise is an integral part of image.

The use of photography in painting creates a prerequisite for the noise also to merge into the pictorial image. The phenomenon is accompanied by autonomic specificities that, according to Belting, in its return reflexion as a mediator "have become visible at a second glance in a way that they have not previously been seen." Deprived of what causes it, noise adapts to its own new nature as well as to the semantic codes of painting. In the "search" of a cohesion with painting, noise loses its status quo of unwillingness and the definition of error;  the potential (of noise) generated by the chaos dynamics is called upon to organize in a new order the painting matter. If we go back to the dualistic notion of light, the nature of colour in the visible spectrum, and to the possible materiality of noise in it too, we can synthesize a notion of the new (pictorial) state of noise as a kind of anti-noise. We recognize anti-noise by its changed charge in the oppositions: unwillingness - quest, destructiveness - constructiveness, meaningless - meaningful, aesthetics - aesthetic refiection. The transformation of noise into anti-noise is observed in the course of painting after the 60s of the last century in polyvalent modalities recognizable for painting as a kind of art.

These general considerations are likely to form and are valid for the searches of a number of modern artists, through established practices of different handling of noise - anti-noise. After recognizing photography as a mediator in painting and transforming with it the noise into an anti-noise, an objective precondition for the transformation, whether conscious or not, into a pictorial method is created. This method is fluidly applied and takes place in a variety of ways, depending on interweaving of personal, individual characteristics and creative abilities, quests, purposes and meanings.

In my personal artistic practice, the first group of paintings created using the visual noise method was a cycle of binary portraits, which I presented at an exhibition with the programmatic (from today's point of view) name "Noise. Portraits of a Dear Person" in 2010. An experienced and later briefly narrated story which was at the same time a pretext for the creating of a portrait cycle, and by compatibility a text-concept of the exhibition too. In a footnote we apply the "story" in its authentic form.

The Binary Noise Portraits project took place in a gallery space – Sofia City Art Gallery, as an exhibition and as an auditory installation. 18 works format 130/200cm were presented, arranged in a mirror-like manner. Each pair of portraits had a flash stick and headphones with it, and through the noise environment, the viewer was embroiled into an impossible and "by default dialogue" with the autistic child E.

From the necessary distance of time that passed we have been able to capture the echo of the influences that we have not realized back then. Preceding the exhibition "Noise. Portraits of a Dear Person" my two-month stay in Paris made it possible to meet live with the portraits of Jan Pei-Ming, a French-based Chinese artist. His canvases, mostly monochromic and black and white (rarely uses shades of red), are painted with wide brushes (up to the size of a broom), and the traces of brushes, left with wide swishes, remain visible and are accompanied by many characteristic ‘leakings’ – drizzling down paint drops. As a result, the image (always with a photographic prototype) loses its specificity, and closely seen, it is perceived as an abstract monochrome structure that is practically anti-noise. We assume that this particular meeting is one of the catalysts to unlock and focus on the notion of visual noise, available in a standby mode in the creative sub-consciousness.

The discovery of a method or the so called "brush-broom" was forthcoming that would organically achieve the noise of chaos. We realized that each brush, from the strangest one to the largest such, was created on one surface or plane. To achieve visual noise, we needed a "non-surface brush". In other words, in the course of preparation for the exhibition we had to find a "brush" or a device somewhat distanced from the Euclidean geometry.

The second cycle of works, created using the visual noise method, was conceptually developed under the title "8 Seconds of My Life, a 4-dimensional exhibition” and was presented in the form of an exhibition in 2012 in ‘Raiko Alexiev’ Hall.

We knew that emotions and feelings were a given in human existence and behavior. They are the result of a formed attitude towards phenomena or objects. And as knowledge raises questions, we had to respond to the following ones: Are our emotions polarized or do they get a positive / negative sign through a designating them system formed in a previous context? Can we control the emotions and feelings we experience, and is it possible to change them selectively? Is it possible to guide our lives by choosing among these? Can we achieve self-cognition through what we experience?

The "8 Seconds of my Life" project explores and strives to find answers to the above questions by addressing metaphysical postulates of human-world relationships with the resources of real-time image transmission technology and the artist's confidence that thought creates a reality; that what we have invented has already begun to exist. Human mind knows the three-dimensional space and can hardly imagine the fourth spatial dimension. We even see 2 + 1 dimensions. A three dimensional view would allow simultaneous viewing of all sides of the object. At that moment a question arose of what would happen if we manipulatively integrate time units into images. Thus, "8 seconds of my life" created an experimental situation by introducing hypothetical time manipulations, confusing its logical sequential time course. Thought is relevant to the multidimensional world and flows into its infinite diversity. Is it possible (in art) to assert that the present moment contains all the time – The Eternity? Is it possible to depict 8 emotional states by adding 8 seconds, able to gather the past of memories and the future of expectations…

The project is realized by creating self-portrait images expressing 8 personal emotional states (part of basic human emotions) by adding to each portrait/ each emotion one unit of time (a second) and capturing the image at a corresponding speed. The 16 defocused and blurred self-portraits, representing a one-second overlaid image-motion (8 of which are on a black background and in pairs are identical to another 8 created on a white background). They are positioned on two opposite walls in a 4-sided enclosure. The second pair of parallel walls are conventionally transformed into parallel "mirror windows" by projecting on them the real-time image captured by two cameras mounted for that purpose. Each of the cameras "sees" the space with the works and the viewers moving in it. Through ‘feedback’ projection the effect of an infinite repetition in one another image is achieved - the electronic analog of the effect of a candle (beam of light) placed between two parallel mirrors. The images achieved with the help of technical devices add up a delay to each of the infinitely repeated image. The eight seconds of my life are transported in time to infinity. As a result, a complete transformation of Space is achieved through images that conditionally generate Time.

"Drop Frame. Portraits in Motion" is the next project, in the "exhibited noise quartet" described by us. Its name was logically derived from the primacy of the paintings - there were dropped out shots when editing the author's film. Outside of the clear social meaning of the film's messages, the reasons for realizing the painting cycle can be brought to an experiment with some of the life-defining facts. For example, people are becoming more and more documentary about life and equipped with technical devices to "catch" an image, they are tourists, reporters, film makers, video gamers and artists. The media is also digitized and transmitted as images in digital format. Image viewing is reduced by time codes and is modified by limits and imperfections in optical systems. Spherical and chromatic aberrations and color noise have become deviations that accompany the vision. It has been "displaced" and with an attached movement and time through a nearly catching it up, off-focus and noisy image. The protagonists depicted in the paintings are at the same time meta-images, synthesized in their short-lived transparence. Their hands, faces, gestures and movements are in a position, in which the assumed conditional 3D dimension in the paintings is displaced by dynamic spatiality.

The last of these four projects – “Palimpsest. Portraits without  name ..." arose as a personal reaction to the fact that the disappearance of biological species in the world is happening at an increasingly rapid pace. Less and less often it (the disappearance) is a consequence of a change in natural conditions, but is mainly due to the human factor. The last specimens of these species are a kind of "star" that have names and acquire identity. This acquired identity we inter-sept with a real identity through a portrait protagonist of ours. This interaction actually takes place in the virtual space, and the new image is generated by computer software processing. For the realization of the project we invited colleagues, and together with Stoyan we created the "mixture" designed for the canvas. Naturally, the visual noise method contributed to the implementation of the project.

The description of the above four projects is not a random occurrence, but a purposeful transition to the systematization of visual noise as a painting method. When we talk about a method, we choose as a starting point the most general meaning of the word method - from Greek "a study, a doctrine, a path of knowledge." Each method involves researching a problem arising from a priori emerging issues. The path of exploration passes through some of the familiar classical stages - observation, consideration, solutions, analysis using certain devices and means. If the method represents a system of evolving principles through which knowledge in positive sciences is reached, then how is the” method” modified and applied to the sphere of the intuitive. Does it lead to knowledge, and if so, what is this knowledge really? And to what extent the method remains a method, or it loses its objective validity. Art expands its field through mutual permeability between itself and science-based achievements such as photography, digital technologies, the expansion of physics in philosophy and social sciences. Behind the innocent permeability on the surface, we see the penetration of the instruments of science and its metamorphoses into the field of art. Noise goes into an anti-noise and the method goes into its isotope by adding to it a piece of intuitive charge needed to interact with chaos.

The reflection on the above concept of visual noise generates a number of implications that we will formulate in the form of a manifesto of a sort for its adequate understanding.

• "Visual noise" appears in painting after the introduction of photography in it.

• "Visual noise" as a painting method is applicable in all the artistic genres, with a potential to focus within the genre boundaries with a tendency to blur them and form new ones.

• "Visual noise" is multivalent with the ability to apply to various research angles, as well as to build images.

• "Visual noise" is not just an artistic technique. Its philosophical content is in conflict with its understanding and application only as a technical means. Reverse understanding does not give a positive result, but carries the creative deficiency of a bordering on non-art striving, and the absence of artistic research.

• "Visual noise," contains the logic of thermodynamic laws and, more precisely, the entropy, creating internal for the colour competing forces.

• "Visual noise" refers to fourth dimension and adds up "extra time", but it is also an element of it too.

• The "visual noise" in painting has a subjective manifestation, reflected in the author's individual expression. In this sense, its manifestation is unlimited in form and content.

This text has no claim to finality and original authenticity, it carries the scars of a subjective creative "meeting" with the "visual noise", and as such it reaches a subjective truth. It should be freely attributed to other artists handling the "visual noise" method basing their work on the principles, as set out in the manifesto.