Visual Music Archive

close Book Detail

 

See this Sound 

(2009) 

by Liz Kotz (Author), Cosima Rainer (Editor), Stella Rollig (Editor), Dieter Daniels (Editor), Manuela Ammer (Editor) aims to make important aspects of the relationship between image and sound accessible in an interdisciplinary way.

See this Sound, *****

The quiet halls of the museum are a thing of the past. Instead, music and sounds are heard everywhere, as visual artists today take for granted the integration of the world of sounds in their works. The former hegemony of the visual has meanwhile given way a diverse interplay of image and sound. The first pioneers in this expanded field of artistic work already emerged during the 1920s. The alleged hierarchy of the senses, reflection on perceptions, and the search for synergies were the greatest challenges. Media Art later became a means of socio-political engagement and a topos of the avant-garde. Major technical changes in media, audio-visual experiments and the charged relationship between narration and abstraction led again and again to new ways of working. The project See this Sound aims to make several important aspects of this manifold and diverse relationship between image and sound accessible in an interdisciplinary way.

 

Source: Buchhandlung Walther König

 

 

See This Sound compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic eye music of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others. In its scope and intelligence, See This Sound is a unique survey of this realm.

 

Source: Amazon 

 

 

ISBN-10: 3865606830

ISBN-13: 978-3865606839

 

 

See this Sound, *****See this Sound, *****

Reading

Audiovisuology: See this sound (2010) - An Interdisciplinary Compendium of Audiovisual Culture. This all-embracing compendium brings together texts on various art forms in which the relationship between sound and image plays a significant role and the techniques used in linking the two. The entire spectrum of audiovisual art and phenomena is presented in 35 dictionary entries. (Cornerhouse)

Sons et Lumières (2004) – A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century (in French) by Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix published by the Centre Pompidou for the excellent Paris exhibition in September 2004 until January 2005.


Curated by the Pompidou’s Sophie Duplaix with the Louvre’s Marcella Lista, the show required a good three or four hours to absorb, with its bombardment of sensory and intellectual input, including painting, sound sculpture, sound/light automata, film and video, and room-size installations. (Frieze Magazine)

Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Digital Harmony (1980): On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art – John Whitney, Sr. wanted to create a dialog between "the voices of light and tone." All of his early experiments in film and the development of sound techniques lead toward this end. He felt that music was an integral part of the visual experience; the combination had a long history in man's primitive development and was part of the essence of life. His theories On the complementarity of Music and Visual Art were explained in his book, Digital Harmony, published by McGraw-Hill in 1980. (Paradise 2012)

Michel Gondry (*1963) is a French film, commercial and music video director and an Academy Award-winning screenwriter. He is noted for his inventive visual style and manipulation of mise en scène. Michel Gondry's career as a filmmaker began with creating music videos for the French rock band Oui Oui, in which he also served as a drummer. The style of his videos for Oui Oui caught the attention of music artist Björk, who asked him to direct the video for her song Human Behaviour. The collaboration proved long-lasting, with Michel Gondry directing a total of seven music videos for Björk. Other artists who have collaborated with Michel Gondry on more than one occasion include Daft Punk, The White Stripes, The Chemical Brothers, The Vines, Steriogram, Radiohead, and Beck. Gondry has also created numerous television commercials. (Wikipedia)

Alex Rutterford is a British director and graphic designer working mostly on music videos. He studied graphic design at the Croydon School of Art and graduated in 1991. His most well-known works include the videos for Gantz Graf by Autechre, Verbal by Amon Tobin and Go to Sleep by Radiohead. (Wikipedia)

Rubber Johnny (2005) by Chris Cunningham is six minutes and ten seconds of terror that fuses the music of Aphex Twin with his own unique visual style. The titular Johnny is a mutant kid stuck in a wheelchair who is shut in the dark by his parents and amuses himself and his pet dog by shape-shifting and raving. Chris himself plays the part of Johnny and the film itself became a kind of side project that evolved out of a 30 second promo for Aphex Twin's Druqks and took several years to complete for both the shooting and the editing. (Pixelsurgeon)

Ohi Ho Bang Bang (1988) - The music in this video was created from the sounds being played live during filming. The film actually shows what you hear. It is a collaboration between Holger Hiller, Akiko Hada and Karl Bonnie. (Holger Hiller)