Sound, Art, Vision

When thinking about the combination of sound and image as it is practiced widely in today’s electronic media, it is difficult to get very far in analytical or differentiating terms. The two areas have long since become too interwoven, too entangled in their complexity. Having taken countless historical forms, aspects of visuality are so bound up with contemporary sound culture that it is difficult to separate the two. Even worse: the historical or »retrospective« sedimentation that inevitably occurs in any form of musical practice,¹ is invariably outdone by its accompanying forms of »indirect visuality.« This term refers to the »outward« visual layers that supervene the core of musicality on many different levels – no matter how immaterial the musical object has in the meantime become. One look at the related YouTube practices can confirm that these visual aspects are pervasive; a listening experience devoid of their flicker is no longer imaginable.

In order to make sense of today’s increasingly impenetrable agglomeration and entanglement of music and visual elements, two contradictory tendencies that are at work in this process are outlined in this text. In simple terms, these might be described as forces of attraction and of repulsion – both resulting from what could be called the irreversible intermingling of both fields.
The attraction that music and visual art have exhibited for each other in the recent past is easy to trace. The history of this »affair« stretches back to the beginning of the twentieth century (catchwords: abstract film and visual music).² In this case, however, we intend to reflect on a more recent period, which in the local context is often considered a »golden age« of the combination of sound and image. In this phase, beginning in the mid-1990s, the growing affordability and ease of use of digital technology meant that both areas could share the same production basis. At first, many of the works in the category of »Austrian Abstracts«³, which found an exhibition platform for a short time at the relevant festivals, followed a classic model: an electronically produced piece of music accompanying a digitally produced, and therefore comparably »fine-grained,« visual counterpart. Soon, however, a completely new possibility arose from this practice; namely, that visual artists were able to become members in music groups. The work of both was after all based primarily on electronic signals, which could now be manipulated in their respective media, through the use of inputs recorded from each separate part of the band.

The visualist Michaela Grill and the musician Martin Siewert, who were both involved in the formation My Kingdom For A Lullaby and produced a series of works together, remember that: »The musicians provided a variety of sounds or musical noises which the two visual artists converted into images using an analog mixer so they could then edit them further. The band in turn improvised on this material, and so the whole process was established reciprocally.«⁴
The »attraction« therefore consisted primarily in treating sound and image as in principle equal. At best, the artists should allow them to mutually emerge from one other, developing from their innermost, shared digital code – instead of draping one over the other to create the aforementioned »indirect visuality« by adding secondary visual enhancement.
Where the decision was made to consider concentrated combinations of image and sound as a closed art form and to present them as pre-packaged works, it served the purpose of bringing to light the shared underlying structures of music and video in a compact, temporally manageable form. It was not about supplying the art market with electronic merchandise, which nobody was particularly eager for at the time (around the year 2000) in any case. This reveals one of the first sensitive areas where something that could be described as a tendency toward repulsion first began to loom.

The tendency to drift apart again, which may manifest less in actual practice and instead in a particular way of thinking, can be seen to begin with the »institutional unease« to which these distinctly hybrid forms of sound, image and art continue to be exposed. For a while, in the first half of the 2000s, the doors of diverse institutions were open to audiovisual acts dedicated to finding new ways of combining the media they used. However, aside from a handful of festivals (from sound:frame to the transmediale), the outlets for such forms of art are still rather scarce or, more precisely, they are in the process of disappearing.
This dwindling of institutional platforms articulates an issue that gravely affects the conjoining of sound and visuality. Now that all media are interconnected – as confirmed by one look at current club visuals – there is conversely a spreading anxiety that anything added from an external source will never quite fit in. No matter how perfect the rhythms, sequences, image composition, textures, timbres etc. are coordinated in individual cases, on a subliminal level a movement towards detachment is becoming noticeable, which causes the music to try to cast off the images intended for it; it would rather not carry the burden of these additional visual layers, which are often nothing more than a mere distraction from what the actual piece. Extremes of sound for which no image is suitable, no matter how it is created, speak very clearly on this situation. Similarly, there are visual works that focus mainly on the exploration of the image’s own qualities rather than wanting to subject them to the interconnection and danger of »drowning out« that music brings. There are sounds with which no images can be readily associated, and images that unfold their »musicality« without any form of audio accompaniment.
This repulsion could be used productively by seeking new ways of elaborating the relationship between image and sound, rather than dissolving it completely. That is to say, the idea is to continue the looped coupling of sound and visuals that emerge from the core of both media – in a way in which music and image are not divorced from each other but freed as far as possible of the arbitrary nature of their combination. By now there are a number of small, unique art forms, such as those produced by so-called »echo jams,«⁵ in which minimal music and image fragments are collated in such a way that shimmering crystals, made of the most minute units of resonance, begin to shine. This sort of »jamming,« the remixing of sound and visual elements, is not new of course but has been practiced in avant-garde film from year one. Nonetheless, it is significant to note that such audiovisual formats primarily exist on the internet nowadays – as if it were their very own, designated space rather than clubs, cinemas or exhibitions.⁶

In conclusion, where this unavoidable intermingling or even unification of different media will eventually lead, and what can be done to prevent it from occurring without leaving the selected context behind completely, is not entirely foreseeable. Today more than ever, combining image and sound has reached one of a defining moment. The point however is that the compulsion to mix different media is not so much outwardly imposed by the »connective« or value-adding uses of media, but may instead exist to a greater degree than previously assumed in the already existing common substructure of the materials used – bound up, so to speak, with their »phase of extinction.« In order to bring out both the attraction and repulsion within this media encounter, it is important to first penetrate this substructure and the already complex interlocking of sound and visual particles, instead of choosing the path of derivative piling up of layer upon layer, or using sound enhancement. The process of achieving this is one that functions in a more subtractive and reductive, rather than additive or accumulative way.

Parts of this text draw on a keynote address held on 13 April 2012 at the opening of the sound:frame festival 2012 at MAK Vienna.