This research project explores the aesthetic structures of audiovisual artistic installations and performances from the modern to the contemporary, on the basis of case study examples. The starting point is the thesis that in non-narrative, non-illustrative sound-image relations, there are essentially three possible modes of relations between visual and audio elements: parallelization, contrast, and addition or extension.
Since spring 2011, Dr Sabine Gebhardt Fink and Dr Claudia di Luzio have been working on a project in the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS) at the ZHdK, investigating the aesthetic structure of audiovisual artistic installations and performances from the modern to the contemporary on the basis of case study examples. The starting point is the thesis that in non-narrative, non-illustrative sound-image relations, there are essentially three possible modes of relations between visual and audio elements: parallelization, contrast, and addition or extension.
Drawing on the ideas of the art theorist Ruth Lang, the project critiques the preoccupation with audiovisual strategies, institutionalized hearing and seeing movements, performance practices and mechanisms of the culture industry. Achronic processes of audiovisual perception can be seen in the artistic practices of a succession of artists, from Jean Tinguely and Maryanne Amacher to Markus Buser/Claude Gaçon. To formulate an adequate description of these, we ask questions such as: What strategies, past and present, suggest themselves for the representation of intermedial artistic works? What modes of meaning generation do they pursue? and: How can works that are now historical be re-enacted, and from what content perspectives can they be collected and scrutinized today?
The project is not continued due to the absence of funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). It ends with a symposium.
Symposium
Aux Ecoutes des Images, Museum Jean Tinguely Basel, 2 December 2011