The more immediate inception of the Omaha Flow Systems [1] project finds its roots in my One Year One Man Show presented by the Oakland Museum in 1972. George Neubert, Curator of Art of the Oakland Museum, invited me to present a solo exhibition which would somehow give the meat and substance of my work. I therefore designed a show which would provide a flow of information growing, changing, maturing and regressing along with the flow of my life. Naturally, for a show of this nature, it seemed logical to take a year, sending in the show at intervals by mail. As it came about, some friends who are part of that life heard about it, and asked to send things in. And, in the course of allowing my life to happen, I let the invitation go abroad until hundreds of people were joining me in my show. When invited to show at The Vancouver Art Gallery, I decided to consciously utilize the participation of my friends, rather than just allowing it, and the result was Ken Friedman and Friends in Process, a presentation of the intersections, parallels, and interstices of our mutual labors in the arts. Work in Progress, the final pre-Omaha systemic from which the Flow System derived, involved the forwarding of all my mail over a six-month span to The Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington in Seattle, while the museum engendered massive public participation by a saturation campaign of invitations throughout the region.
In 1972, I went to visit Archive Jean Brown, a fabulously well-organized archive of contemporary art of Fluxus, the mail artists, and others arranged by Jean Brown, a generous and astute collector. On the way, Roy Butler of Denver's Friends of Contemporary Art suggested I go to visit Harry Taylor at the Joslyn. So: one fine Autumn day, I drove into Omaha to meet Harry Taylor. We sat in his office and chatted for a few hours, nothing in mind, when suddenly he asked me, 'If you could do anything you wanted to do here, what would you do?' And I told him all the dreams which eventually became the Omaha Flow Systems.
Which were: to invite thousands of people from around the world to send their work through the mail to Omaha, and to invite the citizens of Omaha to come to the Museum to take what they wanted home, leaving something behind in exchange, and contacting the artists whose work they took. To use this series of activities as methods for trying to involve all levels of the public in the life of the arts, to involve all segments of society from businesses and civic authorities to educational institutions and religious organizations. 'MY' artwork was the creation of the idea and the systems, and after some time of drawing up proposals, ideas and plans, and getting them accepted by the Board of the Museum, 'my' art -- the systems itself --was done, and The Omaha Flow Systems itself began.
What was the Omaha Flow Systems? The Joslyn Art Museum in cooperation with many other institutions, businesses, and individuals, including Creighton University, The University of Nebraska at Omaha, The Gallery in the Market, Concordia Teachers College, The Greater Omaha Area Lutheran Ministry, The United Methodist Metropolitan Ministries of Omaha, The First Unitarian Church of Omaha, International Artists Cooperation, The Brandeis Department Store, the Xerox Corporation, Roncka Printing Company, Field Paper Corporation, Klopp Printing Company and Commercial Lithographing Company, presented a project for thousands of people in Omaha and around the world. All these groups of people worked together with the System's own Flow Team to present as many challenging activities as could be arranged in the museum, on the street, out of the museum, in stores, bringing performance projects and video programs into the usual quiet spaces of the museum, bringing the shows right out into the classrooms of schools and universities, and more.
Who was the Omaha Flow Systems? It was: Harry Taylor, Project Director; Tim Herstein, Associate Project Director; Bruce Rennie, Associate Artist; Diane Berendt, Special Collaborating Artist; Tweety, Registrar; Calvin Hennig, Director of Floating Information; Max Almy, Director of Video; Eric Sommers, Video Consultant; twelve collaborating artists, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Robert Filliou, Klaus Groh, Janos Urban, Diane Berendt, Stu Horn, Hanns-Werner Kalkmann, Davi Det Hompson, Tom Ockerse, Per Kirkeby and Pierre Keller. As well, the many different members of the Flow Team, in Omaha and around the world, who made the project, in its many aspects, possible. And the excellent photographic team of Butkus, Langdon, Larkin and Phillips who were responsible for the fabulous and thorough documentation of the show from first to last, including the pictures you see here.
The kick-off to the show took place when the museum sent out about 2,000 invitations and posters around the world. A sad irony took place here, in that while the European posters arrived well on time in many cases, in other cases they did not arrive until the week the show opened. And, as of the day the show opened, only 10% of the poster/invitations in the U.S. had arrived, so the very postal service which made the show possible impaired it incalculably in terms of what it could have been. The results, however, were not bad, in that by the end of the show, over 4,000 individual artworks had arrived. Some, of course, came in bundles including many different artists, some came for example, one French artist, Giner, who sent a packet every day for the duration of the show -- many works by one artist. As a result, when each packet was logged in, we came up with a log of several hundred names, but were not able to log in every work. At the end of the show, the rush to get new material out as old material went away made it impossible to maintain the logging system during the last few days, when the greatest amount of the material was exchanged. [2]
During the show, a large number of activities took place. These included lecture/demonstrations for Creighton University, a seminar for a class at University of Nebraska, an Omaha Flow Systems Potluk & Benefit at The First Unitarian Church of Omaha, and a Celebration of the Arts in cooperation with the Lutheran and United Methodist ministries in the Omaha area.
The show was not without its problems. The museum received two grants, one from The Nebraska State Council on the Arts and the other from SRL, a Free Religious Fellowship of Boston, and itself budgeted $500, and spent somewhat more than that. Due to miscalculations, monies supposedly to have been raised were not, and I myself underwrote the show in the sum of $2,000 out of my own pocket for communications and printing expenses, and financial assistance to the collaborating artists.
We feel that one of the reasons for the unusual successes and failures of the show was that it was an amalgamation of firsts for The Joslyn and for Nebraska, including the first exhibition to involve the use of video, the first non-standard (i.e., hang or mount only) exhibition in the area, and the first show to try to utilize a major system, rather than simple museum-channel operations for programming.
The area and the citizens responded well -- we had a large number of television interviews and broadcasts, including a lengthy interview on one channel and two half-hour special programs on a nearby FM radio station. The local press responded well, with two major favorable articles in the two large metropolitan newspapers, one unfavorable review and one rebuttal allowed by the unfavorable critic. Many school-children came, along with other citizens ranging from museum members and interested members of the public to the Mayor of Omaha, Eugene Leahy, who -- with Dr. San Guinary -- entered two giant postcards painted in the Museum as their contribution to the show. (Dr. San Guinary is the fascinating MC of Omaha's late-night monster-movies).
We have not yet determined the number of visitors to the show, but it ranges well into the several thousands. As well, through the press, the publications and announcements, we feel that this project reached out if only as an idea, a possibility to millions of people, some who came from thousands of miles away, others who wrote, to see or take part in the show. In fact, John Bosshard, Michael Gehrke, and Jan Gallagher drove over 1,000 miles from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to do an hour-long sculpture construction piece, then removing half the sculpture to take back with them. They arrived in the late afternoon, did their work, we all ate dinner together, and then they left the next morning to get home in time for work. (The piece was really outstanding, and they even transported several tons of boulders and trees to make sure everything went well, rather than relying on finding the right rocks in Omaha.)
Was the show an art epic? Yes and no. We feel it was an epic project, a glorious idea which opened up a lot of new areas of thought and exploration in the arts. As we discussed earlier, this idea did not spring full-blown from the brain of the artist, but had precedents and resonances over the years in the work of many. It was, for the region and for the museum, and for many who had not heard about earlier projects or efforts in these traditions, a new idea, a new experience, a series of firsts which shed light on many old and new thoughts, ways people can work, what art means, who is an artist, the function and potential of the museum, etc. As well, even to the informed in communications and mail art, it was a new thing: the largest, best-financed (even though running short of funds) and best-organized such project ever to be attempted. And, in this sense, for museums and artists interested in accomplishing such projects in the future, it is a source of information and ideas, both for what to do and what not to do and such mundane things as the importance of mailing time-tables, which the artist suggested, but which, through miscommunication, the museum did not follow, with the sad postal results mentioned above.
The quality of the work varied -- some of the individual works were great, others not so great . . . and much depended on the eye and heart of the individual viewer. Pieces I would have snatched up often stood on the walls while short-order items went like the proverbial hotcakes. Of great interest were the hundreds of works of children's art from around the world, another of the interlinked aspects of the OFS, arranged through artists in various countries.
Beyond, works from artists everywhere . . . Robert Indiana, Jorg Schwarzenberger, Renate Kretschmer, Bengt Af Klingtberg, Kalevi Lappalainen, Gabor Attali, Jiri Valoch, William Sorensen, May Wilson, Franci Zagoricnik, Alice Hutchins, Jerry Elrod, Daniel Biga, Urs and Ros Graf, Bernard Heisdieck, and . . . and . . . and. . .
Like the entire class full of kids who took away Josef Bauer's work, planning to send him their works as a class project . . . or the German class who took away Timm Ulrich's work for a translation project . . . or the many people who received the works of the aforementioned Giner . . .
The basis of our project was this: a regeneration of public interest in the arts, a lively experiment involving many and affording significant personal pleasure to each in her or his own way. Across the nation and around the world, governments, foundations, museums and artists are spending millions toward this goal, often without success. That Omaha Flow Systems was able to achieve the essential goal, even in a tentative, first-step fashion, on a short budget and with a lot of work, stands as a tribute to the many participants, the Flow Team, the Joslyn Art Museum and the citizens and organizations of Omaha who made it possible and effective. This stands as the final judgement of the craft, brightness, hard work and energy involved in creating and nurturing the process that was Omaha Flow Systems, and is its validation as a work of art.
Everything it was . . . from a mail art show to a solo show of one artist's concept to a celebration of the arts (the work of Rev. Vic Schoonover and Rev. Jerry Elrod, of the two ministries) to a giant group show to the ideas and information you are deriving from this article.
One critic suggested that it was a case of the emperor who had no clothes, a pretentious avant-garde exercise in aesthetic futility. I say, it's true the emperor has no clothes but the Ohama Flow Systems was not an imperial procession. It was a family picnic of good, hard-working folks, artists, bankers, politicians, plumbers, all having a go at that most complex of human activities - creative participation in the arts. It was an experimental process which will bear fruit in the lives of those touched by that process.
A postage stamp will not cover an emperor, naked or not - but it will cover the globe, shortening the distance between people and nations, sweetening the hours of our days. This was what we set out to do, and it was good.
CHRONOLOGY: 1960 KF performing events and sending items through the mails to friends, not as a conscious art activity. 1965-6 - KF produces the Radio Garnisht Kigele series on Radio WRSB, Shimer College, Mt. Carroll, Illinois. Contacts Something Else Press. When in New York to visit the Press, Dick Higgins suggests a visit to Fluxus. KF joins Fluxus and becomes Director of Fluxus West. For more details on this Fluxus activity, read 'Fluxus and Concept Art', Art & Artists, October 1972 Fluxus Issue. 1967 through these connections, KF enrolls in the New York Correspondence School, headed by Ray Johnson. 1968 Fluxus West publishes Amazing Facts Magazine, a randomly assembled contributor-based magazine paralleling the better-organized magazines such as Atchley's Ace Space Company productions and Kostelanetz' Assembling of later years. This early project included work by Christo, Ray Johnson, Dick Higgins, Greg Sweigert, Mario Diacono and others. 1970 Ray Johnson and the New York Correspondence School exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum. 1971 The Biennal of Paris holds a large mail art section, organized by Jean-Marc Poinsot. Image Bank of Canada launches the giant Post Card Show under the auspices of The National Gallery of Canada. 1972 KF exhibitions take place as described in article. [3]
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Information on correspondence and mail art will be found extensively in such books as: Mail Art, ed. Jean-Marc Poinsot, Editions C.E.D.l. C., Paris, 1971; The Paper Snake, Ray Johnson, Something Else Press, New York; Ample Food for Stupid Thought, Robert Filliou, Something Else Press, New York; Break-through Fictioneers, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, Something Else Press, Barton, Vermont; Fluxus and Happenings, Harald Szeeman, Hanns Sohm & Dietrich Albrecht, Kunstverein Klnischer, Cologne; A Dialogue with Ken Friedman, by Thomas Albright, The Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; International Sources, ed. Ken Friedman & Stanley Lunetta, Composer/Performer Editions, Sacramento, California; and in the following articles, including several by Thomas Albright, one of the most astute and well-informed critic-historians of communications art, 'A Guerrilla Attack on Traditional Art Ideas', San Francisco Chronicle, p. 49, Feb. 9, 1972; 'Informed Sources', The Art Gallery Magazine, Ivoryton, Conn., April 1972; 'Correspondence Art', Rolling Stone, Issues #106 and #107, San Francisco; 'Mail Art' by David Zack, Art in America, March 1973; and 'Postal System is Shaping Art Shows', by James Bresette, Omaha World-Herald, Mon., April 16, 1972, p.4
A special source of information is The International Contact List of the Arts. Sections have been published since 1966 by Fluxus West. The first major edition was released in 1972 by Fluxus West in cooperation with Image Bank, TransCanadian Fluxus Ltd., and others in Canada. The new revised edition will appear in Fall of 1973 by Fluxus West and Tom Ockerse Editions, of Providence, Rhode Island, including over 1,500 additions, changes, corrections, and updates of information. The list contains over 3,000 names and addresses of individuals around the world who are involved in the arts, and has been used successfully by FILE MAGAZINE of Toronto for their list (originally taken directly from the list), later amended by General Idea -- and in projects such as Davi Det Hompson's Cyclopedia or recent promotionals by FlashArt. A large number of pirates or reprints of the list are in circulation, some bearing the imprint of Fluxus West, and others not. Several of these reprints have received favorable review in major art magazines, sadly lacking the credit to Fluxus West for originating and consistently developing and sharing the list since 1966.
NOTES:
[1] This essay first appeared in print in Art and Artists. London (August 1973).
[2] Ken Friedman has recently clarified that when first he authored this essay a complete tally of the "art in and out" had as yet to be completed. He has noted that the initial projection of "4,000 individual art works" that he cited in this 1973 essay is incorrect and that "the final tally suggested more like 20,000 works coming and going, though the system broke down so completely under the successful response that it is difficult to know for sure." E-mail to Estera Milman dated July 17, 1999.
[3] Because this "Chronology" appears in its original published form, it does not extend beyond 1973. The same is true of the "Bibliography" that follows. The latter should be looked at as a piece of historiographic evidence which marks Friedman's insider's position on the state of the field at the time that the Omaha Flow Systems project was initiated.
essay reproduced from: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/atca/subjugated/five_14.htm
Monday, December 31, 2007
Manifesto of Letterist Poetry, Isidore Isou
MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY
A Commonplaces about Words
by Isidore Isou, 1942
Pathetic I The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us.
All delirium is expansive.
All impulses escape stereotyping.
Still I An intimate experience maintains curious specifics.
Pathetic II Discharges are transmitted by notions.
What a difference between our fluctuations and the
brutality of words.
Transitions always arise between feeling and speech.
Still II The word is the first stereotype.
Pathetic III What a difference between the organism and the sources.
Notions - what an inherited dictionary. Tarzan learns
in his father's book to call tigers cats.
Naming the Unknown by the Forever.
Still III The translated word does not express.
Pathetic IV The rigidity of forms impedes their transmission.
These words are so heavy that the flow fails to carry
them. Temperaments die before arriving at the goal
(firing blanks).
No word is capable of carrying the impulses one
wants to send with it.
Still IV WORDS allow psychic alterations to disappear.
Speech resists effervescence.
Notions require expansion to equivalent formulas.
WORDS Fracture our rhythm.
by their Assassinate sensitivity.
mechanism, Thoughtlessly uniform
fossilization, tortured inspiration.
stability Twist tensions.
and aging Reveal poetic exaltations as useless.
Create politeness.
Invent diplomats.
Promote the use of analogies
Substitute for true emissions.
Pathetic V If one economizes on the riches of the soul, one dries
up the left-over along with the words.
Still V Prevent the flow from molding itself on the cosmos.
Form species in sentiments.
WORDS Destroy sinuosities.
Result from the need to determine things.
Help the elderly remember by forcing the young to forget.
Pathetic VI Every victory of the young has been a victory over words.
Every victory over words has been a fresh, young victory.
Still VI Summarize without knowing how to receive.
It is the tyranny of the simple over the long-winded.
WORDS Discern too concretely to leave room for the mind.
Forget the true measures of expression: suggestions.
Let infrarealities disappear.
Sift without restoring.
Pathetic VII One learns words as one learns good manners.
Without words and manners it is impossible to appear in
society.
It is by making progress in words that one makes progress
socially.
Still VII Kill fleeting evocations.
Slow down short-cuts and approximations.
SPEECH Is always vice-versa for not being identical.
Eliminates solitary individuals who would like to
rejoin society.
Forces men who would like to say "Otherwise" to say "Thus."
Introduces stuttering.
Pathetic VIII The carpentry of the word built to last forever obliges men
to construct according to patterns, like children.
There is no appreciation of value in a word.
Still VIII Words are the great levellers.
Pathetic IX Notions limit opening onto depths by merely standing ajar.
Still IX Words are family garments.
Poets enlarge words every year.
Words already have been mended so much they are in stitches.
Pathetic X People think it is impossible to break words.
Still X Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be
popularized. Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear.
Pathetic XI Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack
of a concrete form.
Still XI Feelings demand living space.
How remarkable the poet's disheartened absorption in words.
Things and nothings to communicate become daily more imperious.
Pathetic XII Efforts at destruction witness to the need to rebuild.
Still XII How long will people hold out in the shrunken domain of
words?
Pathetic XIII The poet suffers indirectly:
Words remain the work of the poet, his existence, his job.
B Innovation I
Destruction of WORDS for LETTERS
ISIDORE ISOU Believes in the potential elevation beyond WORDS; wants
the development of transmissions where nothing is
lost in the process; offers a verb equal to a shock. By
the overload of expansion the forms leap up by themselves.
ISIDORE ISOU Begins the destruction of words for letters.
ISIDORE ISOU Wants letters to pull in among themselves all desires.
ISIDORE ISOU Makes people stop using foregone conclusions, words.
ISIDORE ISOU Shows another way out between WORDS and RENUNCIATION:
LETTERS. He will create emotions against language, for the
pleasure of the tongue.
It consists of teaching that letters have a destination
other than words.
ISOU Will unmake words into their letters.
Each poet will integrate everything into Everything
Everything must be revealed by letters.
POETRY CAN NO LONGER BE REMADE.
ISIDORE ISOU IS STARTING
A NEW VEIN OF LYRICISM.
Anyone who can not leave words behind can stay back with them!
C Innovation II: The Order of Letters
This does not mean destroying words for other words.
Nor forging notions to specify their nuances.
Nor mixing terms to make them hold more meaning.
But it does mean TAKING ALL LETTERS AS A WHOLE; UNFOLDING BEFORE DAZZLED
SPECTATORS MARVELS CREATED FROM LETTERS (DEBRIS FROM
THE DESTRUCTION);
CREATING AN ARCHITECTURE OF LETTRIC RHYTHMS;
ACCUMULATING FLUCTUATING LETTERS IN A PRECISE FRAME;
ELABORATING SPLENDIDLY THE CUSTOMARY COOING;
COAGULATING THE CRUMBS OF LETTERS FOR A REAL MEAL;
RESUSCITATING THE JUMBLE IN A DENSER ORDER;
MAKING UNDERSTANDABLE AND TANGIBLE THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE
AND VAGUE; CONCRETIZING SILENCE;
WRITING THE NOTHINGNESS.
It is the role of the poet to advance toward subversive sources.
the obligation of the poet to advance in the black and
burdened depths of the unknown.
the craft of the poet to open one more treasure-room
door for the common man.
There will be a poet's message in new signs. The ordering of letters is called:
LETTERISM.
It is not a poetic school, but a solitary attitude.
AT THIS MOMENT: LETTERISM = ISIDORE ISOU.
Isou is awaiting his successors in poetry!
(Do they already exist somewhere, ready to burst forth
into history through books?)
EXCUSES FOR WORDS INTRODUCED INTO LITERATURE
There are things which are existent only in the strength of their name.
there are others which exist, but lacking a name are unacknowledged.
Every idea needs a calling card to make itself known.
Ideas are known by the name of their creator.
It is more objective to name them after themselves.
LETTERISM IS AN IDEA THAT
WILL BE LAMENTED BY ITS REPUTATION
Letterics is a material that can always be demonstrated.
Letterics seeds already existing:
NONSENSE WORDS;
WORDS WITH HIDDEN MEANINGS IN THEIR LETTERS;
ONOMATOPOEIAS.
If this material existed before, it didn't have a name to recognize it by.
Letterics works will be those made entirely out of this element, but with
suitable rules and genres!
The word exists and has the right to perpetuate itself.
ISOU IS CALLING ATTENTION TO ITS EXISTENCE.
It is up to the Letterist to develop Letterism.
Letterism is offering a DIFFERENT poetry.
LETTERISM imposes a NEW POETRY.
THE LETTERIC AVALANCHE IS ANNOUNCED.
1942.
above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/isidoreisou_letterist.htm
A Commonplaces about Words
by Isidore Isou, 1942
Pathetic I The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us.
All delirium is expansive.
All impulses escape stereotyping.
Still I An intimate experience maintains curious specifics.
Pathetic II Discharges are transmitted by notions.
What a difference between our fluctuations and the
brutality of words.
Transitions always arise between feeling and speech.
Still II The word is the first stereotype.
Pathetic III What a difference between the organism and the sources.
Notions - what an inherited dictionary. Tarzan learns
in his father's book to call tigers cats.
Naming the Unknown by the Forever.
Still III The translated word does not express.
Pathetic IV The rigidity of forms impedes their transmission.
These words are so heavy that the flow fails to carry
them. Temperaments die before arriving at the goal
(firing blanks).
No word is capable of carrying the impulses one
wants to send with it.
Still IV WORDS allow psychic alterations to disappear.
Speech resists effervescence.
Notions require expansion to equivalent formulas.
WORDS Fracture our rhythm.
by their Assassinate sensitivity.
mechanism, Thoughtlessly uniform
fossilization, tortured inspiration.
stability Twist tensions.
and aging Reveal poetic exaltations as useless.
Create politeness.
Invent diplomats.
Promote the use of analogies
Substitute for true emissions.
Pathetic V If one economizes on the riches of the soul, one dries
up the left-over along with the words.
Still V Prevent the flow from molding itself on the cosmos.
Form species in sentiments.
WORDS Destroy sinuosities.
Result from the need to determine things.
Help the elderly remember by forcing the young to forget.
Pathetic VI Every victory of the young has been a victory over words.
Every victory over words has been a fresh, young victory.
Still VI Summarize without knowing how to receive.
It is the tyranny of the simple over the long-winded.
WORDS Discern too concretely to leave room for the mind.
Forget the true measures of expression: suggestions.
Let infrarealities disappear.
Sift without restoring.
Pathetic VII One learns words as one learns good manners.
Without words and manners it is impossible to appear in
society.
It is by making progress in words that one makes progress
socially.
Still VII Kill fleeting evocations.
Slow down short-cuts and approximations.
SPEECH Is always vice-versa for not being identical.
Eliminates solitary individuals who would like to
rejoin society.
Forces men who would like to say "Otherwise" to say "Thus."
Introduces stuttering.
Pathetic VIII The carpentry of the word built to last forever obliges men
to construct according to patterns, like children.
There is no appreciation of value in a word.
Still VIII Words are the great levellers.
Pathetic IX Notions limit opening onto depths by merely standing ajar.
Still IX Words are family garments.
Poets enlarge words every year.
Words already have been mended so much they are in stitches.
Pathetic X People think it is impossible to break words.
Still X Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be
popularized. Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear.
Pathetic XI Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack
of a concrete form.
Still XI Feelings demand living space.
How remarkable the poet's disheartened absorption in words.
Things and nothings to communicate become daily more imperious.
Pathetic XII Efforts at destruction witness to the need to rebuild.
Still XII How long will people hold out in the shrunken domain of
words?
Pathetic XIII The poet suffers indirectly:
Words remain the work of the poet, his existence, his job.
B Innovation I
Destruction of WORDS for LETTERS
ISIDORE ISOU Believes in the potential elevation beyond WORDS; wants
the development of transmissions where nothing is
lost in the process; offers a verb equal to a shock. By
the overload of expansion the forms leap up by themselves.
ISIDORE ISOU Begins the destruction of words for letters.
ISIDORE ISOU Wants letters to pull in among themselves all desires.
ISIDORE ISOU Makes people stop using foregone conclusions, words.
ISIDORE ISOU Shows another way out between WORDS and RENUNCIATION:
LETTERS. He will create emotions against language, for the
pleasure of the tongue.
It consists of teaching that letters have a destination
other than words.
ISOU Will unmake words into their letters.
Each poet will integrate everything into Everything
Everything must be revealed by letters.
POETRY CAN NO LONGER BE REMADE.
ISIDORE ISOU IS STARTING
A NEW VEIN OF LYRICISM.
Anyone who can not leave words behind can stay back with them!
C Innovation II: The Order of Letters
This does not mean destroying words for other words.
Nor forging notions to specify their nuances.
Nor mixing terms to make them hold more meaning.
But it does mean TAKING ALL LETTERS AS A WHOLE; UNFOLDING BEFORE DAZZLED
SPECTATORS MARVELS CREATED FROM LETTERS (DEBRIS FROM
THE DESTRUCTION);
CREATING AN ARCHITECTURE OF LETTRIC RHYTHMS;
ACCUMULATING FLUCTUATING LETTERS IN A PRECISE FRAME;
ELABORATING SPLENDIDLY THE CUSTOMARY COOING;
COAGULATING THE CRUMBS OF LETTERS FOR A REAL MEAL;
RESUSCITATING THE JUMBLE IN A DENSER ORDER;
MAKING UNDERSTANDABLE AND TANGIBLE THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE
AND VAGUE; CONCRETIZING SILENCE;
WRITING THE NOTHINGNESS.
It is the role of the poet to advance toward subversive sources.
the obligation of the poet to advance in the black and
burdened depths of the unknown.
the craft of the poet to open one more treasure-room
door for the common man.
There will be a poet's message in new signs. The ordering of letters is called:
LETTERISM.
It is not a poetic school, but a solitary attitude.
AT THIS MOMENT: LETTERISM = ISIDORE ISOU.
Isou is awaiting his successors in poetry!
(Do they already exist somewhere, ready to burst forth
into history through books?)
EXCUSES FOR WORDS INTRODUCED INTO LITERATURE
There are things which are existent only in the strength of their name.
there are others which exist, but lacking a name are unacknowledged.
Every idea needs a calling card to make itself known.
Ideas are known by the name of their creator.
It is more objective to name them after themselves.
LETTERISM IS AN IDEA THAT
WILL BE LAMENTED BY ITS REPUTATION
Letterics is a material that can always be demonstrated.
Letterics seeds already existing:
NONSENSE WORDS;
WORDS WITH HIDDEN MEANINGS IN THEIR LETTERS;
ONOMATOPOEIAS.
If this material existed before, it didn't have a name to recognize it by.
Letterics works will be those made entirely out of this element, but with
suitable rules and genres!
The word exists and has the right to perpetuate itself.
ISOU IS CALLING ATTENTION TO ITS EXISTENCE.
It is up to the Letterist to develop Letterism.
Letterism is offering a DIFFERENT poetry.
LETTERISM imposes a NEW POETRY.
THE LETTERIC AVALANCHE IS ANNOUNCED.
1942.
above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/isidoreisou_letterist.htm
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Audiovisions. Music as an Intermedia Art Form, Golo Föllmer, Julia Gerlach
Music is what it is to us through media. Their influence can be major or minor, obvious or subtle. However, with the same astuteness with which Niklas Luhmann makes the meaning of mass media absolute for cognition of the world, [1] for all that is acoustic one can say that mass media make it what it is— and with increasing intensity: With the expansion of electronic media into ever more central positions in everyday and cultural life, music is becoming more heavily influenced by media phenomena, it makes more frequent use of media technologies for its conception and production, and it increasingly reflects the functioning and the effects of media.
Mediality and Intermediality
Even the earliest media that were important for music were not exclusively acoustic media: any of the musical instruments; singing and instrumental techniques that accompanied dances or other ritual or social activities; written and graphic notation; the printing and publishing industries; conventions of musical performance in various epochs—all of these media and dispositives articulate themselves and are handed downnot only through sound, but to a large extent also by way of narrative/text-based representations; they are conveyed via the senses of touch, smell, and taste, but in particular through their visual manifestation. As soon as music is regarded not only as an acoustic stimulus structure, but within the context of its genesis and effect, in many ways it at the same time becomes intermedial.
This essay examines music for its ‹natural,› visible components, for the visual representations with which it conveys and hands down, as well as for the complex interrelations it enters into with images in everyday media products and in the experimental field of the arts.
Notation and Visuality of the Musical Performance
Non-acoustic media are essential for music. Written notation, for instance, produced an enhancement of the current as well as the historical musical memory, without which neither the conception nor the performance of complex polyphony would have been possible. The publishing industry created a new basis for life for nineteenth-century composers, who with their new civic freedom had given up their dependence on church functions and princely allowances, thus causing those music genres that could be performed in the home—primarily piano and chamber music played by small ensembles—to become particularly widespread.
So-called ‹eye music,› often exemplified by making reference to works by Johann Sebastian Bach, illustrates how extensively the visual communication of musical structure represents an independent aesthetic level when certain symbolic meanings only become obvious by reading the score. The composer Dieter Schnebel took this thought to the extreme in his book «Mo-No: Music to.» [2] In the mind of the reader, stimuli to musically appreciate the world of noises and visual text/graphic compositions, which are meant to be taken in by reading alone—mono—and silently, only allow an imagined music to develop out of text and image. Nam June Paik, La Monte Young and George Brecht also composed music for the imagination, which they laid down as so-called «events» in brief textual instructions.
The examination of the specific situations in which music is produced reinforces the diagnosis: Making music also feeds on a variety of visual stimuli—from the flow of reading the score to observing the instrumentalist's motor activity to the gesticulatory coordination of acoustic occurrences amongst several musicians. This continues on the recipient side: The players' gestures and facial expressions convey information to the listeners about context (for example, intended emotion), melody, harmony, and rhythm. The expressive quality of the music—but also the virtuosity demanded of the musician—become more transparent through the visual comprehension of the instrumental performance and supply material that is included in the aesthetic experience and evaluation of music.
Intermediality in Music and Fine Art
Music is clearly an intermedial, above all audiovisual phenomenon to a much larger extent than one might spontaneously believe—more extensively than can be said for fine art. A remark made by Marcel Duchamp provides further explanation: «On peut regarder voir, on ne peut pas entendre entendere,» [3] which in English means «One can watch (someone) seeing; one cannot hear (someone) hearing.» This insight can be extended: One can in fact hear neither seeing or hearing. When the audience becomes silent just before a concert, one may actually hear how the people begin zu listen; however, this silence cannot be distinguished from the silence of visual concentration in a museum. Conversely, one can visually follow someone listening or watching: In the same way one can read the sequence of the elements being looked at and a person's emotional reaction to them from their eyes, one can also see how people listening to something turn their gaze inwards, because this is where the sounds occur, and one can gather the various reactions to what is being heard from their eyes.
During the reception process, the rapt silence in the spaces of a museum promotes the focus on visual contemplation. For his ironic project «Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art,» <> until 1999 the sound artist Ed Osborn collected sound recordings of the background noise in the immediateproximity of central works of European art (including, of course, «Mona Lisa» in the Louvre) and discovered a complete indifference between sound environment and the content of the works of art.
It is somewhat different for the artistic production process. The sound of the brush, the graver, or of the hammer and chisel as well as the acoustic environment certainly affect the practicing artist. But in painting, it was Classic Modernism that first found its way to an explicitly structural parallel to music beyond the representational, oftentimes symbolic depiction of musicians, instruments, and listeners. Cirluonis and Kandinsky, [4] for example, translated musical experience into abstract color patterns which reproduce sound impressions and temporal proportions.
These artists of the early twentieth century made reference to a fundamental connection between the arts: that as in music, similar temporal processes occur in paintings, sculptures, and photographs. From this point of view, the production and reception of fine art are both activities that are acted out in time and that exhibit parallels to following a narration, a spatialrepresentational dramaturgy, or even a musical score.
In the further development, with the continued opening up of artistic design methods to time-based processes (performance, installation), the sound being produced almost automatically established itself as an integral part of these works of art, as is the case, for instance, for Jean Tinguely's sounding kinetic sculptures, or for works such as «The Box with the Sound of its Own Making» (1961) by Robert Morris. Conversely, composers take up the openness of the visual reception process as a model for a new concept of musical interpretation by producing graphic scores that leave the sequence of sound elements open. For his «Fontana Mix,» < John Cage used graphic models and formulated rules, on the basis of whose two overlying line structures precise details can be inferred for pitch, duration of the sound, etc. The score was conceived by the composer as an open system of rules, which is clearly defined with a large degree of variability.
In popular music, at that moment at which musicleaves out the score, the necessity of renewed interpretation, and the public performance context through its transmission, storage, and synthesis, [5] several waves of the visualization of musical context information occur: At the latest in the 1950s, the image of stars such as Elvis Presley took on a fundamental role in the music marketing process. At about the same time, record cover art began to produce its own aesthetics, one of the pioneers of which was the «Blue Note» jazz label. In the 1960s and 1970s, the rock concert became a brilliant visual stage spectacle accompanied by light and smoke; the invisibility of the star during mass events is counteracted by gigantic video walls. In the 1980s, the videoclip developed into an unavoidable visual counterpart to every pop music song. [6]
Intermediality in Experimentalism
Musical experimentalism, the central figure of whose development was John Cage , is based on an expanded understanding of the material, in which, for example, noises are used on a level equal in value to the sounds of the instruments. However, it is primarily structures alien to music—technical, social, and non-musical aesthetic contexts—which are decisive for the conception of the works in which the graphic score described above occupies a central position. Besides social, biological, and game-like rule processes, it was primarily the technical functioning as well as the contents of media apparatuses that were used as ‹structure generators,› for example in Cage's «Imaginary Landscape No. 4,» in which the tuning and the volume of the twelve radios were adjusted according to a time schedule.
At the beginning of the 1950s, concretion of the works was still confined to professional musicians. During this period, John Cage, for instance, backed away from any interaction with listeners, because in his opinion, during the realization of open compositions only trained musicians could resist the temptation of sinking into musical cliches. Cage's objection to interacting with listeners illustrates a central problem: How can the competencies of music experts (composers, interpreters) be brought together with those of the listeners? How can the meaning of theirinteraction be conveyed to listeners who are not musically trained in such a way that they act in a ‹musically meaningful› way?
The solution the experimentalists had for this was to expose the intermedial structure in their interaction: the use of technical or other generally familiar systems that could also be understood and operated by the musically untrained. With this approach, the audience can also take on the role of the interpreter. «Maxfeed» (1967) by Max Neuhaus resembles a transistor radio; however, it produces the screeching and hissing sounds itself. The audience consists of only one person, who determines the sound sequences using the dial settings he is already familiar with from his own radio.
As a structure generator, intermediality in the first place aids the composer in finding new structures. At the same time, intermediality is used as a point of contact for the recipient so that his interaction can follow a consistent line. The logical consequence of this development is the step from the concert performance to the installation situation, which the audience masters independently and individually.
Concert and Installation
Problems Listening to Electronic Music
How important ‹visual support› is when decoding a musical figure (what kind of facial expression does the musician have? what are his physical gestures when producing a particular sound? and so on) can be demonstrated by example of the Electronic Music of the Cologne School of the 1950s, whose lack of human interpreters on stage and consequently the complete absence of visual elements was perceived as a flagrant communication problem. Electronic tape pieces such as «Studie I» by Karlheinz Stockhausen were frequently described as lifeless, rigid, and unmusical. [7] The return of interpreters to the stage in so-called live electronic music since the 1960s countered this problem either by transforming the sounds produced by the instrumentalists during the performance or by producing and modifying the purely electronic sounds live. Karlheinz Stockhausen's «Kontakte» made the musical effects of electro-acoustic technology visible. Now one could again see the human being making the music.
However, this approach did not always solve the problem to everyone's general satisfaction. Today's audiences often lack a sense of what performers who operate electronic equipment by means of buttons and dials are actually pushing and turning. Unlike the classic playing of instruments, hardly anything is conveyed through physical gestures, because what is hidden behind the individual buttons is different at every concert, while the playing of a violin can be universally interpreted on the basis of the violinist's gestures. It was not without a certain amount of irony that Nic Collins built his «Trombone Propelled Electronics,» with which he controls an electronic piece of equipment with the familiar gestures of a trombonist without, however, having a marked talent for playing the trombone itself. This problem has become even more acute in the case of the computer performers of recent years, who are often nearly rigid and frequently sit at their laptops without a single discernible sign of emotion. Listeners obviously expect more from music than just ordered sound.
One solution for this communication problem is for performances to take place in a new kind of spatial setting or in a lounge situation, in which one can regularly withdraw one's visual attention from the stage and allow it to wander through the room and turn it towards what is occurring in it. Other solutions are visualizations of musical contexts in installation settings or visuals shown parallel to the music and whose content or aesthetics can also be independent of the music. A further solution is the interactive inclusion of the audience. All three solutions are based on intermediality.
However, the inclusion of visual media in musical practice does not only feed itself on the lack of visual stimuli in electronic music, but rather it is an aesthetic tendency that is bound to the dissolution symptoms of the concert format and the evaluation criteria associated with it. The reception situation in concert halls—the elevated stage located at the front of the hall—which developed in the nineteenth century and which was coupled with strict behavioral norms such as sitting still or clearly defined applause rituals, is to a large extent subordinate to visual criteria. The listener with closed eyes may be highly respected by a musicology fixated on abstract form and structure,however, s/he is a minority in the audience. [8] The majority of concert visitors intensely follow the conductor and the musicians with their eyes. Frontal orientation in concert halls has been declining since the mid-twentieth century. So-called concert installations frequently integrate multimedia elements in which not only the instrumentalists, but also the members of the audience are distributed throughout the space, and the musicians are seated in the center.
Intermedial Instrumental Playing
The emphasis of the body and of the physical production of sound, which is often accentuated through the use of media, seems almost antithetical to the bodiless performances of electronic music and laptop concerts. In the twentieth century, the fine-motor virtuosity of instrumental musicians, a central criterion in the nineteenth century, has experienced a shift towards emphasizing overall physicality in the production of music. In the 1980s, Helmut Lachenmann made the physical instrumental production of music the content of his works (for example, «Pression,» 1969/70). The pieces composed by Nam June Paik for the performer Charlotte Moorman (e.g., «TV-Bra for Living Sculpture,» 1969) as well as, for example, the performance «Fractal Flesh» by Stelarc , in which he incorporates himself into an electrical system, are also media stage productions of instrumental sound generation that emphasize the body.
Because the ideal of ‹absolute music› continues to have an effect up to the present day, [9] what has always been a matter of course in popular music had to be expressly reestablished in art music: The music of Jimi Hendrix or The Who, heavy metal or hip hop would not be the same without the ‹body work› of the musicians.
However, more recent compositions which adhere to the concert and the genre of instrumental music are also experiencing an intermedialization. The playing of instruments concurrent with a live performance, for instance, is being enhanced or visually mirrored by video projections. For «MACH SIEBEN,» Michael Beil made a videotape recording of the pianist Ernst Surberg playing the piece. In the performance, the video projection and the liveinterpretation embrace to become the temporal mirror of a symmetrically planned composition. Vadim Karassikov enlarges instrumental gestures, which create sound bordering on inaudibility, on projection surfaces that have been hung above the musicians. In «Eyear» (2003) by Pascal Battus and Kamel Maad, the creation of differentiated drum sounds, which are produced by rubbing stones and sand on the drum skins, are filmed from close up in real time and projected onto a screen. The drum becomes the stage, whose sound occurrences experience an aesthetic visual doubling in the video.
Visualizations accentuate qualities of the musical production, thus taking up elements already existing in the composition and in the playing of the instrument and putting them into concrete form using media-technical means. The basic media qualities of instrumental music production are extant during this process. The examples cited above can be interpreted in such a way that the composers regard the visuality of the creation of music as an integral part of music and only make us aware of it with the aid of the video image.
VJing in Clubs
While the video image is still a peculiarity in art-musical concert practice, we can hardly imagine clubs without video monitors. In the 1990s, a new audiovisual format emerged in clubs when DJs and VJs began performing together. For the most part, musicians and video artists have only loose contact during their performances, i.e. the connection between image and sound is rarely based on a technical link between the respective instruments or on concepts that have been drawn up in detail, rather it is primarily based on rough outlines or on improvisation, for example in performances by 242.pilots. Connections between music and image are primarily atmospheric, and it is rare that either level deals with specific content or narrative structures. Their different proximity to reality often results in an imbalance: While real images are frequently used in thevisuals, e.g. urban scenes in «Deathsentences» (2003) by the group Negativland, the music is hardly concrete or narrative throughout. Sometimes it is the use of only individual, concrete noises which can be assigned to real objects that mediates between narrative images and electronic sound processes.
Audiovisual Transformation: The Translation Problem
When linking image and sound, time and again the issue is raised of according to which process or code structural features should be translated from one sensory level to the other: What does it mean for the music when the image is blue, pale, or moving? And what does it mean for the image when the timbre of the music is dull, or the musical structure is harmonically complicated or melodically dominated by large interval jumps?
The problem results from the fact that on the one hand, when processing image and sound cognitively they have an inseparable reciprocal effect: For example, it is sometimes difficult to say whether it was the images or more likely the music in a film that prompted us to have a certain opinion about the overall experience. On the other hand, however, the individual sensory stimuli or the gestalt on which cognitive processing is based are incommensurable, i.e. incomparable in every way: There are as few colors and bodies in the sounding music as there is a major-minor relation or a melodic line in the visual design.
The most extensive integrative role in the audiovisual reception process is played by the temporal structure. Rhythm is a feature that can be perceived both in music as well as in the image. Whether as image allocation, movement of the figures, or as the editing rhythm of the film; whether as musical pulse or as melodic-rhythmic figure: Temporal structure can always be experienced physiologically or physically. Synchronicity of the auditory and visual levels is therefore an important means for creating an integrated experience. [10] This is why DJ/VJ works start at precisely this point. The extent to which rhythm is designed to correspond with image and sound is an individual artistic decision. Image and soundcan be brought together at junctions, or they can also be synchronized or counterpointed throughout.
Analogies between image and sound, however, are also based on parallel perceptive experiences in everyday life: For physical reasons, only large bodies are capable of radiating long-wave frequencies, which is why we associate great volume and power with low tones. In contrast, due to the acute auditory sensitivity of the human ear to high tones, they at best serve as warning signals. This leads to their being used in film e.g. to signal horror, which has the same effect across all cultures. [11]
References between visual and auditory structures can be created in two ways. One possibility is the use of structural or atmospheric analogies or relative synaesthesia: the dark image to which low tones are played; the glaring, mangled surfaces of color accompanied by screeching, high-pitched sounds; or the subdued staccato sequence of notes occurring with the movement of small graphic elements, etc. The other possibility is the narrative assignment of noises to visible objects, and vice versa.
Synaesthesia, Analogy
The Pythagoreans sought correspondences between colors/light and sound. They connected their concept of the harmony of the spheres, which arises out of the harmonious relations between planetary movements, with the colors of light. At the same time, the tertium comparationis, the mediating value between color and pitch, was purely speculative. Leonhard Euler's theory on the oscillation of light, published in 1746, as well as Goethe's theory of colors restimulated the search for scientifically-sound, uniform concepts of light and sound and thus for the specific assignment of individual colors to particular pitches. Various mystical and esoteric conceptions of the world played a role in this quest for a common source and for the fusion of visual and acoustic aesthetics.
Even in the twentieth century, attempts were made to integrate colors and light into complex systems either of a cosmic nature or related to the language of music. Based on his own experiences as a synaesthetician, [12] in 1911 the Russian composer Alexander Skrjabin (1872–1915) who sympathized with the symbolists and theosophicalthought—introduced a color classification system that he regarded as the «reunion of the arts separated over the course of time.» «By overcoming all differences, the synthetic Gesamtkunstwerk is meant to immensely expand consciousness and lead to a state of ecstasy. It shall therefore be structured in such a way that all of the five senses fuse together to become a union. Arts dependent on ‹will› (music, dance, language), however, are superior to the play of color and scents.» [13] The background for the audiovisual references is an integral system of analogy rooted in the subconscious that influences the form and structure of music and its enmeshment with symbolic contents and colors/scents.
Skrjabin wrote a light staff, ‹Luce,› at the top of his symphonic poem «Promethée. Le Poème du feu,» op. 60, from 1911. However, he did not construct a one-to-one translation of the music into colored light. The part for color piano develops its own formal structure, which is only brought together with the music at several junctions. This light version of Prometheus was not performed during Skrjabin's lifetime; however, it was important for the discourse surrounding «Der Blaue Reiter» and Kandinsky. Skrjabin's «Mysterium,» in which both colored lights and scents were meant to contribute to a synthesis of the arts and a holistic sensory experience, remained unfinished. Neither the scent organ nor the hemispherical building intended for the performance of «Mysterium» were ever built.
Instead of keys, Olivier Messiaen created a system of socalled modes on which to base his music. Similar to the way in which certain functions were attached to the ecclesiastical keys within a liturgy, each of Messiaen's modes are based on an individual scale and are assigned certain colors. [14] In addition, Messiaen established references to ornithology and elaborated on this extensive system in his seven-volume «Traité de rhythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie.» [15] However, his works are pure sound; the union of color and tone, of form and time constitute only an ideal basis. Perception of the «magic of the impossible, thus the identity of time and color» [16] is left to the recipient's power of imagination.
The Russian Ivan Wyschnegradsky followed the systemic approaches developed by Skrjabin and Messiaen. He constructed a microtonal scale divided up into seventy-two equally tempered intervals (instead of the twelve semitones of our normal scale) and liquidated octave periodicity. Wyschnegradsky developed a system of ‹total analogy›by dissecting colored circles into concentric rings and cells according to tone-systemic rules, thus arriving at 5,184 color-tone cells. His vision was one of a cosmic, spherical «Temple of Light,» which like Skrjabin's «Mysterium» was never realized.
Space, Color, Time
At the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, a hemispherical Auditorium was built— according to designs drawn up by Karlheinz Stockhausen—for the first time. Sounds could move spatially through the auditorium over fifty speakers. The speaker assignment and the shining of thirty-five sources of white light were controlled intuitively using special ‹spherical sensors.› [17] In the decades to come, Stockhausen consolidated his synthesizing approach to art into a personal mythology and executed it in his comprehensive work series «LICHT.»
The Fluxus artist La Monte Young can only be partially regarded in the tradition of these composers. His system of sound and harmony is based on mathematical principles and concentrates on the phenomenon of time, as oscillations are temporal phenomena. His first concept for «Dream House,» a «living organism with a life and tradition of its own» which he developed in collaboration with the light artist Marian Zazeela, dates back to 1962. «Dream House» transforms a space into a finely balanced sound-light environment. The sounds La Monte Young produces consist exclusively of pure sinus oscillations, whose frequencies he tunes to the spatial proportions in such a way that stationary waves develop. Using a set of different speakers and mathematically related wave lengths, a sound space is created. The recipient strides through the space tracking down junctions and at the same time ‹interrupting› the balance of the stationary waves. The wave length of the magenta-colored light is connected to the tone frequencies. As is the case for Skrjabin and Wyschnegradsky, symmetrical arrangements play an essential role in the complex mathematical structuring of the sound space. In these examples, the transformation logic, i.e. the rules for assigning color to tone, are derived from music (compositional structure, music theory) or from mathematical relations of musical acoustics.
Work by the composer and artist Christina Kubisch demonstrates how in the area of sound art, visual and auditory design are closely interrelated. Sound installations may always have something to do withspace and thus with seeing, with orientation within the space; however, they are not invariably arranged visually as well. With Kubisch, besides the sound level there is almost always a light component as well, whereby she primarily works with the bluish element of black light. With her, too, the phenomenon of time clusters the senses into an expressly non-synaesthetic context. An even more precise description is that it is silence, which is regarded as something motionless in time and is experienced visually as well as auditorally, that becomes the connecting link. [18] Thus in «Klang Fluss Licht Quelle—Vierzig Säulen und ein Raum» (1999), both media convene in a sensual gesture, in a palpability and subtlety as an expression parameter of the space they occupy. The design of painterly and tonal elements does not adhere to a ‹calculated› transformation logic, nor does it strive for unity. Rather, it is based on intuitive decisions.
Electrical and Digital Transformation
With the arrival of electronic media, the practice has developed of translating music directly into an image as an electric signal, and vice versa, thus generating a rhythmic-formal parallel structure. Approaches of this kind can already be seen in the early video work by Nam June Paik. [19] The installation «Skate» (2004) by the London-based media artist Janek Schaefer is founded on a simple electric analogy: He manufactured special records whose grooves are interrupted. As a consequence, the needle hops from one groove fragment to the next. The three-armed record player on which the records are played is connected to a set of red light bulbs, the lamps lighting up to the arbitrary rhythms created by the playing.
Experiments conducted in the first half of the twentieth century with the aid of optical sound recording to acquire image and sound out of one and the same material, thus achieving an audiovisual fusion, can be regarded as the forerunners of today's visuals. Based on his own research, for «Tönende Ornamente» (1932) Oskar Fischinger assumed that there are unconscious connections between culturally disseminated ornaments and their sounds when playing them on optical sound equipment. In Leningrad in 1930, Arsenij Avraamov and Jevgenij Scholpo beganexperimenting with the synthesis of sound out of graphic forms. For his idea of the ‹drawn sound,› Scholpo constructed a special machine, whose principle is similar to so-called ‹wave tables› as used in digital sound synthesis: If one periodically reads out an individual image with a particular curve form using optical sound equipment, a continuous sound is created. Scholpo made attempts to explore to what extent e.g. the sound of scissorcut- like facial profiles reflects the character of the type of person being shown. This approach is paralleled by the audiovisual works by the duo Granular, who process image and sound according to the same principle (of kgranular synthesis).
Interest in the use of electric signals for the generation of music and image has existed since the initial years of electronic design methods, for example with the visualization of sounds on the oscillograph. [20] In addition, forms of visualization were sought which, like traditional notation, could serve as a suitable foundation for the musicological analysis of electronic sound processes (sonagram, graphic notation). In the process, it was realized that these visualizations have their own aesthetic appeal.
Opportunities for the visualization of sound are multiplied through the computerization, and thus the digitalization of sound. The principle of the sonagram is taken up by ‹analysis resynthesis software,› with which one can graphically manipulate the analysis data of acoustic sequences represented visually. The visualization ‹corrected› in this way can in turn be transformed back into sound. Guy van Belle and the group «code31» applied a similar process in the networked performance «Anyware» (2004), in which synthetic sounds and a dynamic colored area are controlled by the same parameters and sent to the other performers via the Internet. The analysis of the incoming sounds and images influences the renewed synthesis of sound and color, resulting in continuous feedback between image and sound as well as between players.
In «Wounded Man´yo 2/2000,» the Fluxus and media artist Yasunao Tone translates Japanese characters, which he draws with a mouse using the audio software «Sound Designer II,» into acoustic oscillation sequences. In this way, noise-likesound structures become audible which in their conciseness of sound can be associated with Japanese characters.
The Argentinean composer Ana Maria Rodriguez attempts to create a union of sound and image by analyzing narrowly defined raw material and then using it as a source for image and sound. In her work «Code Switching » (2004) with the Australian video artist Melita Dahl she proclaims the transformation from one code to another to be the explicit subject. Facial expression as visually mediated, and phonemes as acoustically produced elements from one and the same head and mouth constitute the raw material for this audiovisual installation. The faces of the performer Ute Wassemann are projected onto four large screens and transformed into one another using a morphing technique. Individual phonemes have been isolated and likewise compressed into an abstract sound/language space. The processes applied to the raw materials are both based on the same principle.
For the audiovisual online instrument «nebula.m81,» Netochka Nezvanova uses nothing but the definitions of technical formats: Without requiring a data transformation or a conversion, the program simply redefines the internationally standardized set of «ISO Latin 1» characters from arbitrarily selected Web sites into the audio format «Sun µlaw» with an 8-bit resolution and a sampling frequency of 8 kHz, and plays them as sound. The technical format definitions determine the aesthetic result.
Technological Implications
If one considers the current status of technical development, at first glance image media appear to be more advanced: We are amazed at the visual effects in the latest movies and in commercials, and as a rule we are unaware of how much technological refinement was required to construct their sound backdrop. In fact, today's audio media possess much more far-reaching possibilities of reconstructing a space at another location or even creating it synthetically than does visual virtual reality.
In the chronology of the development of image and sound media, Daguerre's photographic process, introduced in 1839, was the first—even if it was an ‹unnatural› still image that simply ignored time. WhenEdison invented the phonograph in 1877, [21] he had no choice but to take time into account, as not only music, but even physical sound is per se a temporal phenomenon that dissolves into nothing when it stands still in time. Thus sound recording was in the world before image recording in the same way became complete through the inclusion of time in film.
For the most part, the technical lead of sound over the image has been retained: The radio established itself as a mass medium long before television did; the gramophone spread into private households long before film projectors did; there were portable cassette recorders before there were video cameras. Sixteen-mm film, which was invented before the tape recorder and became a common piece of household equipment before it did, constitutes an exception. Amongst the more extravagant technologies used more by the scientific or artistic elite, on the other hand, sound holds the lead: the electromechanical sound synthesis with Thaddeus Cahill's «Telharmonium» and the various stages of electronic sound synthesis with the Theremin and later with Robert Moog's voltage-controlled synthesizer existed before specific methods of image synthesis, or in the absence of the appropriate visual technologies were simply ‹misappropriated› to image synthesis, e.g. by Nam June Paik . Due to problems with the much larger volumes of data during image processing, the digital creation and processing of sound in the computer was introduced first.
Transfer of Artistic Techniques: Montage/Collage
Upon closer examination, the relationship between the availability of certain technologies and the artistic application of their principles proves to be complex. This becomes apparent when, for example, one considers that despite the lead of audio technology, sound artists frequently reacted more slowly to the emerging media than did visual artists: With the aid of film, the artistic montage was developed in the visual area. But as music only hesitantly overcomes its fixation on abstract sounds (instead of the concrete noises that become manageable with the introduction of the gramophone), it is not until the end of the 1940s—with Pierre Schaeffer—that it leads to newmusical results. Elementary sound phenomena may have never been denied the potential of naturally-given beauty: Igor Stravinsky, for instance, emphasized the aesthetic value of sounds such as the rustling of leaves or the singing of birds and describes them as being related to music in that they «… caress the ear and give us pleasure ….» However, in his view this does not yet mean that they possess the status of art: «[B]eyond this passive enjoyment we discover music, which allows us to actively participate in the working of a mind that is ordering, invigorating, and creative.» [22]
In the area between literature, theater, and music, i.e. the radio play and its offspring («Weekend,» Walter Ruttmann's film for radio from 1930), experiments with the montage of noise were successful before those carried out with music. Ruttmann's use of cinematic optical sound recording shows that it was apparently the inaccuracy and awkwardness of montage using the gramophone (by switching between the audio signals coming from two different records) that posed a technical obstacle, whereas film could be relatively accurately and simply assembled using scissors and glue. The collage first established itself in fine art around 1920, although the gramophone would have already long since made the acoustic collage possible. Here, too, it was primarily the practical disadvantages of the gramophone that prevented this development. In 1917—thus long before he applied montage, collage, and double exposure techniques in the film «The Man With the Camera»—Dziga Vertov carried out comparable experiments with gramophone recordings; however, because they were difficult to handle and the sound quality was poor, he gave them up to devote himself instead to film. [23]
Surprisingly, the ostensible use of collage techniques in music occurred for the first time independent from technical media. Charles Ives processed impressions from the urban world of noises as early as 1906 in «Central Park in the Dark.» [24] In this piece for orchestra there manifested a tradition of the simultaneity of musical styles, sound elements, and rhythms, which has continued into contemporary media composition through Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Heiner Goebbels.
Musical Wallpaper: Background Music
It was also in 1906 that Thaddeus Cahill took up the practice of ‹telephone concerts ,› which since the 1880s had been becoming more and more popular in many large cities, when he introduced the world to the «Telharmonium.» His decision was primarily based on economic considerations: no other infrastructure produced as many potential listeners than the telephone, thus creating the means for raising the immense amounts of capital required for this new type of instrument. With this first machine world wide which could synthesize complex sounds and even provide for musically intellectual demands such as playability in pure pitch and a random number of new scales, of necessity the principle of a music materialized that with the aid of media technology could be played into spaces in such a way that it is only taken in as mere background music for other perceptions.
In 1915, Thomas Alva Edison also carried out experiments to allow piping selected pieces of music into factory buildings via a phonograph in order to cover the noise and to raise the morale of the workers, which would ultimately increase profits. [25] Empirical studies soon verified that workers produce more—and consumers buy more—when background music is played. Consequently, the attempt begun in 1922 by General Owen Squiers to specifically market the functional value of broadcasted music was successful: He began transmitting gramophone music via telephone lines into restaurants and offices. Since then, Squiers' company «Muzak,» [26] whose name was to become a synonym for functional background music, has come to line countless locations. Background music lures clientele into boutiques, and it lends more calm to the candlelight in a restaurant and more tension to the red light in the world of prostitutes and pimps.
The so-called ‹Mood-Song,› which was distributed on record in countless versions in the 1950s and 1960s, was, like background music, also based on the discrete arrangements of popular hits: [27] Recordings such as «Music to Work or Study by,» «Music to watch Girls by,» «Music to Read James Bond by,» or simply «Music to Live by» were aimed at the musical lining of specialsituations, whose visual ambience was depicted on the respective record cover.
Brian Eno's idea for ‹ambient music› examined what had since become the ubiquitous phenomenon of lining an otherwise primarily visually marked experience of the world (see below) with music. [28] Installations such as «Generative Roomscape 1» (1996) treat sound and image equally: Both of them are interpreted as atmospheric arrangements that complement each other without confirming the tendency towards the hierarchical subordination of the musical level.
The Soundtrack in Film and in Interactive Media
In film, image and sound come together to form a media-technical construct. Movements in the image and of the image frame itself as well as the assembly of these images enter into complex relationships with the spoken language, music, and noises. While film music exhibited advanced methods of reinforcing narration and the aesthetic effect of the images soon after sound film was established, [29] for a long time sound abided in the subordinate function of reflecting the events visible in the image: «see a dog, hear a dog,» so the motto went. It was not until the 1970s that directors from the ‹New Hollywood› began to give sounds a fundamental and aesthetically independent role, e.g. in films such as «Star Wars» (George Lucas, 1977) or «Apocalypse Now» (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), in which sounds—in part invented—were ‹composed› by sound designers in elaborate and time-consuming processes. [30] Since then, image and sound have had a similar status in the production process, even though the image continues to play the ultimate role in the moviegoer's consciousness. The goal of the envisaged fusion of the image and sound levels is to produce the perfect illusion.
In his film «Nouvelle Vague» (1990), Jean-Luc Godard allows sound and image to fall apart time and again, thus breaking down the illusionist image/sound relation characteristic of Hollywood films. He exaggerates noises, draws attention to intervention by the sound engineer through accelerated fading, allows dialogue to sink into background noises, and mounts music into an image in a way that is irritating and contradicts visible emotional contents.
In interactive media, the linear soundtrackinevitably becomes a dynamic ‹sound field,› an open structure. Here, the principle of linear narration in classic film and the fixed form sequence predominant in occidental music no longer works. [31] The authoring software «Koan,» which was developed for the dynamic addition of sound to free navigation through Web sites, is a pragmatic concretion of this condition. On the basis of the «Flash» format, zeitblom realized a dynamic sound background of a similar nature for a Web site by the Freunde Guter Musik < which reflects the degree of the visitor's activity.
Acoustic Interfaces
Functional acoustic information—the output of audible responses to user activity—which one can refer to as an ‹acoustic user interface,› is similar to the soundtrack. Research in the area of the ‹auditory display› [32] is searching for neat models for the audification of computing processes and for acoustic orientation aids in large data stocks, for instance through so-called ‹earcons,› which like visual icons should help to quickly and intelligibly distinguish data types and means of navigation.
Principles like ‹rollover› have spread with the development of formats such as «Flash/Shockwave» and «Beatnik.» Consequently, in the area of net music, [33] artistic projects such as «electrica» have developed which emit acoustic signals to indicate what lies behind a graphic structure. While this kind of audiovisual navigation can function well on art Web sites, in everyday practice the problem arises that sound permanently reaches the ear, while visual stimuli can be selected depending on the direction of vision. This causes signal-like sounds such as the acoustic rollover to quickly become annoying. In addition, earcons are apparently difficult to decipher: Producers of radio jingles point out that in fast-moving, everyday radio, only about fifteen different types of noises (the ringing of a telephone, the jingle of coins, the flushing of a toilet, etc.) can be clearly identified by listeners. The reasons for this poor ability to identify sounds probably lie in the dominance of the visual within Western culture. [34]
The Dominance of the Image
The dominance of the image can be demonstrated using the computer as an example. The computer (and thus the interface to the Internet) is conceived as a text medium with a visual interface. Its era began with the spartan illustration of letters; all one could hear was the irritating hum of the cooling ventilators. The assertion of the graphic user interface on the basis of the intuitively usable desktop metaphor [35] by «Apple Macintosh» in 1984 supported this visual fixation. HTML, the basic code of the World Wide Web, is also text/imageoriented. Hyperlinks are symbolized by highlighted words and images.
The underrepresentation of the acoustic may have also resulted from the low computing performance levels of early PCs; however, it was more a result of the visual dominance of our age: In Western culture a preference for visual perception developed based on writing as the fixation of language. [36] In contrast to hearing, its objects tend to be lasting and quantifiable and thus embody objectivity and truth. Sound, on the other hand, is ephemeral and strongly dependent on subjective judgement. And so it is not really suited to the electronic superbrain, the machine, which primarily serves the efficiencyoriented elimination of uncertainties. [37]
Accordingly, like in a library, all computer data, regardless of whether they contain text, sound, or image, are archived alphabetically according to their language designation. Even today there are no sound databases that allow archiving according to tonal criteria or even performing an auditory search. [38]
Interactive audio applications deal with this kind of visually-guided navigation through sound and thus also with issues of notation. The direct transmission of the two central notation coordinates—time in the horizontal and pitch in the vertical, which are read out linearly by a cursor—places the clueless user in the precarious position of having to arrange concrete sound occurrences in time, therefore to ‹compose.› Because s/he is in most cases inexperienced, it is no wonder that many examples of this kind supply unsatisfactory results.
In the modules of the work «Small Fish» on CD-ROM by Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masaki Fujihata and Wolfgang Münch, the linear version of the cursor has been replaced by the simulation of the behavior of organic systems. Users produce and influence the music by manipulating graphic objects that lead an individual, ‹independent existence.› With the aid of object-oriented programming, the behavior of the individual objects has been structured in such a way that they exchange information among themselves. The user's interaction and collisions with other objects alter the state of individual objects and thus the overall system. None of the objects knows all of the connections, i.e. there is no point in the system where all information runs together. So a dynamic system of autonomous objects is coupled to the autonomous actions performed by the user. Here the tradition of musical notation on a surface is interwoven with the behavior of organisms and physical systems. The systems' behavior orients itself towards natural and mechanical processes, and this is why despite their complexity, they can—as is the case for the experimentalists' concepts—be comprehended and used in a practical way on the basis of everyday experience.
Music = Audiovision
Media-artistic examinations of music time and again thematicize the intermediality of the acoustic experience. In the process, imbalances in the perception of everyday media life and the hierarchical relation between image and sound are questioned. The production, dissemination, and reception of music have changed since the introduction of electronic and digital media. Technical media as a common source of image and sound have stimulated a wealth of intermedia connections. What continues to be behind this is the centuries-old desire to fuse sensory impressions together into a synaesthetic experience.
Besides this explicitly art-synthetic approach, it is often overlooked that because of its special production and reception conditions, music actually already possesses intermedia characteristics. Musical practice of the twentieth century reflects these relationships, emphasizes them, or questions them inthat the concert is being enhanced by a variety of forms of visualization, and customary notation is being replaced by graphic symbols and visuallyinfluenced forms of interaction. Intermediality in music is therefore not a consequence of the advance of technology, rather it is a phenomenon which is inherent in music itself and which with the aid of media can be molded in particularly effective and diverse ways.
[1] Luhmann somewhat graphically formulated (to which the initial sentence is faithful), «We know what we know about the world through mass media.» If one removes the polemics, what neverthelessfs remains is that our knowledge about the world is molded throughout by aesthetics and knowledge from mass media. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 2nd ed., Opladen, 1996, p. 9.
[2] Dieter Schnebel, Mo-No: Music to Read, Cologne, 1969.
[3] Marcel Duchamp, Box of 1914, in: Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du Signe. Ecrits, ed. Michel Sanouillet, Paris 1976, p. 37
[4] Refer to the text «Das klingende Bild - über das Verhältnis von Kunst und Musik. Ein kunsthistorischer Rückblick» by Barbara John.
[5] Also refer to the text «Audio Art» by Golo Föllmer in the Key Topic «Survey of Media Art.»
[6] Refer to the text «Montage/Sampling/Morphing. On the Triad of Aesthetics/Technology/Politics» by Diedrich Diedrichsen.
[7] Cf. the discussions in Wandel des musikalischen Hörens, Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung Darmstadt (ed.), vol. 3, Berlin, 1962.
[8] Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, Frankfurt/Main, 1975, pp. 14f.
[9] Cf. Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Musik, Kassel, 1978.
[10] Cf. Michel Chion's notion of ‹synchrese› (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, Sound on Screen, New York, 1994).
[11] Cf. Klaus Scherer et al., «Emotion inferences from vocal expression correlate across languages and cultures,» in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(1), 2001, pp. 76–92.
[12] Four percent of all people are synaestheticians. Tests have shown that depending on the individual, their color/sound classifications are different and contradictory. Cf. Manfred Kerkel, «Esoterik und formale Gestaltung in Skrjabins Spätwerken,» in Alexander Skrjabin. Studien zur Wertungsforschung, Otto Kolleritsch (ed.), vol. 13, Graz, 1980.
[13] Manfred Kerkel, «Esoterik und formale Gestaltung in Skrjabins Spätwerken,» in Alexander Skrjabin. Studien zur Wertungsforschung, Otto Kolleritsch (ed.), vol. 13, Graz, 1980, pp. 28–29.
[14] Messiaen, too, was a synaesthetician. Cf. Richard Cytowic, Synesthesia. A Union of the Senses, New York, 1989, p. 238.
[15] Olivier Messiaen, Traité de rhythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1949–1992), Paris, 1994.
[16] Elmar Budde, «Vom Zauber des Unmöglichen,» in Olivier Messiaen, Thomas Daniel Schlee/Dietrich Kämper (eds.), Cologne, 1998.
[17] Cf. Frank Gertich/Julia Gerlach/Golo Föllmer, Musik, …verwandelt. Das Elektronische Studio der Technischen Universität Berlin, Hofheim, 1996, pp. 195–211.
[18] Michael Glasmeier, «Mit den Ohren Stille sehen,» in Zwischenräume [catalogue accompanying the exhibition by Christina Kubisch], Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken (ed.), Saarbrücken, 1996.
[19] Also refer to the text «Sound & Vision in Avant-garde & Mainstream» by Dieter Daniels.
[20] Cf. Fritz Winckel (ed.), Experimentelle Musik. Raum Musik, Visuelle Musik, Medien Musik, Wort Musik, Elektronik Musik, Computer Musik, Berlin, 1970.
[21] Refer to the texts «Audio Art» by Golo Föllmer in «Survey of Media Art» und Dieter Daniels' «Sound & Vision in Avant-garde & Mainstream.»
[22] Igor Strawinsky, Musikalische Poetik, Mainz, 1949, p. 18.
[23] Stefan Amzoll, «‹Ich bin das Ohr›. Zum 100. Geburtstag des Klangpioniers,» in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Jan./Feb. 1996, pp. 50–53.
[24] Werner Bärtschi (ed.), Ives, Charles: Ausgewählte Texte, Zürich, 1985, pp.189f.
[25] Cf. Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music. A surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and other Moodsong, London, 1995, p. 13.
[26] Squier formed the brand name for his product out of the terms «music» and «Kodak.» The small Kodak cameras were regarded as the epitome of comfortable modernity.
[27] Cf. Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music. A surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and other Moodsong, London, 1995.
[28] Refer to the text «Audio Art» by Golo Föllmer in «A Survey of Media Art.»
[29] Cf. Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music. A Neglected Art, 2nd ed., New York, 1992.
[30] Cf. Barbara Flückiger, Sound Design. Die virtuelle Klangwelt des Films, Marburg, 2001, and Michel Chion, Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen, New York, 1994.
[31] Cf. Christian Kaden, «Musiksoziologie,» in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 6, Kassel, 1996, pp. 1633f.
[32] Cf. Gregory Kramer (Hg.), Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification and Auditory Interfaces, Reading/MA, 1994; also refer to the Web site of the International Community for Auditory Display.
[33] Cf. Golo Föllmer, Netzmusik, Hofheim, 2005.
[34] Cf. Murray Schafer, Klang und Krach. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Hörens, Frankfurt/Main, 1988.
[35] The interface could have definitely been designed differently. The user interface «Lifestreams,» for example, was developed in such a way that all of the contents are arranged according to the temporal sequence of events.
[36] Cf. Wolfgang Welsch, «Auf dem Weg zu einer Kultur des Hörens?,» in Der Klang der Dinge: Akustik—eine Aufgabe des Design, A.-V. Langenmaier (ed.), Munich, 1993, pp. 86f.
[37] Research in this area is still in its infancy. Cf. Bernhard Feiten, «Sound Information Technology Research Group,» in Musik…, verwandelt, Frank Gertich/Julia Gerlach/Golo Föllmer (eds.), Hofheim, 1996, pp. 313–318.
[38] Cf. Phoebe Sengers, «Fabrikation der Subjekte. Verdinglichung, Schizophrenie und Künstliche Intelligenz,» in Netzkritik. Materialien zur Internet-Debatte, nettime (ed.), Berlin, 1997, p. 131.
above copied fromL http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/image-sound_relations/audiovisions/print/
Mediality and Intermediality
Even the earliest media that were important for music were not exclusively acoustic media: any of the musical instruments; singing and instrumental techniques that accompanied dances or other ritual or social activities; written and graphic notation; the printing and publishing industries; conventions of musical performance in various epochs—all of these media and dispositives articulate themselves and are handed downnot only through sound, but to a large extent also by way of narrative/text-based representations; they are conveyed via the senses of touch, smell, and taste, but in particular through their visual manifestation. As soon as music is regarded not only as an acoustic stimulus structure, but within the context of its genesis and effect, in many ways it at the same time becomes intermedial.
This essay examines music for its ‹natural,› visible components, for the visual representations with which it conveys and hands down, as well as for the complex interrelations it enters into with images in everyday media products and in the experimental field of the arts.
Notation and Visuality of the Musical Performance
Non-acoustic media are essential for music. Written notation, for instance, produced an enhancement of the current as well as the historical musical memory, without which neither the conception nor the performance of complex polyphony would have been possible. The publishing industry created a new basis for life for nineteenth-century composers, who with their new civic freedom had given up their dependence on church functions and princely allowances, thus causing those music genres that could be performed in the home—primarily piano and chamber music played by small ensembles—to become particularly widespread.
So-called ‹eye music,› often exemplified by making reference to works by Johann Sebastian Bach, illustrates how extensively the visual communication of musical structure represents an independent aesthetic level when certain symbolic meanings only become obvious by reading the score. The composer Dieter Schnebel took this thought to the extreme in his book «Mo-No: Music to.» [2] In the mind of the reader, stimuli to musically appreciate the world of noises and visual text/graphic compositions, which are meant to be taken in by reading alone—mono—and silently, only allow an imagined music to develop out of text and image. Nam June Paik, La Monte Young and George Brecht also composed music for the imagination, which they laid down as so-called «events» in brief textual instructions.
The examination of the specific situations in which music is produced reinforces the diagnosis: Making music also feeds on a variety of visual stimuli—from the flow of reading the score to observing the instrumentalist's motor activity to the gesticulatory coordination of acoustic occurrences amongst several musicians. This continues on the recipient side: The players' gestures and facial expressions convey information to the listeners about context (for example, intended emotion), melody, harmony, and rhythm. The expressive quality of the music—but also the virtuosity demanded of the musician—become more transparent through the visual comprehension of the instrumental performance and supply material that is included in the aesthetic experience and evaluation of music.
Intermediality in Music and Fine Art
Music is clearly an intermedial, above all audiovisual phenomenon to a much larger extent than one might spontaneously believe—more extensively than can be said for fine art. A remark made by Marcel Duchamp provides further explanation: «On peut regarder voir, on ne peut pas entendre entendere,» [3] which in English means «One can watch (someone) seeing; one cannot hear (someone) hearing.» This insight can be extended: One can in fact hear neither seeing or hearing. When the audience becomes silent just before a concert, one may actually hear how the people begin zu listen; however, this silence cannot be distinguished from the silence of visual concentration in a museum. Conversely, one can visually follow someone listening or watching: In the same way one can read the sequence of the elements being looked at and a person's emotional reaction to them from their eyes, one can also see how people listening to something turn their gaze inwards, because this is where the sounds occur, and one can gather the various reactions to what is being heard from their eyes.
During the reception process, the rapt silence in the spaces of a museum promotes the focus on visual contemplation. For his ironic project «Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art,» <> until 1999 the sound artist Ed Osborn
It is somewhat different for the artistic production process. The sound of the brush, the graver, or of the hammer and chisel as well as the acoustic environment certainly affect the practicing artist. But in painting, it was Classic Modernism that first found its way to an explicitly structural parallel to music beyond the representational, oftentimes symbolic depiction of musicians, instruments, and listeners. Cirluonis and Kandinsky, [4] for example, translated musical experience into abstract color patterns which reproduce sound impressions and temporal proportions.
These artists of the early twentieth century made reference to a fundamental connection between the arts: that as in music, similar temporal processes occur in paintings, sculptures, and photographs. From this point of view, the production and reception of fine art are both activities that are acted out in time and that exhibit parallels to following a narration, a spatialrepresentational dramaturgy, or even a musical score.
In the further development, with the continued opening up of artistic design methods to time-based processes (performance, installation), the sound being produced almost automatically established itself as an integral part of these works of art, as is the case, for instance, for Jean Tinguely's sounding kinetic sculptures, or for works such as «The Box with the Sound of its Own Making» (1961) by Robert Morris. Conversely, composers take up the openness of the visual reception process as a model for a new concept of musical interpretation by producing graphic scores that leave the sequence of sound elements open. For his «Fontana Mix,» < John Cage used graphic models and formulated rules, on the basis of whose two overlying line structures precise details can be inferred for pitch, duration of the sound, etc. The score was conceived by the composer as an open system of rules, which is clearly defined with a large degree of variability.
In popular music, at that moment at which musicleaves out the score, the necessity of renewed interpretation, and the public performance context through its transmission, storage, and synthesis, [5] several waves of the visualization of musical context information occur: At the latest in the 1950s, the image of stars such as Elvis Presley took on a fundamental role in the music marketing process. At about the same time, record cover art began to produce its own aesthetics, one of the pioneers of which was the «Blue Note» jazz label. In the 1960s and 1970s, the rock concert became a brilliant visual stage spectacle accompanied by light and smoke; the invisibility of the star during mass events is counteracted by gigantic video walls. In the 1980s, the videoclip developed into an unavoidable visual counterpart to every pop music song. [6]
Intermediality in Experimentalism
Musical experimentalism, the central figure of whose development was John Cage , is based on an expanded understanding of the material, in which, for example, noises are used on a level equal in value to the sounds of the instruments. However, it is primarily structures alien to music—technical, social, and non-musical aesthetic contexts—which are decisive for the conception of the works in which the graphic score described above occupies a central position. Besides social, biological, and game-like rule processes, it was primarily the technical functioning as well as the contents of media apparatuses that were used as ‹structure generators,› for example in Cage's «Imaginary Landscape No. 4,» in which the tuning and the volume of the twelve radios were adjusted according to a time schedule.
At the beginning of the 1950s, concretion of the works was still confined to professional musicians. During this period, John Cage, for instance, backed away from any interaction with listeners, because in his opinion, during the realization of open compositions only trained musicians could resist the temptation of sinking into musical cliches. Cage's objection to interacting with listeners illustrates a central problem: How can the competencies of music experts (composers, interpreters) be brought together with those of the listeners? How can the meaning of theirinteraction be conveyed to listeners who are not musically trained in such a way that they act in a ‹musically meaningful› way?
The solution the experimentalists had for this was to expose the intermedial structure in their interaction: the use of technical or other generally familiar systems that could also be understood and operated by the musically untrained. With this approach, the audience can also take on the role of the interpreter. «Maxfeed» (1967) by Max Neuhaus resembles a transistor radio; however, it produces the screeching and hissing sounds itself. The audience consists of only one person, who determines the sound sequences using the dial settings he is already familiar with from his own radio.
As a structure generator, intermediality in the first place aids the composer in finding new structures. At the same time, intermediality is used as a point of contact for the recipient so that his interaction can follow a consistent line. The logical consequence of this development is the step from the concert performance to the installation situation, which the audience masters independently and individually.
Concert and Installation
Problems Listening to Electronic Music
How important ‹visual support› is when decoding a musical figure (what kind of facial expression does the musician have? what are his physical gestures when producing a particular sound? and so on) can be demonstrated by example of the Electronic Music of the Cologne School of the 1950s, whose lack of human interpreters on stage and consequently the complete absence of visual elements was perceived as a flagrant communication problem. Electronic tape pieces such as «Studie I» by Karlheinz Stockhausen were frequently described as lifeless, rigid, and unmusical. [7] The return of interpreters to the stage in so-called live electronic music since the 1960s countered this problem either by transforming the sounds produced by the instrumentalists during the performance or by producing and modifying the purely electronic sounds live. Karlheinz Stockhausen's «Kontakte» made the musical effects of electro-acoustic technology visible. Now one could again see the human being making the music.
However, this approach did not always solve the problem to everyone's general satisfaction. Today's audiences often lack a sense of what performers who operate electronic equipment by means of buttons and dials are actually pushing and turning. Unlike the classic playing of instruments, hardly anything is conveyed through physical gestures, because what is hidden behind the individual buttons is different at every concert, while the playing of a violin can be universally interpreted on the basis of the violinist's gestures. It was not without a certain amount of irony that Nic Collins built his «Trombone Propelled Electronics,» with which he controls an electronic piece of equipment with the familiar gestures of a trombonist without, however, having a marked talent for playing the trombone itself. This problem has become even more acute in the case of the computer performers of recent years, who are often nearly rigid and frequently sit at their laptops without a single discernible sign of emotion. Listeners obviously expect more from music than just ordered sound.
One solution for this communication problem is for performances to take place in a new kind of spatial setting or in a lounge situation, in which one can regularly withdraw one's visual attention from the stage and allow it to wander through the room and turn it towards what is occurring in it. Other solutions are visualizations of musical contexts in installation settings or visuals shown parallel to the music and whose content or aesthetics can also be independent of the music. A further solution is the interactive inclusion of the audience. All three solutions are based on intermediality.
However, the inclusion of visual media in musical practice does not only feed itself on the lack of visual stimuli in electronic music, but rather it is an aesthetic tendency that is bound to the dissolution symptoms of the concert format and the evaluation criteria associated with it. The reception situation in concert halls—the elevated stage located at the front of the hall—which developed in the nineteenth century and which was coupled with strict behavioral norms such as sitting still or clearly defined applause rituals, is to a large extent subordinate to visual criteria. The listener with closed eyes may be highly respected by a musicology fixated on abstract form and structure,however, s/he is a minority in the audience. [8] The majority of concert visitors intensely follow the conductor and the musicians with their eyes. Frontal orientation in concert halls has been declining since the mid-twentieth century. So-called concert installations frequently integrate multimedia elements in which not only the instrumentalists, but also the members of the audience are distributed throughout the space, and the musicians are seated in the center.
Intermedial Instrumental Playing
The emphasis of the body and of the physical production of sound, which is often accentuated through the use of media, seems almost antithetical to the bodiless performances of electronic music and laptop concerts. In the twentieth century, the fine-motor virtuosity of instrumental musicians, a central criterion in the nineteenth century, has experienced a shift towards emphasizing overall physicality in the production of music. In the 1980s, Helmut Lachenmann made the physical instrumental production of music the content of his works (for example, «Pression,» 1969/70). The pieces composed by Nam June Paik for the performer Charlotte Moorman (e.g., «TV-Bra for Living Sculpture,» 1969) as well as, for example, the performance «Fractal Flesh» by Stelarc , in which he incorporates himself into an electrical system, are also media stage productions of instrumental sound generation that emphasize the body.
Because the ideal of ‹absolute music› continues to have an effect up to the present day, [9] what has always been a matter of course in popular music had to be expressly reestablished in art music: The music of Jimi Hendrix or The Who, heavy metal or hip hop would not be the same without the ‹body work› of the musicians.
However, more recent compositions which adhere to the concert and the genre of instrumental music are also experiencing an intermedialization. The playing of instruments concurrent with a live performance, for instance, is being enhanced or visually mirrored by video projections. For «MACH SIEBEN,» Michael Beil made a videotape recording of the pianist Ernst Surberg playing the piece. In the performance, the video projection and the liveinterpretation embrace to become the temporal mirror of a symmetrically planned composition. Vadim Karassikov enlarges instrumental gestures, which create sound bordering on inaudibility, on projection surfaces that have been hung above the musicians. In «Eyear» (2003) by Pascal Battus and Kamel Maad, the creation of differentiated drum sounds, which are produced by rubbing stones and sand on the drum skins, are filmed from close up in real time and projected onto a screen. The drum becomes the stage, whose sound occurrences experience an aesthetic visual doubling in the video.
Visualizations accentuate qualities of the musical production, thus taking up elements already existing in the composition and in the playing of the instrument and putting them into concrete form using media-technical means. The basic media qualities of instrumental music production are extant during this process. The examples cited above can be interpreted in such a way that the composers regard the visuality of the creation of music as an integral part of music and only make us aware of it with the aid of the video image.
VJing in Clubs
While the video image is still a peculiarity in art-musical concert practice, we can hardly imagine clubs without video monitors. In the 1990s, a new audiovisual format emerged in clubs when DJs and VJs began performing together. For the most part, musicians and video artists have only loose contact during their performances, i.e. the connection between image and sound is rarely based on a technical link between the respective instruments or on concepts that have been drawn up in detail, rather it is primarily based on rough outlines or on improvisation, for example in performances by 242.pilots. Connections between music and image are primarily atmospheric, and it is rare that either level deals with specific content or narrative structures. Their different proximity to reality often results in an imbalance: While real images are frequently used in thevisuals, e.g. urban scenes in «Deathsentences» (2003) by the group Negativland, the music is hardly concrete or narrative throughout. Sometimes it is the use of only individual, concrete noises which can be assigned to real objects that mediates between narrative images and electronic sound processes.
Audiovisual Transformation: The Translation Problem
When linking image and sound, time and again the issue is raised of according to which process or code structural features should be translated from one sensory level to the other: What does it mean for the music when the image is blue, pale, or moving? And what does it mean for the image when the timbre of the music is dull, or the musical structure is harmonically complicated or melodically dominated by large interval jumps?
The problem results from the fact that on the one hand, when processing image and sound cognitively they have an inseparable reciprocal effect: For example, it is sometimes difficult to say whether it was the images or more likely the music in a film that prompted us to have a certain opinion about the overall experience. On the other hand, however, the individual sensory stimuli or the gestalt on which cognitive processing is based are incommensurable, i.e. incomparable in every way: There are as few colors and bodies in the sounding music as there is a major-minor relation or a melodic line in the visual design.
The most extensive integrative role in the audiovisual reception process is played by the temporal structure. Rhythm is a feature that can be perceived both in music as well as in the image. Whether as image allocation, movement of the figures, or as the editing rhythm of the film; whether as musical pulse or as melodic-rhythmic figure: Temporal structure can always be experienced physiologically or physically. Synchronicity of the auditory and visual levels is therefore an important means for creating an integrated experience. [10] This is why DJ/VJ works start at precisely this point. The extent to which rhythm is designed to correspond with image and sound is an individual artistic decision. Image and soundcan be brought together at junctions, or they can also be synchronized or counterpointed throughout.
Analogies between image and sound, however, are also based on parallel perceptive experiences in everyday life: For physical reasons, only large bodies are capable of radiating long-wave frequencies, which is why we associate great volume and power with low tones. In contrast, due to the acute auditory sensitivity of the human ear to high tones, they at best serve as warning signals. This leads to their being used in film e.g. to signal horror, which has the same effect across all cultures. [11]
References between visual and auditory structures can be created in two ways. One possibility is the use of structural or atmospheric analogies or relative synaesthesia: the dark image to which low tones are played; the glaring, mangled surfaces of color accompanied by screeching, high-pitched sounds; or the subdued staccato sequence of notes occurring with the movement of small graphic elements, etc. The other possibility is the narrative assignment of noises to visible objects, and vice versa.
Synaesthesia, Analogy
The Pythagoreans sought correspondences between colors/light and sound. They connected their concept of the harmony of the spheres, which arises out of the harmonious relations between planetary movements, with the colors of light. At the same time, the tertium comparationis, the mediating value between color and pitch, was purely speculative. Leonhard Euler's theory on the oscillation of light, published in 1746, as well as Goethe's theory of colors restimulated the search for scientifically-sound, uniform concepts of light and sound and thus for the specific assignment of individual colors to particular pitches. Various mystical and esoteric conceptions of the world played a role in this quest for a common source and for the fusion of visual and acoustic aesthetics.
Even in the twentieth century, attempts were made to integrate colors and light into complex systems either of a cosmic nature or related to the language of music. Based on his own experiences as a synaesthetician, [12] in 1911 the Russian composer Alexander Skrjabin (1872–1915) who sympathized with the symbolists and theosophicalthought—introduced a color classification system that he regarded as the «reunion of the arts separated over the course of time.» «By overcoming all differences, the synthetic Gesamtkunstwerk is meant to immensely expand consciousness and lead to a state of ecstasy. It shall therefore be structured in such a way that all of the five senses fuse together to become a union. Arts dependent on ‹will› (music, dance, language), however, are superior to the play of color and scents.» [13] The background for the audiovisual references is an integral system of analogy rooted in the subconscious that influences the form and structure of music and its enmeshment with symbolic contents and colors/scents.
Skrjabin wrote a light staff, ‹Luce,› at the top of his symphonic poem «Promethée. Le Poème du feu,» op. 60, from 1911. However, he did not construct a one-to-one translation of the music into colored light. The part for color piano develops its own formal structure, which is only brought together with the music at several junctions. This light version of Prometheus was not performed during Skrjabin's lifetime; however, it was important for the discourse surrounding «Der Blaue Reiter» and Kandinsky. Skrjabin's «Mysterium,» in which both colored lights and scents were meant to contribute to a synthesis of the arts and a holistic sensory experience, remained unfinished. Neither the scent organ nor the hemispherical building intended for the performance of «Mysterium» were ever built.
Instead of keys, Olivier Messiaen created a system of socalled modes on which to base his music. Similar to the way in which certain functions were attached to the ecclesiastical keys within a liturgy, each of Messiaen's modes are based on an individual scale and are assigned certain colors. [14] In addition, Messiaen established references to ornithology and elaborated on this extensive system in his seven-volume «Traité de rhythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie.» [15] However, his works are pure sound; the union of color and tone, of form and time constitute only an ideal basis. Perception of the «magic of the impossible, thus the identity of time and color» [16] is left to the recipient's power of imagination.
The Russian Ivan Wyschnegradsky followed the systemic approaches developed by Skrjabin and Messiaen. He constructed a microtonal scale divided up into seventy-two equally tempered intervals (instead of the twelve semitones of our normal scale) and liquidated octave periodicity. Wyschnegradsky developed a system of ‹total analogy›by dissecting colored circles into concentric rings and cells according to tone-systemic rules, thus arriving at 5,184 color-tone cells. His vision was one of a cosmic, spherical «Temple of Light,» which like Skrjabin's «Mysterium» was never realized.
Space, Color, Time
At the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, a hemispherical Auditorium was built— according to designs drawn up by Karlheinz Stockhausen—for the first time. Sounds could move spatially through the auditorium over fifty speakers. The speaker assignment and the shining of thirty-five sources of white light were controlled intuitively using special ‹spherical sensors.› [17] In the decades to come, Stockhausen consolidated his synthesizing approach to art into a personal mythology and executed it in his comprehensive work series «LICHT.»
The Fluxus artist La Monte Young can only be partially regarded in the tradition of these composers. His system of sound and harmony is based on mathematical principles and concentrates on the phenomenon of time, as oscillations are temporal phenomena. His first concept for «Dream House,» a «living organism with a life and tradition of its own» which he developed in collaboration with the light artist Marian Zazeela, dates back to 1962. «Dream House» transforms a space into a finely balanced sound-light environment. The sounds La Monte Young produces consist exclusively of pure sinus oscillations, whose frequencies he tunes to the spatial proportions in such a way that stationary waves develop. Using a set of different speakers and mathematically related wave lengths, a sound space is created. The recipient strides through the space tracking down junctions and at the same time ‹interrupting› the balance of the stationary waves. The wave length of the magenta-colored light is connected to the tone frequencies. As is the case for Skrjabin and Wyschnegradsky, symmetrical arrangements play an essential role in the complex mathematical structuring of the sound space. In these examples, the transformation logic, i.e. the rules for assigning color to tone, are derived from music (compositional structure, music theory) or from mathematical relations of musical acoustics.
Work by the composer and artist Christina Kubisch demonstrates how in the area of sound art, visual and auditory design are closely interrelated. Sound installations may always have something to do withspace and thus with seeing, with orientation within the space; however, they are not invariably arranged visually as well. With Kubisch, besides the sound level there is almost always a light component as well, whereby she primarily works with the bluish element of black light. With her, too, the phenomenon of time clusters the senses into an expressly non-synaesthetic context. An even more precise description is that it is silence, which is regarded as something motionless in time and is experienced visually as well as auditorally, that becomes the connecting link. [18] Thus in «Klang Fluss Licht Quelle—Vierzig Säulen und ein Raum» (1999), both media convene in a sensual gesture, in a palpability and subtlety as an expression parameter of the space they occupy. The design of painterly and tonal elements does not adhere to a ‹calculated› transformation logic, nor does it strive for unity. Rather, it is based on intuitive decisions.
Electrical and Digital Transformation
With the arrival of electronic media, the practice has developed of translating music directly into an image as an electric signal, and vice versa, thus generating a rhythmic-formal parallel structure. Approaches of this kind can already be seen in the early video work by Nam June Paik. [19] The installation «Skate» (2004) by the London-based media artist Janek Schaefer
Experiments conducted in the first half of the twentieth century with the aid of optical sound recording to acquire image and sound out of one and the same material, thus achieving an audiovisual fusion, can be regarded as the forerunners of today's visuals. Based on his own research, for «Tönende Ornamente» (1932) Oskar Fischinger assumed that there are unconscious connections between culturally disseminated ornaments and their sounds when playing them on optical sound equipment. In Leningrad in 1930, Arsenij Avraamov and Jevgenij Scholpo beganexperimenting with the synthesis of sound out of graphic forms. For his idea of the ‹drawn sound,› Scholpo constructed a special machine, whose principle is similar to so-called ‹wave tables› as used in digital sound synthesis: If one periodically reads out an individual image with a particular curve form using optical sound equipment, a continuous sound is created. Scholpo made attempts to explore to what extent e.g. the sound of scissorcut- like facial profiles reflects the character of the type of person being shown. This approach is paralleled by the audiovisual works by the duo Granular, who process image and sound according to the same principle (of kgranular synthesis).
Interest in the use of electric signals for the generation of music and image has existed since the initial years of electronic design methods, for example with the visualization of sounds on the oscillograph. [20] In addition, forms of visualization were sought which, like traditional notation, could serve as a suitable foundation for the musicological analysis of electronic sound processes (sonagram, graphic notation). In the process, it was realized that these visualizations have their own aesthetic appeal.
Opportunities for the visualization of sound are multiplied through the computerization, and thus the digitalization of sound. The principle of the sonagram is taken up by ‹analysis resynthesis software,› with which one can graphically manipulate the analysis data of acoustic sequences represented visually. The visualization ‹corrected› in this way can in turn be transformed back into sound. Guy van Belle and the group «code31» applied a similar process in the networked performance «Anyware» (2004), in which synthetic sounds and a dynamic colored area are controlled by the same parameters and sent to the other performers via the Internet. The analysis of the incoming sounds and images influences the renewed synthesis of sound and color, resulting in continuous feedback between image and sound as well as between players.
In «Wounded Man´yo 2/2000,» the Fluxus and media artist Yasunao Tone translates Japanese characters, which he draws with a mouse using the audio software «Sound Designer II,» into acoustic oscillation sequences. In this way, noise-likesound structures become audible which in their conciseness of sound can be associated with Japanese characters.
The Argentinean composer Ana Maria Rodriguez attempts to create a union of sound and image by analyzing narrowly defined raw material and then using it as a source for image and sound. In her work «Code Switching » (2004) with the Australian video artist Melita Dahl she proclaims the transformation from one code to another to be the explicit subject. Facial expression as visually mediated, and phonemes as acoustically produced elements from one and the same head and mouth constitute the raw material for this audiovisual installation. The faces of the performer Ute Wassemann are projected onto four large screens and transformed into one another using a morphing technique. Individual phonemes have been isolated and likewise compressed into an abstract sound/language space. The processes applied to the raw materials are both based on the same principle.
For the audiovisual online instrument «nebula.m81,» Netochka Nezvanova uses nothing but the definitions of technical formats: Without requiring a data transformation or a conversion, the program simply redefines the internationally standardized set of «ISO Latin 1» characters from arbitrarily selected Web sites into the audio format «Sun µlaw» with an 8-bit resolution and a sampling frequency of 8 kHz, and plays them as sound. The technical format definitions determine the aesthetic result.
Technological Implications
If one considers the current status of technical development, at first glance image media appear to be more advanced: We are amazed at the visual effects in the latest movies and in commercials, and as a rule we are unaware of how much technological refinement was required to construct their sound backdrop. In fact, today's audio media possess much more far-reaching possibilities of reconstructing a space at another location or even creating it synthetically than does visual virtual reality.
In the chronology of the development of image and sound media, Daguerre's photographic process, introduced in 1839, was the first—even if it was an ‹unnatural› still image that simply ignored time. WhenEdison invented the phonograph in 1877, [21] he had no choice but to take time into account, as not only music, but even physical sound is per se a temporal phenomenon that dissolves into nothing when it stands still in time. Thus sound recording was in the world before image recording in the same way became complete through the inclusion of time in film.
For the most part, the technical lead of sound over the image has been retained: The radio established itself as a mass medium long before television did; the gramophone spread into private households long before film projectors did; there were portable cassette recorders before there were video cameras. Sixteen-mm film, which was invented before the tape recorder and became a common piece of household equipment before it did, constitutes an exception. Amongst the more extravagant technologies used more by the scientific or artistic elite, on the other hand, sound holds the lead: the electromechanical sound synthesis with Thaddeus Cahill's «Telharmonium» and the various stages of electronic sound synthesis with the Theremin and later with Robert Moog's voltage-controlled synthesizer existed before specific methods of image synthesis, or in the absence of the appropriate visual technologies were simply ‹misappropriated› to image synthesis, e.g. by Nam June Paik . Due to problems with the much larger volumes of data during image processing, the digital creation and processing of sound in the computer was introduced first.
Transfer of Artistic Techniques: Montage/Collage
Upon closer examination, the relationship between the availability of certain technologies and the artistic application of their principles proves to be complex. This becomes apparent when, for example, one considers that despite the lead of audio technology, sound artists frequently reacted more slowly to the emerging media than did visual artists: With the aid of film, the artistic montage was developed in the visual area. But as music only hesitantly overcomes its fixation on abstract sounds (instead of the concrete noises that become manageable with the introduction of the gramophone), it is not until the end of the 1940s—with Pierre Schaeffer—that it leads to newmusical results. Elementary sound phenomena may have never been denied the potential of naturally-given beauty: Igor Stravinsky, for instance, emphasized the aesthetic value of sounds such as the rustling of leaves or the singing of birds and describes them as being related to music in that they «… caress the ear and give us pleasure ….» However, in his view this does not yet mean that they possess the status of art: «[B]eyond this passive enjoyment we discover music, which allows us to actively participate in the working of a mind that is ordering, invigorating, and creative.» [22]
In the area between literature, theater, and music, i.e. the radio play and its offspring («Weekend,» Walter Ruttmann's film for radio from 1930), experiments with the montage of noise were successful before those carried out with music. Ruttmann's use of cinematic optical sound recording shows that it was apparently the inaccuracy and awkwardness of montage using the gramophone (by switching between the audio signals coming from two different records) that posed a technical obstacle, whereas film could be relatively accurately and simply assembled using scissors and glue. The collage first established itself in fine art around 1920, although the gramophone would have already long since made the acoustic collage possible. Here, too, it was primarily the practical disadvantages of the gramophone that prevented this development. In 1917—thus long before he applied montage, collage, and double exposure techniques in the film «The Man With the Camera»—Dziga Vertov carried out comparable experiments with gramophone recordings; however, because they were difficult to handle and the sound quality was poor, he gave them up to devote himself instead to film. [23]
Surprisingly, the ostensible use of collage techniques in music occurred for the first time independent from technical media. Charles Ives processed impressions from the urban world of noises as early as 1906 in «Central Park in the Dark.» [24] In this piece for orchestra there manifested a tradition of the simultaneity of musical styles, sound elements, and rhythms, which has continued into contemporary media composition through Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Heiner Goebbels.
Musical Wallpaper: Background Music
It was also in 1906 that Thaddeus Cahill took up the practice of ‹telephone concerts ,› which since the 1880s had been becoming more and more popular in many large cities, when he introduced the world to the «Telharmonium.» His decision was primarily based on economic considerations: no other infrastructure produced as many potential listeners than the telephone, thus creating the means for raising the immense amounts of capital required for this new type of instrument. With this first machine world wide which could synthesize complex sounds and even provide for musically intellectual demands such as playability in pure pitch and a random number of new scales, of necessity the principle of a music materialized that with the aid of media technology could be played into spaces in such a way that it is only taken in as mere background music for other perceptions.
In 1915, Thomas Alva Edison also carried out experiments to allow piping selected pieces of music into factory buildings via a phonograph in order to cover the noise and to raise the morale of the workers, which would ultimately increase profits. [25] Empirical studies soon verified that workers produce more—and consumers buy more—when background music is played. Consequently, the attempt begun in 1922 by General Owen Squiers to specifically market the functional value of broadcasted music was successful: He began transmitting gramophone music via telephone lines into restaurants and offices. Since then, Squiers' company «Muzak,» [26] whose name was to become a synonym for functional background music, has come to line countless locations. Background music lures clientele into boutiques, and it lends more calm to the candlelight in a restaurant and more tension to the red light in the world of prostitutes and pimps.
The so-called ‹Mood-Song,› which was distributed on record in countless versions in the 1950s and 1960s, was, like background music, also based on the discrete arrangements of popular hits: [27] Recordings such as «Music to Work or Study by,» «Music to watch Girls by,» «Music to Read James Bond by,» or simply «Music to Live by» were aimed at the musical lining of specialsituations, whose visual ambience was depicted on the respective record cover.
Brian Eno's idea for ‹ambient music› examined what had since become the ubiquitous phenomenon of lining an otherwise primarily visually marked experience of the world (see below) with music. [28] Installations such as «Generative Roomscape 1» (1996) treat sound and image equally: Both of them are interpreted as atmospheric arrangements that complement each other without confirming the tendency towards the hierarchical subordination of the musical level.
The Soundtrack in Film and in Interactive Media
In film, image and sound come together to form a media-technical construct. Movements in the image and of the image frame itself as well as the assembly of these images enter into complex relationships with the spoken language, music, and noises. While film music exhibited advanced methods of reinforcing narration and the aesthetic effect of the images soon after sound film was established, [29] for a long time sound abided in the subordinate function of reflecting the events visible in the image: «see a dog, hear a dog,» so the motto went. It was not until the 1970s that directors from the ‹New Hollywood› began to give sounds a fundamental and aesthetically independent role, e.g. in films such as «Star Wars» (George Lucas, 1977) or «Apocalypse Now» (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), in which sounds—in part invented—were ‹composed› by sound designers in elaborate and time-consuming processes. [30] Since then, image and sound have had a similar status in the production process, even though the image continues to play the ultimate role in the moviegoer's consciousness. The goal of the envisaged fusion of the image and sound levels is to produce the perfect illusion.
In his film «Nouvelle Vague» (1990), Jean-Luc Godard allows sound and image to fall apart time and again, thus breaking down the illusionist image/sound relation characteristic of Hollywood films. He exaggerates noises, draws attention to intervention by the sound engineer through accelerated fading, allows dialogue to sink into background noises, and mounts music into an image in a way that is irritating and contradicts visible emotional contents.
In interactive media, the linear soundtrackinevitably becomes a dynamic ‹sound field,› an open structure. Here, the principle of linear narration in classic film and the fixed form sequence predominant in occidental music no longer works. [31] The authoring software «Koan,» which was developed for the dynamic addition of sound to free navigation through Web sites, is a pragmatic concretion of this condition. On the basis of the «Flash» format, zeitblom realized a dynamic sound background of a similar nature for a Web site by the Freunde Guter Musik < which reflects the degree of the visitor's activity.
Acoustic Interfaces
Functional acoustic information—the output of audible responses to user activity—which one can refer to as an ‹acoustic user interface,› is similar to the soundtrack. Research in the area of the ‹auditory display› [32] is searching for neat models for the audification of computing processes and for acoustic orientation aids in large data stocks, for instance through so-called ‹earcons,› which like visual icons should help to quickly and intelligibly distinguish data types and means of navigation.
Principles like ‹rollover› have spread with the development of formats such as «Flash/Shockwave» and «Beatnik.» Consequently, in the area of net music, [33] artistic projects such as «electrica» have developed which emit acoustic signals to indicate what lies behind a graphic structure. While this kind of audiovisual navigation can function well on art Web sites, in everyday practice the problem arises that sound permanently reaches the ear, while visual stimuli can be selected depending on the direction of vision. This causes signal-like sounds such as the acoustic rollover to quickly become annoying. In addition, earcons are apparently difficult to decipher: Producers of radio jingles point out that in fast-moving, everyday radio, only about fifteen different types of noises (the ringing of a telephone, the jingle of coins, the flushing of a toilet, etc.) can be clearly identified by listeners. The reasons for this poor ability to identify sounds probably lie in the dominance of the visual within Western culture. [34]
The Dominance of the Image
The dominance of the image can be demonstrated using the computer as an example. The computer (and thus the interface to the Internet) is conceived as a text medium with a visual interface. Its era began with the spartan illustration of letters; all one could hear was the irritating hum of the cooling ventilators. The assertion of the graphic user interface on the basis of the intuitively usable desktop metaphor [35] by «Apple Macintosh» in 1984 supported this visual fixation. HTML, the basic code of the World Wide Web, is also text/imageoriented. Hyperlinks are symbolized by highlighted words and images.
The underrepresentation of the acoustic may have also resulted from the low computing performance levels of early PCs; however, it was more a result of the visual dominance of our age: In Western culture a preference for visual perception developed based on writing as the fixation of language. [36] In contrast to hearing, its objects tend to be lasting and quantifiable and thus embody objectivity and truth. Sound, on the other hand, is ephemeral and strongly dependent on subjective judgement. And so it is not really suited to the electronic superbrain, the machine, which primarily serves the efficiencyoriented elimination of uncertainties. [37]
Accordingly, like in a library, all computer data, regardless of whether they contain text, sound, or image, are archived alphabetically according to their language designation. Even today there are no sound databases that allow archiving according to tonal criteria or even performing an auditory search. [38]
Interactive audio applications deal with this kind of visually-guided navigation through sound and thus also with issues of notation. The direct transmission of the two central notation coordinates—time in the horizontal and pitch in the vertical, which are read out linearly by a cursor—places the clueless user in the precarious position of having to arrange concrete sound occurrences in time, therefore to ‹compose.› Because s/he is in most cases inexperienced, it is no wonder that many examples of this kind supply unsatisfactory results.
In the modules of the work «Small Fish» on CD-ROM by Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masaki Fujihata and Wolfgang Münch, the linear version of the cursor has been replaced by the simulation of the behavior of organic systems. Users produce and influence the music by manipulating graphic objects that lead an individual, ‹independent existence.› With the aid of object-oriented programming, the behavior of the individual objects has been structured in such a way that they exchange information among themselves. The user's interaction and collisions with other objects alter the state of individual objects and thus the overall system. None of the objects knows all of the connections, i.e. there is no point in the system where all information runs together. So a dynamic system of autonomous objects is coupled to the autonomous actions performed by the user. Here the tradition of musical notation on a surface is interwoven with the behavior of organisms and physical systems. The systems' behavior orients itself towards natural and mechanical processes, and this is why despite their complexity, they can—as is the case for the experimentalists' concepts—be comprehended and used in a practical way on the basis of everyday experience.
Music = Audiovision
Media-artistic examinations of music time and again thematicize the intermediality of the acoustic experience. In the process, imbalances in the perception of everyday media life and the hierarchical relation between image and sound are questioned. The production, dissemination, and reception of music have changed since the introduction of electronic and digital media. Technical media as a common source of image and sound have stimulated a wealth of intermedia connections. What continues to be behind this is the centuries-old desire to fuse sensory impressions together into a synaesthetic experience.
Besides this explicitly art-synthetic approach, it is often overlooked that because of its special production and reception conditions, music actually already possesses intermedia characteristics. Musical practice of the twentieth century reflects these relationships, emphasizes them, or questions them inthat the concert is being enhanced by a variety of forms of visualization, and customary notation is being replaced by graphic symbols and visuallyinfluenced forms of interaction. Intermediality in music is therefore not a consequence of the advance of technology, rather it is a phenomenon which is inherent in music itself and which with the aid of media can be molded in particularly effective and diverse ways.
[1] Luhmann somewhat graphically formulated (to which the initial sentence is faithful), «We know what we know about the world through mass media.» If one removes the polemics, what neverthelessfs remains is that our knowledge about the world is molded throughout by aesthetics and knowledge from mass media. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 2nd ed., Opladen, 1996, p. 9.
[2] Dieter Schnebel, Mo-No: Music to Read, Cologne, 1969.
[3] Marcel Duchamp, Box of 1914, in: Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du Signe. Ecrits, ed. Michel Sanouillet, Paris 1976, p. 37
[4] Refer to the text «Das klingende Bild - über das Verhältnis von Kunst und Musik. Ein kunsthistorischer Rückblick» by Barbara John.
[5] Also refer to the text «Audio Art» by Golo Föllmer in the Key Topic «Survey of Media Art.»
[6] Refer to the text «Montage/Sampling/Morphing. On the Triad of Aesthetics/Technology/Politics» by Diedrich Diedrichsen.
[7] Cf. the discussions in Wandel des musikalischen Hörens, Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung Darmstadt (ed.), vol. 3, Berlin, 1962.
[8] Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, Frankfurt/Main, 1975, pp. 14f.
[9] Cf. Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Musik, Kassel, 1978.
[10] Cf. Michel Chion's notion of ‹synchrese› (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, Sound on Screen, New York, 1994).
[11] Cf. Klaus Scherer et al., «Emotion inferences from vocal expression correlate across languages and cultures,» in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(1), 2001, pp. 76–92.
[12] Four percent of all people are synaestheticians. Tests have shown that depending on the individual, their color/sound classifications are different and contradictory. Cf. Manfred Kerkel, «Esoterik und formale Gestaltung in Skrjabins Spätwerken,» in Alexander Skrjabin. Studien zur Wertungsforschung, Otto Kolleritsch (ed.), vol. 13, Graz, 1980.
[13] Manfred Kerkel, «Esoterik und formale Gestaltung in Skrjabins Spätwerken,» in Alexander Skrjabin. Studien zur Wertungsforschung, Otto Kolleritsch (ed.), vol. 13, Graz, 1980, pp. 28–29.
[14] Messiaen, too, was a synaesthetician. Cf. Richard Cytowic, Synesthesia. A Union of the Senses, New York, 1989, p. 238.
[15] Olivier Messiaen, Traité de rhythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1949–1992), Paris, 1994.
[16] Elmar Budde, «Vom Zauber des Unmöglichen,» in Olivier Messiaen, Thomas Daniel Schlee/Dietrich Kämper (eds.), Cologne, 1998.
[17] Cf. Frank Gertich/Julia Gerlach/Golo Föllmer, Musik, …verwandelt. Das Elektronische Studio der Technischen Universität Berlin, Hofheim, 1996, pp. 195–211.
[18] Michael Glasmeier, «Mit den Ohren Stille sehen,» in Zwischenräume [catalogue accompanying the exhibition by Christina Kubisch], Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken (ed.), Saarbrücken, 1996.
[19] Also refer to the text «Sound & Vision in Avant-garde & Mainstream» by Dieter Daniels.
[20] Cf. Fritz Winckel (ed.), Experimentelle Musik. Raum Musik, Visuelle Musik, Medien Musik, Wort Musik, Elektronik Musik, Computer Musik, Berlin, 1970.
[21] Refer to the texts «Audio Art» by Golo Föllmer in «Survey of Media Art» und Dieter Daniels' «Sound & Vision in Avant-garde & Mainstream.»
[22] Igor Strawinsky, Musikalische Poetik, Mainz, 1949, p. 18.
[23] Stefan Amzoll, «‹Ich bin das Ohr›. Zum 100. Geburtstag des Klangpioniers,» in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Jan./Feb. 1996, pp. 50–53.
[24] Werner Bärtschi (ed.), Ives, Charles: Ausgewählte Texte, Zürich, 1985, pp.189f.
[25] Cf. Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music. A surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and other Moodsong, London, 1995, p. 13.
[26] Squier formed the brand name for his product out of the terms «music» and «Kodak.» The small Kodak cameras were regarded as the epitome of comfortable modernity.
[27] Cf. Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music. A surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and other Moodsong, London, 1995.
[28] Refer to the text «Audio Art» by Golo Föllmer in «A Survey of Media Art.»
[29] Cf. Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music. A Neglected Art, 2nd ed., New York, 1992.
[30] Cf. Barbara Flückiger, Sound Design. Die virtuelle Klangwelt des Films, Marburg, 2001, and Michel Chion, Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen, New York, 1994.
[31] Cf. Christian Kaden, «Musiksoziologie,» in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 6, Kassel, 1996, pp. 1633f.
[32] Cf. Gregory Kramer (Hg.), Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification and Auditory Interfaces, Reading/MA, 1994; also refer to the Web site of the International Community for Auditory Display.
[33] Cf. Golo Föllmer, Netzmusik, Hofheim, 2005.
[34] Cf. Murray Schafer, Klang und Krach. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Hörens, Frankfurt/Main, 1988.
[35] The interface could have definitely been designed differently. The user interface «Lifestreams,» for example, was developed in such a way that all of the contents are arranged according to the temporal sequence of events.
[36] Cf. Wolfgang Welsch, «Auf dem Weg zu einer Kultur des Hörens?,» in Der Klang der Dinge: Akustik—eine Aufgabe des Design, A.-V. Langenmaier (ed.), Munich, 1993, pp. 86f.
[37] Research in this area is still in its infancy. Cf. Bernhard Feiten, «Sound Information Technology Research Group,» in Musik…, verwandelt, Frank Gertich/Julia Gerlach/Golo Föllmer (eds.), Hofheim, 1996, pp. 313–318.
[38] Cf. Phoebe Sengers, «Fabrikation der Subjekte. Verdinglichung, Schizophrenie und Künstliche Intelligenz,» in Netzkritik. Materialien zur Internet-Debatte, nettime (ed.), Berlin, 1997, p. 131.
above copied fromL http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/image-sound_relations/audiovisions/print/
Reflections on Conceptual Art and its Relation to New Media, a month long conversation at Empyre, Eduardo Navas
I was a guest speaker on Empyre during the month of April 2005. The following text is a revision of two particular postings on Conceptual art, which I here use as launching platforms to reflect on the long debate that took place between Raul Ferrera Balanquet (CU/MX), Kate Southworth and Patrick Simons(UK), and myself. Other invited guests included Lucrezia Cippitelli (IT), Heidi Figueroa Sarriera (PR), Raquel Herrera Ferrer (ES), Lucas Bambozzi (BR), Andres Burbano (CO), and Joeser Álvarez. This text is also part of a larger essay which will be published at a later date in its entirety.
The conversation was fruitful in various ways, ranging from abstract theoretical propositions to more personal statements. The online exchange proved to be one of the most important experiences for me until now, because I learned that colonial ideology is more powerful than I expected. It is thanks to Raul's intervention (this is how he considered his writing) that I realized this shortly after the discussion came to a close. Such realization will be the subject of reflection for the second part of this series. In this first part I will focus on the premise proposed by Christina McPhee for the month long conversation.
The theme of the month:
Do conceptual art and curatorial practice merge in post digital cultural production? How are new media art, criticism and curatorial practice a 'transgressive' ecology"?
While it is true that artists part of the net.art group were influenced by a certain type of conceptualism, the premises behind conceptual art as it is understood from its origins in the New York scene is practically irrelevant in new media practice. When it is brought up it is often in allegorical form. In regards to this, we can consider a work that has been reviewed here. MTAA's One Year Performance,[1] which allegorizes Performance artist Sam Hsieh's One year performance where he stayed in a cell for a whole year.
Conceptual art, mainly in the New York scene, developed in reaction to Greenbergian modernism; this is specific to Joseph Kosuth and his contemporaries. However conceptual practice became quite diverse and took on many approaches around the world.[2]
Critical art practices since the turn of the twentieth century have relied on a materialist approach to art making.[3] To be specific, the artist looks at the subject and considers key material elements to then make them obvious to the viewer, who if the work is developed carefully, will come to question it according to the exposed contradictions, coherences, limitations, and excess, which can be read as open-ended questions, or at times as forms subject to the sublime (the latter may be problematic for some conceptualists who are critical of ideology). The artist can claim that what she has done is nothing but show what was already there, thus appearing critical and detached with proper distance, thus questioning not only what the role of the artist is, but also the idea of originality. This is what Duchamp did with his famous Urinal.[4] As it is commonly known, he did nothing but choose a work that exposed the artist's role in art practice and her/his relation to the growing industrial world. However, he was not directly questioning the material aspect of the work of art. Conceptualism did-New York conceptualism to be exact.[5] Whether moving towards or away from the object; the point is that, in conceptualism, the materiality of the object of art was in question, or at least it was the subject of reflection. Yet, if this is to be contested, what can be said about Conceptualism is that its subject was the idea as the object of art.[6]
With new media we experience works that are not materialized in the conventional sense to which conceptualism reacted. This is in part because new media works are easily reproducible. What is unique about new media art is that it did not face what other mediums had faced in the past to be legitimated. Issues of originality and purposiveness were previously dealt with by other media such as photography and most importantly Film. In fact, new media was understood so quickly as a vehicle for efficient dissemination that it swiftly moved to affect previously existing media. New media is considered to have pronounced major reciprocal effects, especially in Cinema. As Lev Manovich explains:
Computer media redefine the very identity of cinema. In a symposium that took place in Hollywood in the spring of 1996, one of the participants provocatively referred to movies as "flatties" and to human actors as "organics" and "soft-fuzzies." As these terms accurately suggest, what used to be cinema's defining characteristics are now just default options, with many other available.[7]
Here we notice how new media's language comes to redefine how previous media is negotiated creatively. And so, it can be stated that new media art rides on the histories of previous media thus functioning allegorically. It uses the language of film and photography--not to mention painting to create works that take on different forms according to specific contexts, and the viewers accept such work because the codes at play are already common knowledge. The power of such language allows for the actual object to disappear and eventually lets information take over.
It is important to note that there is no physical object of art with many new media projects--especially Internet art. Of course we can say that we have moved on to the actual discourse and its form as information becoming the object, but when this shift happens the criticism also shifts. We can consider the role of an electronic mailing list such as Empyre in relation to intellectual capital and its new power position within the gift economy as an example where discourse becomes the object of contemplation.[8] Their description reads:
Empyre facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media by inviting guests-key new media artists, curators, theorists, producers and others to participate in thematic discussions.[9]
In such a list, discourse is always incomplete, ongoing (as the list moves from discussions from month to month), and full of slippages due to the immediacy of e-mail correspondences. Yet, those who participate in such lists have intellectual Capital that can be spent online to further their network connections. The lists depends on the academic institution to make it possible for those with the knowledge and the time to write, to participate in an activity where no actual pay is expected. This is important to consider in relation to early paradigms of conceptualism, which aimed to problematize institutionalization and academization of art discourse in the art institution.
What actually happens with this shift from object to information is that the artist --in particular the new media artist--can develop work using a materialist approach following the parameters of conceptualism while not worrying about an object and this may be why some people confuse new media practice following a materialist analysis with Conceptualism as understood with the likes of Michael Asher or (to show the complexity of Conceptual art) Adriane Piper. However, the basic criticism that made conceptualism a specific movement of resistance is no longer there; meaning, the object of art is no longer expected to be present, or critiqued in order to call something art, in the realm of new media. This type of criticism itself has become institutionalized, becoming part of what today is called "Institutional Critique." This does not mean that there is no such thing as a conceptual online practice that of critiquing the object or the institution, only that the criticism of such practice is quite different because the object of art is information (data) that can be presented in various forms.
So, the object of art (of new media) is metadata/data. Materialization of information (however this may be) is an after effect of power relations ending in careful distribution through diverse forms--for the information can be reconfigured to meet the demand of a locality according to a global market. This is the object of contemplation in new media practice and this is where artists who have made works of note in such a field have focused. And here we can find renewed forms of resistance, and new forms of criticism.
To further complicate this, the new media artwork is not easily labeled as just "art"; much of it crosses over to activism, hacktivism, and pervasive media. Without going into detailed definitions of these terms, it should be pointed out that they are all activities that actually influence the political spectrum around the world. It would appear then that the lines between art for a selective audience and mass media start to blur in New Media Art practice. And this is the model that carries the conceptual trace. The reason being that in new media, and online practice because there is no actual object, the focus is by default on the idea. This is the major difference in the aesthetics at play; meaning that the type of resistance expected of a New York conceptual avant-garde practice is not expected of online practice. This does not mean that some artists are not critical following the tradition of previous conceptualists, it just means that such practice is actually a specific choice. The model for new media practice is dependent on ideas not forms, and this is particular to new media, just like objecthood is for painting and sculpture in the fine arts.
1 MTAA, http://turbulence.org/Works/1year/ See Review:
http://www.netartreview.net/
weeklyFeatures/2005_01_09_archive.html
2 Alexander Alberro , "Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977," Conceptual Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press, 1999), xvi-xxxvii.
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
4 The pros and cons are reviewed by Thierry De Duve, see Thierry De Duve, "Contra Duchamp," Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1998), 454-462.
5 Joseph Kosuth, "Intentions," Conceptual Art: a Critical Anthology, 460-469.
6 Sol Le Witt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," Conceptual Art..., 12-17.
7 Lev Manovich, "Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image," The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: 2000), 293.
8 Empyre, http://www.subtle.net/empyre/
9 Ibid.
Copies from: http://www.netartreview.net/monthly/0705_3.html
The conversation was fruitful in various ways, ranging from abstract theoretical propositions to more personal statements. The online exchange proved to be one of the most important experiences for me until now, because I learned that colonial ideology is more powerful than I expected. It is thanks to Raul's intervention (this is how he considered his writing) that I realized this shortly after the discussion came to a close. Such realization will be the subject of reflection for the second part of this series. In this first part I will focus on the premise proposed by Christina McPhee for the month long conversation.
The theme of the month:
Do conceptual art and curatorial practice merge in post digital cultural production? How are new media art, criticism and curatorial practice a 'transgressive' ecology"?
While it is true that artists part of the net.art group were influenced by a certain type of conceptualism, the premises behind conceptual art as it is understood from its origins in the New York scene is practically irrelevant in new media practice. When it is brought up it is often in allegorical form. In regards to this, we can consider a work that has been reviewed here. MTAA's One Year Performance,[1] which allegorizes Performance artist Sam Hsieh's One year performance where he stayed in a cell for a whole year.
Conceptual art, mainly in the New York scene, developed in reaction to Greenbergian modernism; this is specific to Joseph Kosuth and his contemporaries. However conceptual practice became quite diverse and took on many approaches around the world.[2]
Critical art practices since the turn of the twentieth century have relied on a materialist approach to art making.[3] To be specific, the artist looks at the subject and considers key material elements to then make them obvious to the viewer, who if the work is developed carefully, will come to question it according to the exposed contradictions, coherences, limitations, and excess, which can be read as open-ended questions, or at times as forms subject to the sublime (the latter may be problematic for some conceptualists who are critical of ideology). The artist can claim that what she has done is nothing but show what was already there, thus appearing critical and detached with proper distance, thus questioning not only what the role of the artist is, but also the idea of originality. This is what Duchamp did with his famous Urinal.[4] As it is commonly known, he did nothing but choose a work that exposed the artist's role in art practice and her/his relation to the growing industrial world. However, he was not directly questioning the material aspect of the work of art. Conceptualism did-New York conceptualism to be exact.[5] Whether moving towards or away from the object; the point is that, in conceptualism, the materiality of the object of art was in question, or at least it was the subject of reflection. Yet, if this is to be contested, what can be said about Conceptualism is that its subject was the idea as the object of art.[6]
With new media we experience works that are not materialized in the conventional sense to which conceptualism reacted. This is in part because new media works are easily reproducible. What is unique about new media art is that it did not face what other mediums had faced in the past to be legitimated. Issues of originality and purposiveness were previously dealt with by other media such as photography and most importantly Film. In fact, new media was understood so quickly as a vehicle for efficient dissemination that it swiftly moved to affect previously existing media. New media is considered to have pronounced major reciprocal effects, especially in Cinema. As Lev Manovich explains:
Computer media redefine the very identity of cinema. In a symposium that took place in Hollywood in the spring of 1996, one of the participants provocatively referred to movies as "flatties" and to human actors as "organics" and "soft-fuzzies." As these terms accurately suggest, what used to be cinema's defining characteristics are now just default options, with many other available.[7]
Here we notice how new media's language comes to redefine how previous media is negotiated creatively. And so, it can be stated that new media art rides on the histories of previous media thus functioning allegorically. It uses the language of film and photography--not to mention painting to create works that take on different forms according to specific contexts, and the viewers accept such work because the codes at play are already common knowledge. The power of such language allows for the actual object to disappear and eventually lets information take over.
It is important to note that there is no physical object of art with many new media projects--especially Internet art. Of course we can say that we have moved on to the actual discourse and its form as information becoming the object, but when this shift happens the criticism also shifts. We can consider the role of an electronic mailing list such as Empyre in relation to intellectual capital and its new power position within the gift economy as an example where discourse becomes the object of contemplation.[8] Their description reads:
Empyre facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media by inviting guests-key new media artists, curators, theorists, producers and others to participate in thematic discussions.[9]
In such a list, discourse is always incomplete, ongoing (as the list moves from discussions from month to month), and full of slippages due to the immediacy of e-mail correspondences. Yet, those who participate in such lists have intellectual Capital that can be spent online to further their network connections. The lists depends on the academic institution to make it possible for those with the knowledge and the time to write, to participate in an activity where no actual pay is expected. This is important to consider in relation to early paradigms of conceptualism, which aimed to problematize institutionalization and academization of art discourse in the art institution.
What actually happens with this shift from object to information is that the artist --in particular the new media artist--can develop work using a materialist approach following the parameters of conceptualism while not worrying about an object and this may be why some people confuse new media practice following a materialist analysis with Conceptualism as understood with the likes of Michael Asher or (to show the complexity of Conceptual art) Adriane Piper. However, the basic criticism that made conceptualism a specific movement of resistance is no longer there; meaning, the object of art is no longer expected to be present, or critiqued in order to call something art, in the realm of new media. This type of criticism itself has become institutionalized, becoming part of what today is called "Institutional Critique." This does not mean that there is no such thing as a conceptual online practice that of critiquing the object or the institution, only that the criticism of such practice is quite different because the object of art is information (data) that can be presented in various forms.
So, the object of art (of new media) is metadata/data. Materialization of information (however this may be) is an after effect of power relations ending in careful distribution through diverse forms--for the information can be reconfigured to meet the demand of a locality according to a global market. This is the object of contemplation in new media practice and this is where artists who have made works of note in such a field have focused. And here we can find renewed forms of resistance, and new forms of criticism.
To further complicate this, the new media artwork is not easily labeled as just "art"; much of it crosses over to activism, hacktivism, and pervasive media. Without going into detailed definitions of these terms, it should be pointed out that they are all activities that actually influence the political spectrum around the world. It would appear then that the lines between art for a selective audience and mass media start to blur in New Media Art practice. And this is the model that carries the conceptual trace. The reason being that in new media, and online practice because there is no actual object, the focus is by default on the idea. This is the major difference in the aesthetics at play; meaning that the type of resistance expected of a New York conceptual avant-garde practice is not expected of online practice. This does not mean that some artists are not critical following the tradition of previous conceptualists, it just means that such practice is actually a specific choice. The model for new media practice is dependent on ideas not forms, and this is particular to new media, just like objecthood is for painting and sculpture in the fine arts.
1 MTAA, http://turbulence.org/Works/1year/ See Review:
http://www.netartreview.net/
weeklyFeatures/2005_01_09_archive.html
2 Alexander Alberro , "Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977," Conceptual Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press, 1999), xvi-xxxvii.
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
4 The pros and cons are reviewed by Thierry De Duve, see Thierry De Duve, "Contra Duchamp," Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1998), 454-462.
5 Joseph Kosuth, "Intentions," Conceptual Art: a Critical Anthology, 460-469.
6 Sol Le Witt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," Conceptual Art..., 12-17.
7 Lev Manovich, "Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image," The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: 2000), 293.
8 Empyre, http://www.subtle.net/empyre/
9 Ibid.
Copies from: http://www.netartreview.net/monthly/0705_3.html
Saturday, December 29, 2007
First Surrealist Manifesto, ANDRÉ BRETON
From Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, 1924
We are still living under the reign of logic, but the logical processes of our time apply only to the solution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which remains in fashion allows for the consideration of only those facts narrowly relevant to our experience. Logical conclusions, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say, boundaries have been assigned even to ex- perience. It revolves in a cage from which release is becoming increasingly difficult. It too depends upon immediate utility and is guarded by common sense. In the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we have suc- ceeded in dismissing from our minds anything that, rightly or wrongly, could be regarded as superstition or myth; and we have proscribed every way of seeking the truth which does not conform to convention. It would appear that it is by sheer chance that an aspect of intellectual life - and by far the most important in my opinion — about which no one was supposed to be concerned any longer has, recently, been brought back to light. Credit for this must go to Freud. On the evidence of his discoveries a current of opinion is at last developing which will enable the explorer of the human mind to extend his investigations, since he will be empowered to deal with more than merely summary realities. Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights. If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them; first to capture them and later to submit them, should the occasion arise, to the control of reason. The analysts themselves can only gain by this. But it is im- portant to note that there is no method fixed a priori for the execution of this enterprise, that until the new order it can be considered the province of poets as well as scholars, and that its success does not depend upon the more or less capricious routes which will be followed.
It was only fitting that Freud should appear with his critique on the dream. In fact, it is incredible that this important part of psychic activity has still attracted so little attention. (For, at least from man's birth to his death, thought presents no solution of continuity; the sum of dreaming moments - even taking into consideration pure dream alone, that of sleep - is from the point of view of time no less than the sum of moments of reality, which we shall confine to waking moments.) I have always been astounded by the extreme disproportion in the importance and seriousness assigned to events of the waking moments and to those of sleep by the ordinary observer. Man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all at the mercy of his memory, and the memory normally delights in feebly retracing the circumstance of the dream for him, depriving it of all actual consequence and obliterating the only determinant from the point at which he thinks he abandoned this constant hope, this anxiety, a few hours earlier. He has the illusion of continuing something worthwhile. The dream finds itself relegated to a parenthesis, like the night. And in general it gives no more counsel than the night. This singular state of affairs seems to invite a few reflections:
1. Within the limits to which its performance is restricted (or what passes for performance), the dream, according to all outward appearances, is continuous and bears traces of organization. Only memory claims the right to edit it, to suppress transitions and present us with a series of dreams rather than the dream. Similarly, at no given instant do we have more than a distinct representation of realities whose co-ordination is a matter of will.(1) It is important to note that nothing leads to a greater dissipation of the constituent elements of the dream. I regret discussing this according to a formula which in principle ex- cludes the dream. For how long, sleeping logicians, philosophers? I would like to sleep in order to enable myself to surrender to sleepers, as I surrender to those who read me with their eyes open, in order to stop the conscious rhythm of my thought from prevailing over this material. Perhaps my dream of last night was a continuation of the preceding night's, and will be continued tonight with an admirable precision. It could be, as they say. And as it is in no way proven that, in such a case, the 'reality' with which I am concerned even exists in the dream state, or that it does not sink into the immemorial, then why should I not concede to the dream what I sometimes refuse to reality - that weight of self-assurance which by its own terms is not exposed to my denial? Why should I not expect more of the dream sign than I do of a daily increasing degree of consciousness? Could not the dreams as well be applied to the solution of life's fundamental problems? Are these problems the same in one case as in the other, and do they already exist in the dream? Is the dream less oppressed by sanctions than the rest? I am growing old and, perhaps more than this reality to which I believe myself confined, it is the dream, and the detachment that I owe to it, which is ageing me.
2 I return to the waking state. I am obliged to retain it as a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind show a strange tendency to disorientation under these conditions (this is the clue to slips of the tongue and lapses of all kinds whose secret is just beginning to be surrendered to us), but when function- ing normally the mind still seems to obey none other than those suggestions which rise from that deep night I am commending. Sound as it may be, its equilibrium is relative. The mind hardly dares express itself and, when it does, is limited to stating that this idea or that woman has an effect on it. What effect it cannot say; thus it gives the measure of its subjectivism and nothing more. The idea, the woman, disturbs it, disposes it to less severity. Their role is to isolate one second of its discappearance and remove it to the sky in that glorious acceleration that it can be, that it is. Then, as a last resort, the mind invokes chance - a more obscure divinity than the others - to whom it attributes all its aberrations. Who says that the angle from which that idea is presented which affects the mind, as well as what the mind loves in that woman's eye, is not precisely the same thing that attracts the mind to its dream and reunites it with data lost through its own error? And if things were otherwise, of what might the mind not be capable? I should like to present it with the key to that passage.
3 The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. Kill, plunder more quickly, love as much as you wish. And if you die, are you not sure of being roused from the dead? Let yourself be led. Events will not tolerate deferment. You have no name. Everything Is inestimably easy.
What power, I wonder, what power so much more generous than others confers this natural aspect upon the dream and makes me welcome unreservedly a throng of episodes whose strangeness would overwhelm me if they were hap- pening as I write this? And yet I can believe it with my own eyes, my own ears. That great day has come, that beast has spoken.
If man's awakening is harsher, if he breaks the spell too well, it is because he has been led to form a poor idea of expiation.
4 When the time comes when we can submit the dream to a methodical examination, when by methods yet to be determined we succeed in realizing the dream in its entirety (and that implies a memory discipline measurable in generations, but we can still begin by recording salient facts), when the dream's curve is developed with an unequalled breadth and regularity, then we can hope that mysteries which are not really mysteries will give way to the great Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these two states -- outwardly so contradic- tory -- which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak, I am aiming for its conquest, certain that I myself shall not attain it, but too indifferent to my death not to calculate the joys of such possession.
They say that not long ago, just before he went to sleep, Saint-Pol-Roux placed a placard on the door of his manor at Camaret which read: THE POET WORKS.
There is still a great deal to say, but I did want to touch lightly, in passing, upon a subject which in itself would require a very long exposition with a dif- ferent precision. I shall return to it. For the time being my intention has been to see that justice was done to that hatred of the marvellous which rages in certain men, that ridicule under which they would like to crush it. Let us resolve, therefore: the Marvellous is always beautiful, everything marvellous is beautiful. Nothing but the Marvellous is beautiful.
... One night, before falling asleep, I became aware of a most bizarre sentence, clearly articulated to the point where it was impossible to change a word of it, but still separate from the sound of any voice. It came to me bearing no trace of the events with which I was involved at that time, at least to my conscious knowledge. It seemed to me a highly insistent sentence - a sentence, I might say, which knocked at the window. I quickly took note of it and was prepared to disregard it when something about its whole character held me back. The sentence truly astounded me. Unfortunately I still cannot remember the exact words to this day, but it was something like: 'A man is cut in half by the window'; but it can only suffer from ambiguity, accompanied as it was by the feeble visual representation of a walking man cut in half by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. ^ It was probably a simple mat- ter of a man leaning on the window and then straightening up. But the window followed the movements of the man, and I realized that I was dealing with a very rare type of image. Immediately I had the idea of incorporating it into my poetic material, but no sooner had I invested it with poetic form than it went on to give way to a scarcely intermittent succession of sentences which surprised me no less than the first and gave me the impression of such a free gift that the control which I had had over myself up to that point seemed illusory and I no longer thought of anything but how to put an end to the interminable quarrel which was taking place within me.(3)
Totally involved as I was at the time with Freud, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some occasion to practise on the sick during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain from a patient - a spoken monologue uttered as rapidly as possible, over which the critical faculty of the subject has no control, unencumbered by any reticence, which is spoken thought as far as such a thing is possible. It seemed to me, and still does - the manner in which the sentence about the man cut in two came to me proves it - that the speed of thought is no greater than that of words, and that it does not necessarily defy language or the moving pen. It was with this in mind that Philippe Soupault (with whom I had shared these first conclusions) and I undertook to cover some paper with writing, with a laudable contempt for what might result in terms of literature. The ease of realization did the rest. At the end of the first day we were able to read to each other around fifty pages obtained by this method, and began to compare our results. Altogether, those of Soupault and my own presented a remarkable similarity, even including the same faults in construction: in both cases there was the illusion of an extra- ordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable assortment of images of a quality such as we would never have been capable of achieving in ordinary writing, a very vivid graphic quality, and here and there an acutely comic passage. The only difference between our texts seemed to me essentially due to our respective natures (Soupault's is less static than mine) and, if I may hazard a slight criticism, due to the fact that he had made the mistake of distributing a few words in the way of titles at the head of certain pages — no doubt in the spirit of mystification. On the other hand, I must give him credit for maintaining his steadfast opposition to the slightest alteration in the course of any passage which seemed to me rather badly put. He was completely right on this point, of course.(4) In fact it is very difficult to appreciate the full value of the various elements when confronted by them. It can even be said to be impossible to appreciate them at the first reading. These elements are outwardly as strange to you who have written them as to anyone else, and you are naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are especially endowed with a very high degree of immediate absurdity. The peculiarity of this absurdity, on closer examination, comes from their capitulation to everything — both inad- missible and legitimate - In the world, to produce a revelation of a certain number of premises and facts generally no less objective than any others.
In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire - who died recently, and who appears to have consistently obeyed a similar impulse to ours without ever really sacrificing mediocre literary means - Soupault and I used the name SURREALISM to designate the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal and with which we were anxious to benefit our friends. Today I do not believe anything more need be said about this word. The meaning which we have given it has generally prevailed over Apollinaire's meaning. With even more justification we could have used SUPERNATURALISM, employed by Gerard de Nerval in the dedication of Filles de Feu.(5) In fact, Nerval appears to have possessed to an admirable extent the spirit to which we refer. Apollinaire, on the other hand, possessed only the letter of surrealism (which was still imper- fect) and showed himself powerless to give it the theoretical insight that engages us. Here are two passages by Nerval which appear most significant in this regard:
'I will explain to you, my dear Dumas, the phenomenon of which you spoke above. As you know, there are certain story-tellers who cannot invent without identifying themselves with the characters from their imagination. You know with what conviction our old friend Nodier told how he had had the misfortune to be guillotined at the time of the Revolution; one became so convinced that one wondered how he had managed to stick his head back on.'
'... And since you have had the imprudence to cite one of the sonnets composed in this state of SUPERNATURALIST reverie, as the Germans v/ould say, you must hear all of them. You will find them at the end of the volume. They are hardly more obscure than Hegel's metaphysics or Swedenborg's MEMORABLES, and would lose their charm in explication, if such a thing were possible, so concede me at least the merit of their expression . . .'(6)
It would be dishonest to dispute our right to employ the word SURREALISM in the very particular sense in which we intend it, for it is clear that before we came along this word amounted to nothing. Thus I shall define it once and for all:
SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp. 66-75.
copied from: http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/F98/SurrealistManifesto.htm
We are still living under the reign of logic, but the logical processes of our time apply only to the solution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which remains in fashion allows for the consideration of only those facts narrowly relevant to our experience. Logical conclusions, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say, boundaries have been assigned even to ex- perience. It revolves in a cage from which release is becoming increasingly difficult. It too depends upon immediate utility and is guarded by common sense. In the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we have suc- ceeded in dismissing from our minds anything that, rightly or wrongly, could be regarded as superstition or myth; and we have proscribed every way of seeking the truth which does not conform to convention. It would appear that it is by sheer chance that an aspect of intellectual life - and by far the most important in my opinion — about which no one was supposed to be concerned any longer has, recently, been brought back to light. Credit for this must go to Freud. On the evidence of his discoveries a current of opinion is at last developing which will enable the explorer of the human mind to extend his investigations, since he will be empowered to deal with more than merely summary realities. Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights. If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them; first to capture them and later to submit them, should the occasion arise, to the control of reason. The analysts themselves can only gain by this. But it is im- portant to note that there is no method fixed a priori for the execution of this enterprise, that until the new order it can be considered the province of poets as well as scholars, and that its success does not depend upon the more or less capricious routes which will be followed.
It was only fitting that Freud should appear with his critique on the dream. In fact, it is incredible that this important part of psychic activity has still attracted so little attention. (For, at least from man's birth to his death, thought presents no solution of continuity; the sum of dreaming moments - even taking into consideration pure dream alone, that of sleep - is from the point of view of time no less than the sum of moments of reality, which we shall confine to waking moments.) I have always been astounded by the extreme disproportion in the importance and seriousness assigned to events of the waking moments and to those of sleep by the ordinary observer. Man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all at the mercy of his memory, and the memory normally delights in feebly retracing the circumstance of the dream for him, depriving it of all actual consequence and obliterating the only determinant from the point at which he thinks he abandoned this constant hope, this anxiety, a few hours earlier. He has the illusion of continuing something worthwhile. The dream finds itself relegated to a parenthesis, like the night. And in general it gives no more counsel than the night. This singular state of affairs seems to invite a few reflections:
1. Within the limits to which its performance is restricted (or what passes for performance), the dream, according to all outward appearances, is continuous and bears traces of organization. Only memory claims the right to edit it, to suppress transitions and present us with a series of dreams rather than the dream. Similarly, at no given instant do we have more than a distinct representation of realities whose co-ordination is a matter of will.(1) It is important to note that nothing leads to a greater dissipation of the constituent elements of the dream. I regret discussing this according to a formula which in principle ex- cludes the dream. For how long, sleeping logicians, philosophers? I would like to sleep in order to enable myself to surrender to sleepers, as I surrender to those who read me with their eyes open, in order to stop the conscious rhythm of my thought from prevailing over this material. Perhaps my dream of last night was a continuation of the preceding night's, and will be continued tonight with an admirable precision. It could be, as they say. And as it is in no way proven that, in such a case, the 'reality' with which I am concerned even exists in the dream state, or that it does not sink into the immemorial, then why should I not concede to the dream what I sometimes refuse to reality - that weight of self-assurance which by its own terms is not exposed to my denial? Why should I not expect more of the dream sign than I do of a daily increasing degree of consciousness? Could not the dreams as well be applied to the solution of life's fundamental problems? Are these problems the same in one case as in the other, and do they already exist in the dream? Is the dream less oppressed by sanctions than the rest? I am growing old and, perhaps more than this reality to which I believe myself confined, it is the dream, and the detachment that I owe to it, which is ageing me.
2 I return to the waking state. I am obliged to retain it as a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind show a strange tendency to disorientation under these conditions (this is the clue to slips of the tongue and lapses of all kinds whose secret is just beginning to be surrendered to us), but when function- ing normally the mind still seems to obey none other than those suggestions which rise from that deep night I am commending. Sound as it may be, its equilibrium is relative. The mind hardly dares express itself and, when it does, is limited to stating that this idea or that woman has an effect on it. What effect it cannot say; thus it gives the measure of its subjectivism and nothing more. The idea, the woman, disturbs it, disposes it to less severity. Their role is to isolate one second of its discappearance and remove it to the sky in that glorious acceleration that it can be, that it is. Then, as a last resort, the mind invokes chance - a more obscure divinity than the others - to whom it attributes all its aberrations. Who says that the angle from which that idea is presented which affects the mind, as well as what the mind loves in that woman's eye, is not precisely the same thing that attracts the mind to its dream and reunites it with data lost through its own error? And if things were otherwise, of what might the mind not be capable? I should like to present it with the key to that passage.
3 The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. Kill, plunder more quickly, love as much as you wish. And if you die, are you not sure of being roused from the dead? Let yourself be led. Events will not tolerate deferment. You have no name. Everything Is inestimably easy.
What power, I wonder, what power so much more generous than others confers this natural aspect upon the dream and makes me welcome unreservedly a throng of episodes whose strangeness would overwhelm me if they were hap- pening as I write this? And yet I can believe it with my own eyes, my own ears. That great day has come, that beast has spoken.
If man's awakening is harsher, if he breaks the spell too well, it is because he has been led to form a poor idea of expiation.
4 When the time comes when we can submit the dream to a methodical examination, when by methods yet to be determined we succeed in realizing the dream in its entirety (and that implies a memory discipline measurable in generations, but we can still begin by recording salient facts), when the dream's curve is developed with an unequalled breadth and regularity, then we can hope that mysteries which are not really mysteries will give way to the great Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these two states -- outwardly so contradic- tory -- which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak, I am aiming for its conquest, certain that I myself shall not attain it, but too indifferent to my death not to calculate the joys of such possession.
They say that not long ago, just before he went to sleep, Saint-Pol-Roux placed a placard on the door of his manor at Camaret which read: THE POET WORKS.
There is still a great deal to say, but I did want to touch lightly, in passing, upon a subject which in itself would require a very long exposition with a dif- ferent precision. I shall return to it. For the time being my intention has been to see that justice was done to that hatred of the marvellous which rages in certain men, that ridicule under which they would like to crush it. Let us resolve, therefore: the Marvellous is always beautiful, everything marvellous is beautiful. Nothing but the Marvellous is beautiful.
... One night, before falling asleep, I became aware of a most bizarre sentence, clearly articulated to the point where it was impossible to change a word of it, but still separate from the sound of any voice. It came to me bearing no trace of the events with which I was involved at that time, at least to my conscious knowledge. It seemed to me a highly insistent sentence - a sentence, I might say, which knocked at the window. I quickly took note of it and was prepared to disregard it when something about its whole character held me back. The sentence truly astounded me. Unfortunately I still cannot remember the exact words to this day, but it was something like: 'A man is cut in half by the window'; but it can only suffer from ambiguity, accompanied as it was by the feeble visual representation of a walking man cut in half by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. ^ It was probably a simple mat- ter of a man leaning on the window and then straightening up. But the window followed the movements of the man, and I realized that I was dealing with a very rare type of image. Immediately I had the idea of incorporating it into my poetic material, but no sooner had I invested it with poetic form than it went on to give way to a scarcely intermittent succession of sentences which surprised me no less than the first and gave me the impression of such a free gift that the control which I had had over myself up to that point seemed illusory and I no longer thought of anything but how to put an end to the interminable quarrel which was taking place within me.(3)
Totally involved as I was at the time with Freud, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some occasion to practise on the sick during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain from a patient - a spoken monologue uttered as rapidly as possible, over which the critical faculty of the subject has no control, unencumbered by any reticence, which is spoken thought as far as such a thing is possible. It seemed to me, and still does - the manner in which the sentence about the man cut in two came to me proves it - that the speed of thought is no greater than that of words, and that it does not necessarily defy language or the moving pen. It was with this in mind that Philippe Soupault (with whom I had shared these first conclusions) and I undertook to cover some paper with writing, with a laudable contempt for what might result in terms of literature. The ease of realization did the rest. At the end of the first day we were able to read to each other around fifty pages obtained by this method, and began to compare our results. Altogether, those of Soupault and my own presented a remarkable similarity, even including the same faults in construction: in both cases there was the illusion of an extra- ordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable assortment of images of a quality such as we would never have been capable of achieving in ordinary writing, a very vivid graphic quality, and here and there an acutely comic passage. The only difference between our texts seemed to me essentially due to our respective natures (Soupault's is less static than mine) and, if I may hazard a slight criticism, due to the fact that he had made the mistake of distributing a few words in the way of titles at the head of certain pages — no doubt in the spirit of mystification. On the other hand, I must give him credit for maintaining his steadfast opposition to the slightest alteration in the course of any passage which seemed to me rather badly put. He was completely right on this point, of course.(4) In fact it is very difficult to appreciate the full value of the various elements when confronted by them. It can even be said to be impossible to appreciate them at the first reading. These elements are outwardly as strange to you who have written them as to anyone else, and you are naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are especially endowed with a very high degree of immediate absurdity. The peculiarity of this absurdity, on closer examination, comes from their capitulation to everything — both inad- missible and legitimate - In the world, to produce a revelation of a certain number of premises and facts generally no less objective than any others.
In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire - who died recently, and who appears to have consistently obeyed a similar impulse to ours without ever really sacrificing mediocre literary means - Soupault and I used the name SURREALISM to designate the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal and with which we were anxious to benefit our friends. Today I do not believe anything more need be said about this word. The meaning which we have given it has generally prevailed over Apollinaire's meaning. With even more justification we could have used SUPERNATURALISM, employed by Gerard de Nerval in the dedication of Filles de Feu.(5) In fact, Nerval appears to have possessed to an admirable extent the spirit to which we refer. Apollinaire, on the other hand, possessed only the letter of surrealism (which was still imper- fect) and showed himself powerless to give it the theoretical insight that engages us. Here are two passages by Nerval which appear most significant in this regard:
'I will explain to you, my dear Dumas, the phenomenon of which you spoke above. As you know, there are certain story-tellers who cannot invent without identifying themselves with the characters from their imagination. You know with what conviction our old friend Nodier told how he had had the misfortune to be guillotined at the time of the Revolution; one became so convinced that one wondered how he had managed to stick his head back on.'
'... And since you have had the imprudence to cite one of the sonnets composed in this state of SUPERNATURALIST reverie, as the Germans v/ould say, you must hear all of them. You will find them at the end of the volume. They are hardly more obscure than Hegel's metaphysics or Swedenborg's MEMORABLES, and would lose their charm in explication, if such a thing were possible, so concede me at least the merit of their expression . . .'(6)
It would be dishonest to dispute our right to employ the word SURREALISM in the very particular sense in which we intend it, for it is clear that before we came along this word amounted to nothing. Thus I shall define it once and for all:
SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp. 66-75.
copied from: http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/F98/SurrealistManifesto.htm
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