See this Sound

Supported by funding from Linz 2009 - European Capital of Culture

Project Directors: Dieter Daniels, Sandra Naumann
Project Team: Mario Röhrle, Jan Thoben, Bernhard Pusch, Heike Helfert, Michaela Schörflinger, Adam Dörflinger, Carolina Hubelnig, Linda Thalmann, Dietmar Offenhuber , Stefan Schilcher
Cooperation Partner: Lentos Art Museum Linz, 5uper.net, Vienna

Project Period: 11/2006 - 12/2009
Project Objective: exhibition, conference, catalogue, scholarly publication and web platform

Project Description

The project explores the present and the past of the connection of image and sound in art, media and perception.

The starting point for this is the fact that our world of experience today is characterized by an omnipresence of audiovisual products and structures, in which cultural image and sound production is inextricably intertwined in terms of media technology, market strategy, and artistically. “See this Sound” reacts to this by presenting and discussing various realizations of contemporary art and art studies. The current fields of reference range from pop culture to theories of perception and media technology.

A thematic review of the historical deep layers of acoustic and optical culture and their radical transformation in the past 150 years forms the background for considering current developments. At the same time, we reflect on the omnipresence of audiovisual products that we experience everywhere – and often merely tolerate – but whose framework conditions or possible alternatives are not immediately visible or audible. Complex and surprising aesthetic experiences are created through the contextualized presentation of multifaceted works rich in references by contemporary artists, and processes of cultural insight are set in motion. The aim of the project is to link contemporary visual art and media art together with historical predecessors and aspects external to art.

Strategically, the project “See this Sound” stands for the function of the Institute as an intersection between the fields of contemporary art and media art, art history and media theory. In light of a growing tendency since the late 1990s towards a divergence of the respective discourses and increasing specialization with equally different audience segments, participating in a major, audience-magnet event presents an opportunity for the Institute to set this dialogue between media art and contemporary art in motion again.

Exhibition in the Lentos Art Museum Linz «See this Sound – Promises of Image and Sound» - 28. Aug. 2009 - 10. Jan. 2010

The exhibition in the Lentos Art Museum will make several central aspects of the manifold relations between image and sound accessible in an interdisciplinary way, bringing together exemplary artistic works and cultural history perspectives. The cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research enables the integration of specific media history issues and research approaches in the exhibition. The exhibition shows technical, perception-related and media-reflexive aspects of the coupling of image and sound from the beginnings up to the present, as well as important poetic conceptual positions that are important for contemporary visual artists. This constellation will enable them to mutually contour and illuminate one another.

Online platform of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. «See this Sound - Audiovisualogy»

The scholarly interdisciplinary and artistic genre-crossing character of the project is expressed particularly in the framework of an online platform on the subject of sound-image relations (bilingual German-English).
This interdisciplinary field of knowledge has previously only been developed from the perspective of different fields of expertise. For this reason, the audio-visual lexicon pursues the goal of establishing a cross-disciplinary knowledge base of image-sound relations with contributions from experts. Experts from art history, musicology, film theory, media studies, theater studies, pop theory, cognitive psychology and neurology contribute their respective perspectives to an “audiovisualogy” as a cross-section of these academic fields. Text contributions from research work at the institute will be conjoined here with contributions from external authors.
The entire spectrum of audiovisual arts and phenomena will be represented in a lexicon-type form through a total of 35 historical longitudinal sections and systematic cross-sections. Interdisciplinary themes will be examined in depth in longer essays. Examples of work will be audiovisually documented and academically commented and contextualized. Audiovisuality is thus both the theme and the method of the online platform. The mutually complementary lexicon entries linked with key words and time sections and the audiovisual examples of work result in a totality opening up new conjunctions of meanings. This procedure also enables the overlapping and networking of artistic and scholarly elements of the project and the development of new ways of the multimedia communication and representation of science and art. An interface developed at the institute in collaboration with the line of research “Knowledge Representation and Visualization” will connect the online platform with the exhibition.
www.see-this-sound.at

Conference of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Reserach. «See this Sound – Sound-Image Relations in Art and Media»

An interdisciplinary exchange among the theoretical and aesthetic thematic fields of the project is the goal of an international conference of the institute. The conference touches on the points of contact among various academic disciplines, including art and music studies, media and art theory, media archeology and the history of technology. Artistic presentations will also be integrated in the course of the conference to stimulate a dialogue between art and science (see symposium).

Academic Publications of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research.

In addition to being published online, the compendium as well as the essays from the online platform will each be published in book form. 

Resources

• Audiovisualogie: Text by Dieter Daniels und Sandra Naumann (so far only available in German).
• Linz 2009 – European Capital of Culture (web site)
• Lentos Art Museum Linz (web site)
• See this Sound (web site)