THE AUDIOVISUAL BREAKTHROUGH
Ana Carvalho and
Cornelia Lund (eds.)
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41
83
109
129
THE AUDIOVISUAL BREAKTHROUGH
7
PRACTICE AND DISCOURSE.
AN INTRODUCTION AS MANUAL
Ana Carvalho and
Cornelia Lund
The Audiovisual Breakthrough guides us
across the landscape of artistic live practices that present sound and image through
technological means. This landscape has
been radically reshaped during the last 20
years due to technological developments
causing what we might call an “audiovisual
breakthrough,” which means that audiovisual artistic production has gained a certain
visibility and a certain, even institutionalized,
standing. The main objective of this book,
however, is not to portray this landscape
with its main players and their activities,
but to find out more about the underlying
concepts that help us explain these activities.
� Whoever has been trying to write an
academic or curatorial text on this area has
probably felt trapped in a confusing web
of unclear, or even inconsistent, definitions.
Visual music, expanded cinema, VJing, live
cinema, and live audiovisual performance
are the most widely used concepts here,
each of these terms addressing a different
angle of contemporary audiovisual production contextualized within specific features and a related history. Holding this in
mind, The Audiovisual Breakthrough aims at
developing useful definitions for both the
theoretical debate and the performance
context. � � � We might of course say—
especially as performers—that we “really
don’t care” and that we are “more interested
in doing than explaining,” 1 [
The survey was carried out in 2014. It consisted
of an international online survey and, parallel
to it, a survey mostly addressing the Viennese
community and undertaken in the context of the
sound:frame festival. The results are discussed
below in this text.
as one of the participants in our survey put
it. At this point, it can prove interesting
to introduce the history of this book and the
project behind it, which will show that
what at first glance might seem like a purely
theoretical problem is in fact very closely
linked to actual developments in the world of
audiovisual artistic production. Some time
ago, Cornelia was invited to the LaptopsRus
conference at the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Discussing the possible subject of her contribution with the curators, Shu Lea Cheang
and Maite Cajaraville, they told her how they
had been struck by VJs telling them that
they were “not doing VJing any more” but
“AV performances.” At first sight, this might
seem of little consequence, and yet such
statements lead to some interesting questions: Why is it so important to former VJs to
be considered AV performers? And were they
really doing something different? Or were
they opting for another term for other reasons? These initial questions led deeper
into the aforementioned confusing tableau
of terms and concepts and their relations
to actual performances. It soon became
9
obvious that clarifications were needed for
meaningful communication about and within the field of artistic AV production to be
possible in the future. Outsiders will
find it much easier to understand a given
context when a clear terminology is applied
and mutually understood by those involved
in it, those who construct it. The variety
in the designated meaning of terms used
by festivals, symposia, and other events
does not really offer this for our context at
the moment. Although permanent use and
critique belong to the process of practically
defining each term, the use of a clear syntax
of terms is still important for all practical
purposes now that audiovisual performative
practices have become well established.
For example, artists need to situate and
describe their work, and festivals and institutions need to announce events in their
programs to facilitate the development of
expectations on part of the public. Then
it is also necessary to set a stable ground
from which academic researchers on an
international level can move forward beyond
definitions, to elaborate on philosophical,
aesthetic, and theoretical implications
related to contemporary practices. Accordingly, this book is addressed to artists,
researchers, students, and teachers within
the field of audiovisual practices and anyone
working at their intersection with other
fields of knowledge. � Even if its history
is sometimes traced back to Pythagoras,
artistic audiovisual production owes its
current blossoming to rather recent technological developments. It is in fact continually evolving, which is one of the difficulties
of working out stable definitions. This
complexity of defining live practices with
sound and image has led us to the decision
to approach The Audiovisual Breakthrough
as a collaborative project—an approach that
also mirrors the collaborative approaches
dominant in the audiovisual field itself. �
A group of six experts gathered around the
project and decided to work out definitions
for the five aforementioned main categories.
Considering the ever-changing nature of
the field, they set out to try and define
these terms within a contemporary context,
describing the permeable borders of the
different categories, while also showing up
possible future developments. A survey was
organized to foster the dialogue with artists
and professionals involved in audiovisual
production and to gather knowledge about
their ways of working and defining their own
work. � When the group met for the first
time at sound:frame festival 2014 in Vienna,
it was decided that the final outcome of
the project should take the form of a book,
including texts on the five categories and
the results of the survey. Each text is written
by a member of the group who is a recognized expert in the topic. Collectively, the
group gathers different approaches to the
subjects at stake: as writers, teachers,
researchers, artists, curators, and editors,
the authors come from different contexts
and approaches, while also moving between
different countries. The texts are informed
by these discursive differences, providing
the readers an opportunity to gain insight
into other, wider discourses and examples.
� � The project group members are: Ana
11
Carvalho, a Portuguese live video composer,
performer, and editor for live audiovisual
performance; Eva Fischer, an Austrian art
historian, curator, visualist, and founder
and director of sound:frame Festival for
Audiovisual Expressions for VJing/visualists;
Cornelia Lund, a German art historian,
media theorist, and curator for visual music;
Adeena Mey, a Swiss-Cambodian critic and
researcher for expanded cinema; Gabriel
Menotti, a Brazilian curator and lecturer
at the Federal University of Espírito Santo
for live cinema. The survey was designed
and organized by Maria Pfeifer, an Austrian
comparative literature scholar and part of
the sound:frame festival team. This group
was later joined by Eva-Maria Offermann,
a German graphic designer working on
experimental book projects and poster art,
who has designed the publication as a
graphic comment on audiovisuality. ∫ While
the final texts are each written by a single
author and informed by her or his specific
background, the framework of the whole
project is the result of collective research
and discussions that started before and
went on after the meeting in Vienna. As the
five terms in question are, on the one hand,
fashioned by academic and non-academic
debate and, on the other hand, by contemporary audiovisual art practice, it seemed
imperative not only to analyze the discourse
but also to survey the field of audiovisual
art practice. Another vital part of the project
was therefore the exchange with artists and
professionals involved in audiovisual production. Parallel to the meeting in Vienna, the
team had the opportunity to swap ideas
with several Vienna-based artists including
Anita Hafner (Lost in Bass), Jan Lauth (mediaopera), Gerald Moser, Station Rose, and
others in the framework of a public discussion at the sound:frame festival. Apart from
personal meetings and our intimate knowledge of the field, the survey proved an
important tool for getting into contact with
as many practitioners as possible. Although
the results are not fully representative but
rather indicative of an international scene, 2 [
The number of participants was not large enough
and their countries of origin were not diverse
enough to make the survey truly representative.
they were very helpful for verifying perceived
tendencies and also the pertinence of the
discussions the group had been leading
during the workshop in Vienna. The survey
is included in this publication on different
levels: some articles refer to it directly, like
those on “Live Audiovisual Performance”
and “VJing,” while it is of more indirect relevance for others—for example the article
on “Visual Music,” since practically none
of the participants in the survey consider
themselves as visual music artists. To give
readers an insight into the nature of the
questions and answers, the statistical information gained from the survey is represented by visualizations, as well as examples
of some answers to specific questions.
All these different forms of exchange
allowed us to define some basic parameters
for the project as well as a common methodological basis. Correspondingly, before
we start our discussion of the field of audiovisual artistic production in depth, it seems
13
useful to come to an understanding about
the basic meaning of the term “audiovisual.”
� Generally speaking, audiovisual works
range across media such as TV, cinema, and
live shows to include all the possibilities
that present a stimulus to both auditory
and visual sensorial systems. These media
may not even be technologically developed,
puppetry and theater can be audiovisual.
To refer to a work as audiovisual already
implies an intermedia connection, one whose
very nature lies in the combination of the
two words put together: audio and visual.
By itself, “audiovisuality” is not an artistic
practice but describes a generic group of
practices. Within this group, production is
continually developing. Our main fields of
interest are the live practices that include
audio and image, and even there the
variety of works presented expresses the
enormous possibilities within this combination. Consequently, part of the difficulties
of working out stable definitions are the
infinite technical, conceptual, and aesthetic
possibilities for using sound and image. ○
The Audiovisual Breakthrough follows the
main purpose of making this complexity
somehow manageable by putting forth and
elaborating on definitions for the five main
concepts that we have identified within this
field: visual music, expanded cinema, live
cinema, VJing, and live audiovisual performance. While our focus lies on these terms
as they are used within a contemporary
context, historical references are, of course,
considered in the individual articles. The
main periods of reference are, very generally speaking: first, what we could call the
period of synaesthesia, from around 1900
until the 1930s, when many modernists
showed an interest in correlations between
music and the visual arts, and also fresh
ideas of how sound and images could come
together were stimulated by the newly
invented medium of film. Second, the 1960s,
when ideas of the “expanded arts” 3 [
See, for example: George Maciunas,
“Expanded Arts Diagram,” Film Culture—
Expanded Arts 43 (1966), p. 7.
gave a new elan to the combination of sound
and image. Third, the period of ongoing
digitalization from the 1990s on, when the
possibilities of combining sound and images
in realtime became gradually more powerful and faster. ≈ It is hardly original to
state the impossibility of arranging any field
of activities in neat boxes—and yet this is,
of course, very true for the five terms in
question and their definitions. They are all
players on the same grounds and can therefore only be defined in relation to each other.
Furthermore, no field exists completely
independent from its surroundings, and thus
it is necessary to define the concepts also
in relation to other relevant art or music
practices. � � � Considering the everchanging nature of audiovisual live practices,
our articles aim to develop relational and
fluid definitions, describing the permeable
borders of the different categories, and
also showing possible future developments.
Nevertheless, to define always means to
include and exclude certain aspects, and
we are aware of the problem that there are
hundreds of individual cases that would
15
be worth a special case study. This project,
however, as a mostly theoretical work,
follows a more general approach: trying to
offer a framework that will fit a majority
of cases, and attempting to develop manageable definitions for the time being. ∆ ∆ ∆
∆ ∆ Two questions in our survey pointed
directly to the five concepts, asking participants to choose the definition they felt was
most suited to describe their practice and
their own role (e.g. as a VJ or live cinema
artist). While many of the participants chose
between the options provided, a large
number also chose the possibility to give
an open-text response, providing their own
descriptions for their practices (see p. 71).
They offer many more terms than the ones
we define in this book—so how did we come
to our choices? As already mentioned, we
selected the most widely used concepts,
not necessarily in the eyes of all the practitioners themselves, but surely if we take
into consideration institutional contexts
such as festivals, project spaces, museums,
and the paratexts they produce, as well as
academic discourse. The decision to focus
on live performance was prompted by our
research, which had shown us that the
definitions in this field were the most
unstable. This is also due to the fact that
some of the concepts, such as VJing, live
cinema, and live audiovisual performance,
are comparatively recent and therefore
still evolving, whereas the older and more
established concepts, such as visual music
and expanded cinema, have to be reformulated in view of current developments.
Visual music and expanded cinema are also
the two concepts not necessarily linked to
performance, expanded cinema doesn’t
even have to be audiovisual. We chose to
integrate them all the same, since a very
important part of what takes place under
these denominations is still performative
and audiovisual. 4 [
Even if expanded cinema is not per se an audiovisual practice, the overview introducing the
book Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film
includes “VJ events and ‘real-time visual
performance.’” David Curtis, A.L. Rees, Duncan
White, Steven Ball (eds.), Expanded Cinema: Art,
Performance, Film, London: Tate Publishing,
2011, p. 9. Adeena Mey’s article in the present
publication does not especially address the topic
of audiovisuality, instead it opens up a wider
picture of expanded cinema and its relation to
performance with image and sound. For some case
studies see e.g. Maxa Zoller, “Sound in Expanded
Cinema: Malcolm Le Grice’s Berlin Horse,” in:
Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund (eds.), Audio.Visual:
On Visual Music and Related Media, Stuttgart:
Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2009, pp. 78–85.
And the articles will show that, despite the
differences between concepts, they form
an intricate web of audiovisual relations
centered around four main characteristics
that play a crucial role in our definitional
work: liveness, intermediality, performativity,
and cinematicity. � Such characteristics,
mostly tied to the shared experience of
an artistic practice developing in time and
space, might seem difficult to translate
to the pages of a book, and yet Eva-Maria
Offermann’s design develops a parallel
argument. The chosen font, GT Cinetype,
17
combines allusions to analog and digital
working processes. It is based on the design
of cinematic subtitles engraved in the film
stock by an analog laser moving only in
straight lines and therefore unable to
deliver curved letters—the angular letters
can also be read as a reference to the first
attempts in designing digital fonts, still
without postscript. Typographically, a rich set
of references is opened up to the cinematic
context and, in consequence, to moving
images, analog and digital, to projections,
and to translations from one medium to the
other. The motif underlying the layout is
the grid as structural reference to musical
composition. The grid becomes visible in
the information graphics, whose reduced
simplicity reminds us of notations. The idea
of notation is developed further by the use
of certain signs: re-notation at the end of
every paragraph in the texts, indicated by a
continually changing sign. Rhythmical notations, too: variations of signs indicating the
proportions in the graphics accentuate the
concept of signs in motion, of shifting signs.
Cinematicity and notation therefore serve
as the main elements in the design concept
to express the idea of translations, which
is so fundamental for audiovisual thought.
� We hope that by describing the genesis
of The Audiovisual Breakthrough and explaining our approach and basic working
tools, we could arouse your curiosity. Rather
than to already disclose too much of the
contents of each article, we would now like
to invite you to discover the publication
yourselves and to stroll through its contents,
both textual and graphical.
Do you prefer any context to show your work?
21
VISUAL MUSIC
23
1[
Some publications address this historical lineage explicitly
in their titles, such as “From Visual Music to the Music
Clip” in the subtitle of: Veruschka Bódy and Peter Weibel
(eds.), Clip, Klapp, Bum: Von der visuellen Musik zum
Musikvideo, Cologne: DuMont, 1987; or “Visual Music: From
the Avant-Garde to the Music Clip and VJing” in the subtitle
of: Agnes Fischer and Ines Hubert, “Visuelle Musik: Von
der Avantgarde über das Musikvideo zum VJing,” 2005,
http://server4.medienkomm.uni-halle.de/filmsound/kap1-4.
htm (accessed Sep 1, 2015); while other definitions refer
more implicitly to visual music by counting traditional
examples for visual music such as color organs or experimental films by Oskar Fischinger among their predecessors
(see 375 Wikipedians, VJing, Greyscale Press, 2010, chapter
1.1, and César Ustarroz, Teoría del VJing: Realización y
representación audiovisual a tiempo real, Madrid: Ediciones
Libertarias, 2010, chapter 3).
2[
The Punto y Raya Festival and the Reykjavík Center for
Visual Music organized a “live cinema competition” for their
joint festival edition in 2014 that was clearly defined as
a visual music festival by its description. See: http://www.
puntoyrayafestival.com/descargas/14_RVM_PyR_press_
release.pdf (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
3[
See e.g. the Visual Music Award 2015, http://www.visualmusic-award.de/index.cfm?siteid=7 (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
Cornelia Lund
Within the family of terms discussed in this publication, visual music is the oldest cousin. As such,
the term assumes two different functions: on
the one hand, it is referred to as an ancestor that
has engendered other, more recent audiovisual
expressions, while, on the other hand, visual music
is very much alive as a contemporary audiovisual
expression in its own right. In this double function
of being an antecedent of the music clip, of live
cinema, or VJing, 1 [ for example, and of still being
a player in the same ield of contemporary audiovisual production, the term has acquired an extremely broad meaning, to the point of becoming
potentially meaningless. When we think of
visual music, we probably have in mind a certain
idea of what it looks like. “Mostly abstract and nonnarrative visuals combined with sound, presented
either as ilm or as a live or realtime performance
involving projection,” could be a minimal deinition based on experience. One look at the Internet,
however, is enough to show that the situation is
more complex. Visual music seems to serve as an
umbrella term for all kinds of audiovisual production—the umbrella having become a very large
one since the advent of realtime technology, sheltering everything from live cinema, 2 [ through
music video and installations, to interactive applications. 3 [ Therefore, if we don’t wish to dismiss
25
4[
The term is generally said to have been used for the first
time (or one of the first times) by Roger Fry. He mentions
“visual music” in the catalogue of a Post-Impressionist
exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in 1912; see: Roger Fry,
Vision and Design, London: Chatto & Windus, 1920, p. 157.
Then the term appears again in connection to Kandinsky’s
paintings in an article published on August 2, 1913, in The
Nation; see: Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, p. 168.
5[
We won’t retrace the history of visual music here, it has been
done numerous times, more or less extensively, e.g. by
Bódy and Weibel, Clip, Klapp, Bum (see note 1), or by: Kerry
Brougher, Jeremy Strick, Ari Wiseman, Judith Zilczer (eds.),
Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900,
London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.
6[
See Nick Fox-Gieg, Cindy Keefer, Margaret Schedel,
“Editorial,” Organised Sound 17 (2012), p. 97; online at:
doi:10.1017/S1355771812000015 (accessed Sep 1, 2015),
and also implicitly Kerry Brougher’s article “Visual-Music
Culture,” in: Brougher, Strick, Wiseman, Zilczer, Visual
Music (see note 5), pp. 88–178.
the notion of visual music because it has become
unmanageable, a thorough examination of the ield
of contemporary visual music is imperative in
order to reestablish a more stable and viable deinition. A set of main questions will structure our
analysis, in an attempt to frame the ield from
different angles: How does contemporary visual
music relate to historical forms and preoccupations
of visual music? Where is it being made and discussed? Who are the producers and theoreticians
of visual music? In which contexts does it appear?
And inally: How does it relate to the other players
in the ield of contemporary audiovisual production? ∫ Born some hundred years ago, the term
“visual music” is deeply rooted in the artistic exploration of synaesthesia of the time. 4 [ Its historical
ancestry is traditionally located in Pythagoras’
relections on music and color being both organized in intervals. Some centuries later those relections on the physical nature of sound and color
gradually led to the discovery of sound and light
waves. From color organs and experiments with
oscilloscope techniques to digital programming, 5 [
the idea of a direct analogy between these waveforms, a mathematical system that would link
them rationally, as well as ways of converting sound
to image and vice versa, have been at the core of
visual music experiments. Consequently, visual
music artists have always seized on the latest developments in media technology or even created
new instruments customized to their needs. 6 [
27
7[
William Moritz, “Towards an Aesthetics of Visual Music,”
1986, http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/TAVM.htm
(accessed Sep 1, 2015).
8[
See http://www.corneta.org/no_44/musica_visual_el_
nuevo_arte_sinestesico.html (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
9[
Laurent Carlier, “VJing between Image and Sound,” in:
Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund (eds.), Audio.Visual:
On Visual Music and Related Media, Stuttgart: Arnoldsche
Art Publishers, 2009, p. 163.
10 [
Ibid.
11 [
Hervé Vanel, “Visual Muzak and the Regulation of the
Senses. (Notes on Nicolas Schöffer),” in: Lund and Lund,
Audio.Visual (see note 9), p. 59.
Such enthusiasm for technological solutions is so
characteristic of a certain kind of visual music
that in 1986 William Moritz even warned against
“the delusion of technology.” 7 [ Thus, it is very
typical that VJs include visual music when they outline their own genealogy. ∂ ◊ Whereas some
of the historical heritage to visual music—such as
a compositional approach that stresses the structural relationship between visuals and sounds—
is hardly contested, the common attitude toward
synaesthesia is ambivalent, to say the least. Yet its
place in the discourse and production of contemporary visual music is afirmed by titles of events
such as “Música Visual: El Nuevo Arte Sinestético”
(Caracas, 2009). 8 [ Even the most polemical attitude, which declares visual music dead “because
synaesthetic art has come to a dead-end,” 9 [
assumes that visual music is based on synaesthesia,
but adds a negative twist by deining the “hallucinatory fusion of the senses” as a mere “marketing
ploy,” as dangerous as “the myths of interactivity
and other immersive/absorbing/homogenizing
environments.” 10 [ Without actively dismissing
visual music, Hervé Vanel’s argumentation points in
a similar direction by afirming that a certain
enthusiastic discourse about the digital possibilities of intertwining music and images “belongs to
a philosophy that is deeply rooted in the utopian
dream of visual music.” 11 [ A modernist utopia,
closely linked to the wish for a “‘better society’ that
has never ceased to be beckoned through the
29
12 [
Ibid., p. 60.
13 [
See their “Call for Entries 2015,” http://www.visual-musicaward.de/index.cfm?siteid=7 (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
14 [
Jack Ox and Cindy Keefer, “On Curating Recent Digital
Abstract Visual Music,” authored for The New York Digital
Salon’s Abstract Visual Music catalogue and website,
slight revision, 2008, http://www.centerforvisualmusic.
org/Ox_Keefer_VM.htm (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
15 [
Ibid.
16 [
Fox-Gieg, Keefer, Schedel, “Editorial” (see note 6), p. 98.
diverse aspirations for a synthesis of the arts,” 12 [
which still shines through in—rather more esoteric—
formulations, such as the “holistic multi-sensual
and expressive aesthetic,” 13 [ that the Frankfurtbased Visual Music Award expects from the entries
to the competition. ∫ ∫ As modernist utopias,
however, are generally considered to have failed,
their key concepts tend to lose impact, and so synaesthesia has disappeared from a large part of
the contemporary discourse on visual music. Or it
is at least discussed with some skepticism. Keefer
and Ox acknowledge that synaesthesia is still
part of the ield of visual music, but “certainly not
the prominent or most signiicant deinition.” 14 [
Their proposed solution is the concept of “metaphoric” 15 [ synaesthesia. ◊ But, if synaesthesia
is not the central element of visual music any
more, how can the term be deined today? For FoxGieg, Keefer, and Schedel, in their “Editorial” to
one of the more recent publications on visual
music, “perhaps the most useful [deinition] refers
to visuals composed as if they were music, using
musical structures. Another deinition refers to
a visualization of music, using the structures of an
underlying composition in a new work. Still more
examples of visual music include works using
manual, mechanical, or algorithmic means of transcoding sound to image, pieces which translate
images into sound, abstract silent ilms, and even
performance painting and live cinema.” 16 [ The
idea of a structural analogy based on the model of
31
17 [
See for example Maura McDonnell, “Visual Music,” in:
Visual Music Marathon, New York: Northeastern University,
2009, pp. 2–20; or Friedemann Dähn, “Visual Music:
Forms and Possibilities,” in: Lund and Lund, Audio.Visual
(see note 9), pp. 152f.
18 [
McDonnell, “Visual Music” (see note 17), p. 18.
19 [
Ibid., p. 12.
20 [
Maura McDonnell: “Visual Music: A Composition of the Things
Themselves,” based on a paper presented at the Sounding
Out 5 conference, Bournemouth University, 2010, http://
www.academia.edu/525221/Visual_Music_-_A_Composition_
Of_The_Things_Themselves (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
21 [
Shirley Clarke quoted in Peter Weibel, “Von der visuellen
Musik zum Musikvideo,” in: Bódy and Weibel, Clip, Klapp,
Bum (see note 1), p. 53.
22 [
Dähn, “Visual Music” (see note 17), p. 149.
23 [
Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund: “Editorial,” in: Lund and
Lund, Audio.Visual (see note 9), p. 12.
24 [
Comparable ideas can be found in numerous texts, e.g.
Dähn, “Visual Music,” (see note 17), p. 153; Weibel, “Von der
visuellen Musik zum Musikvideo” (see note 21), p. 53; John
Whitney jr., Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of
Music and Visual Art, Peterborough, NH: McGraw-Hill, 1980,
musical composition is stressed in many deinitions
coming from a background of music and musicology. 17 [ According to the musicologist Maura
McDonnell, visual music productions can put an
emphasis either on the “craft of composition” or
on the “performance aspect.” 18 [ Whether the
performance is based on analog instruments or
realtime controllers, it should still obey the rules
that structure music. 19 [ These considerations
consequently lead McDonnell to deine visual music
as “an area of activity that comes under the
broad area of sonic arts.” 20 [ This might come as
a surprise for those who have always been looking
at visual music from the perspective of the visual
arts or ilm, with Kandinsky’s paintings or the
ilms of Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Mary Ellen
Bute as historical references in mind. Many
attempts to deine visual music—whether they
tend to stress the compositional or transpositional
aspect or favor other forms of sound-image
relations—privilege neither of its ingredients and
see it as something new that emerges from the
combination of image and sound. The authors may
differ as to what this third entity is to be called,
a “medium” 21 [ or an “art form,” 22 [ for example,
but they generally agree that the objective of
visual music productions is an interaction, or even
an “evenly balanced or equilibrated interplay
between visual and acoustic components,” 23 [
leading to an effect that neither of the two components would have produced alone. 24 [ This idea of
33
p. 91. Interestingly, Eva Fischer takes up exactly the same
ideas for the definition of what she calls “audiovisual
art”: “Aus A + V wird ein drittes Ganzes = AV” (A + V become
a third entity = AV). Eva Fischer, Audiovisuelle Kunst.
Entwicklung eines Begriffes. VJing, audiovisuelle Live
Performance und Installation im Kontext kunsthistorischer
und zeitgenössischer Entwicklungen, Saarbrücken:
AV Akademiker Verlag, 2014, p. 100. See also there, p. 95.
25 [
Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Something Else Newsletter,
vol. 1, no. 1, New York: Something Else Press, 1966.
26 [
See http://visualmusic.ning.com/, http://www.centerfor
visualmusic.org/, and http://visualmusicarchive.org.
27 [
It is impossible to give an exhaustive list here. Some
examples are the Understanding Visual Music Conference
(Montreal 2011; Buenos Aires 2013), the CAMP International
Festival for Visual Music (http://www.camp-festival.de),
and the Visual Music Award (http://www.visual-musicaward.de).
sound and image coming together to form a new
audiovisual entity clearly relects Dick Higgins’
concept of “intermedia” as the merging of two art
forms, or media, to form a new one, the “intermedium.” 25 [ ↑ Seen historically, this proximity to
the concept of “intermedia” points us to the 1960s,
when visual music enjoyed its second strong wave.
While the idea of synaesthesia, strongly associated with the early experiments in visual music in
the irst decades of the 20th century, had not
become completely obsolete, visual music was now
part of the larger context of “expanded arts.”
The third wave of visual music, which is linked to
the advent of realtime technologies, has embraced
these historical concepts and adjusted them to the
contemporary ield. Due to the dual nature of
visual music, the protagonists of the discipline,
theoreticians and producers, have always come
from different backgrounds, mostly music and the
visual arts, experimental ilm, and, in more recent
digital times, from architecture, media, or even
game design. Although few of the participants in
our online survey have declared themselves to be
visual music artists (see p. 71), the international
community is very active, gathering in the “Visual
Music Village” or around the “Center for Visual
Music” and the “Visual Music Archive,” 26 [ and
meeting at festivals and conferences 27 [ dedicated
to visual music. Geographically, this community
spreads around the world, with strong centers
in the English-speaking countries, especially the
35
US and Canada, in Europe, especially in Germany,
and with growing activities in South America.
These geographical centers do not come as a
surprise, as visual music, born in the context of
the historical avant-gardes, was initially based
on the principles of Western art music. ₩ When
we look at the parameters discussed above, it
appears quite unexpected that a rather clearly
deined concept like visual music should suddenly
start sprawling all over the ield of artistic audiovisual production. Why is the concept used so
inlationarily, and what is it that makes it so
attractive? On the one hand, by declaring a piece
to be “visual music,” its producers inscribe it into
an acknowledged avant-garde tradition in music
and/or the visual arts with a lineage of wellknown artistic examples, on the other hand, the
label “visual music” implicitly maintains that
sound and image come together in a meaningful
way. Hence, iling an audiovisual piece or a
festival, for example, under “visual music” might
help to suggest a certain relevance, just by afiliation. ^ This is not to say, of course, that visual
music has become an empty label. Following the
deinitions discussed above, the central point
of visual music is, indeed, the quality of the audiovisual combination, which can be achieved by
different means, such as a structural reference
to musical composition, by transcoding sound into
image or vice versa, or by performing sound and
image according to the rules of (musical) impro-
37
28 [
Taking Lev Manovich and Alan Kay as a starting point,
this idea is further developed in Jamie O’Neil, “Mix/Remix
as Epistemology: The Implications of the Metamedium,
Digital Media,” 2006, http://www.jamieoneil.net/images/
oneil_remix_epist.pdf (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
29 [
In her as yet unpublished presentation “Visual Music:
Aspects of a Non-Genre” (held at the conference “Experimental Settings,” Universidade de São Paulo, June 20,
2013), the author discusses visual music as a (non-) genre,
precisely because, on the one hand, visual music seems
to follow the logics of a genre: when we read about a visual
music event, we probably have a more or less clear idea
of what to expect, a combination of sound and (moving)
images, the latter probably more or less abstract. Historical
references such as Oskar Fischinger or Len Lye might come
to our minds. On the other hand, as we have also shown
in this text, the boundaries of visual music have become
so wobbly that it loses all contour and—even if we take
into account that definitions are necessarily dynamic and
open—it becomes rather a non-genre.
visation. The result of this audiovisual combination
should be a new, genuinely audiovisual product.
“Medium” and “intermedium” are some of the
terms that have already been cited as possible
labels for this product. Following the idea of “intermedium,” which is, however, irmly based in the
discursive context of the 1960s, it seems tempting to take up a concept which addresses more
directly the relations of media under the sign of
the digital: the “metamedium,” as the result of an
“active” mix of media, as opposed to multimedia
seen as a mere addition of media. 28 [ While the
concept of the metamedium describes how media
work together, it doesn’t address speciic aspects
of audiovisual combination in visual music. So maybe another concept is needed, one that is based
on the description of characteristics, such as the
concept of genre. The short deinition we have just
developed—complemented by descriptive terms
like “mostly abstract” and “non-narrative”—could
serve as the basis for a genre deinition. The only
problem is that beyond this minimal deinition,
everything is very lexible about visual music. 29 [
Unorthodox combinations of media have always
been characteristic of it and have become even
more so now with the post-digital mixes of media—
a usage of media constituting a challenge in
terms of genre deinition, even for a transmedial
perspective on genres. Moreover, the concept
of visual music doesn’t point to a certain form of
presentation, a context, or a technical support—
39
all parameters that the other concepts discussed
in this book address. In return, however, these
concepts all can be visual music, even if only
partly, when the combination of audio and video
is organized accordingly.
Do you have any further statements on
audiovisual art you want to share with us?
41
EXPANDED CINEMA, BY OTHER MEANS 1 [
43
1[
The title of this essay paraphrases Pavle Levi’s Cinema by
Other Means, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
2[
On the “cinematic turn” see: Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between
Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms,
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011, pp. 109–156.
Adeena Mey
1. The task of deining expanded cinema is as much
a needed enterprise, which might help to shed
light on current debates surrounding the so-called
“cinematic turn” 2 [ in contemporary art, as it is
a vexed one, for—and that is what I would like to
argue in this paper—the very spectrum of practices it describes resists attempts at producing
clear deinitions. Not only is “expanded cinema”
merely a name among others to describe forms of
work and artistic practices whose nature is hybrid
and cuts across media, it also always refers to
a dynamic ield made up of struggling concepts
and objects. As its heterogeneous genealogies
and its openness to plural becomings suggest,
the category of expanded cinema itself is—no
pun intended—subject to expansion. In the wake
of contemporary debates on multi-screen and
immersive video and ilmic installations that place
these genres within a historical continuity with
expanded cinema (alongside an analogous questioning of the links between contemporary artists’
ilms and videos and the video art which emerged
in the 1960s, or between the former and avantgarde ilm), a possible “deinition” of expanded
ilm practices emerges from a position oscillating
between historicism, from which unfold multiple
genealogies (and by extension a form of relativism
as to the different ields and discourses), and a
45
3[
The idea that a (literary) genre can participate in multiple
genres without belonging to any one of them was developed
by Jacques Derrida in “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7 (Spring
1980,) pp. 202–229.. If we keep the idea of participation
without belonging in mind, Derrida’s focus on linguistic
effects at the cost of concrete objects is for us highly problematic. Indeed, while we would like to describe similar
processes, these are to be found in the way such modalities
of participation are (re-)mediated through apparatuses
that distribute objects, discourses, and technologies within
specific spatial and temporal situations.
kind of media essentialism which de-historicizes
and transposes a medium and the sensible regimes
it structures across contexts. The question of
deining what the modalities of expansion entail
in the sphere of ilm practice depends on their
belonging and/or participation 3 [ in the planes of
visuality, spatiality, temporality, performativity,
and affect. One would also have to consider how
they are negotiated among the arts, their articulations around the tensions between the discourses of medium speciicity, intermediality, and
post-mediality, and the dialectics of ideation and
materiality through which a work comes into being.
� � This confusion of terms, which asserts a
direct iliation between contemporary installation
art involving multiple screens and expanded
cinema, has been criticized by German ilm theorist Volker Pantenburg. For him, to posit expanded
cinema as the predecessor of installation art
relies on the denial of several parameters. First,
the notion of “expansion” is reduced to its spatial
dimension; second, it is based on a misunderstanding regarding the modalities of mobility and
the temporalities of experience, respectively in the
spheres of experimental cinema and contemporary
art; third, a misapprehension regarding the institutional and economic structures of production
and reception of moving image works (roughly the
ilm coop model vs. the museum); inally, what he
calls an “asymmetry of discursive capacities,” that
is, a monopolizing of critical discourse mediated
47
4[
Volker Pantenburg, “1970 and Beyond. Experimental Cinema
and Installation Art,” in: Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg,
Simon Rothöhler (eds.), Screen Dynamics: Mapping the
Borders of Cinema, Vienna: Synema, 2012, pp. 78–92.
5[
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, London: Studio Vista,
1970.
6[
Ibid., p. 41.
7[
Ibid., p. 348.
8[
Most notably in: Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,”
Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965), reprinted in: Francis
Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds.), Modern Art and
Modernism: A Critical Anthology, London: Harper & Row,
1982, pp. 5–10.
9[
Reproduced in Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas’
“Learning Machines”: From Art History to a Chronology of
Fluxus, Vienna / New York: Springer, 2003, pp. 18f.
10 [
Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Something Else Press Newsletter,
vol. 1, no. 1, New York: Something Else Press, 1966. The founding of Something Else Press by Higgins marks his departure
from the Fluxus network. See for instance: Cuauhtémoc
Medina, “The ‘Kulturbolschewiken’ I: Fluxus, the Abolition of
Art, the Soviet Union, and ‘Pure Amusement,’” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 48 (Autumn 2005), pp. 179–192. It is
also noteworthy for the discussion on the uses of the concepts
of expanded cinema and intermedia and their relationships
by the art world through the medium of the catalogue. 4 [ Although Pantenburg can be criticized for
being overly schematic and for failing to account
for the many historical cases of exchanges between
expanded cinema and the art world as well as
the numerous precedents aimed at integrating cinema as part of the visual arts, it is useful to keep
these parameters in mind to think about the ways
expanded cinema is discussed. Thus we might
better understand the conditions under which
expanded cinema can (or cannot) be reactualized
in different contexts, as well as the relationships
it entertains with formally similar practices—in
our case: live audiovisual performance, VJing,
visual music, and live cinema. 2. The “spatial
misunderstanding,” as Pantenburg calls it, has to
be placed in its historical dimension. It is Gene
Youngblood’s conception of expanded cinema in
his eponymous book 5 [ that has come to act as
canonical reference. Here it becomes necessary to
quote the deinition Youngblood gives in his preface:
“When we say expanded cinema we actually mean
expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does
not mean computer ilms, video phosphors, atomic
light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema
isn’t a movie at all: like if it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest
his consciousness outside of his mind, in front
of his eyes. One no longer can specialize in a single
discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear
picture of its relationships in the environment.
49
that in Japan, after the term intermedia (Intãmedia in
Japanese) had first been officially used for the “Intermedia”
festival at the Runami Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo, in May 1967,
it quickly became synonymous with “cinematic projection
that refuses to comply to the rules of normative projection”
and was discussed by artists and critics such as Yasunao Tone,
Juzo Ishiko, or Miyabi Ichikawa. For a discussion of expanded cinema practices in Japan, see: Julian Ross, “Site and
Specificity in Japanese Expanded Cinema: Intermedia and
its Development in the late 60s,” Décadrages 21–22 (Winter
2012); online at: http://www.decadrages.ch/site-andspecificity-japanese-expanded-cinema-intermedia-andits-development-late-60s-julian-ross (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
If in Japan expanded cinema was discussed in relation to
its North-American definition, in the UK, most specifically
in the films and performances made in the framework of
the London Filmmakers Cooperative, another and almost
oppositional kind of expanded cinema emerged. Influenced
by Bertolt Brecht’s theories of estrangement and distancing
effects, and articulated in Peter Gidal’s formulation of a
“structuralist-materialist film,” expanded cinema in London
sought a rigorous and analytical deconstruction of the film
apparatus and of its technological elements as well as
a radical exploration of spectatorial viewing conventions,
contrasting with the technophile utopianism of Youngblood.
See Malcolm Le Grice, “Digital Cinema and Experimental
Film” [1999], in: Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age,
London: BFI, 2001, p. 319. Youngblood’s conception was
also criticized by Deke Dusinberre in his introduction to
the catalogue of the Festival of Expanded Cinema at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1976, a critique
embodied in the curatorial choices of the committee of this
institutional exhibition of (mostly British) expanded cinema. Dusinberre stated that Youngblood’s eclecticism was
“combined on the cinematic level with a technological fetish
This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which
now functions as nothing less than the nervous
system of mankind.” 6 [ § When Youngblood
describes a rich spectrum of audiovisual situations—
ranging from what he terms a “synaesthetic cinema,” which includes Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses
(1965), John Whitney’s computer ilm Catalogue
(1961), experiments by the Alwin Nikolais Dance
Company with WCBS-TV, or seminal “intermedia”
environments like Aldo Tambellini’s Back Zero (1965)—
for him expanded cinema is a media ecology that
exceeds the realms of art and ilm. The imagemaking technologies he discusses are inscribed
within a cybernetic utopia, corollary to what he
sees as a general anthropological mutation. The
latter is enabled by the rise of an intermedia
culture, following the collective USCO’s deinition
endorsed by Youngblood: “The simultaneous use
of various media to create a total environmental
experience for the audience. Meaning is communicated not by coding ideas into abstract literary
language, but by creating an emotionally real
experience through the use of audiovisual technology. Originally conceived in the realm of art
rather than in science or engineering, the principles
on which intermedia is based are grounded in
the ields of psychology, information theory, and
communication engineering.” 7 [ � Hence, not
only does the intermedial nature of expanded cinema bring into crisis the medium-speciicity of the
51
which equated cinema with the expanded consciousness
available through expanded technology. As such, it yielded
a synthesis with occasional connotations of psychedelia,
and the resultant fascination with the new perception
tended to overlook the actual aesthetic implications of both
the original and the expanded perception […]. Thus the
critical criteria on which the committee attempted to base
its selections centered on the creative use of the projection
event and the possibilities offered by the facilities at
the ICA; the selected pieces tend to emphasize either the
physical, spatial, or temporal aspects of these creative
possibilities to facilitate such a perceptual shift.” Deke
Dusinberre, “Festival of Expanded Cinema: An Introduction,”
The Festival of Expanded Cinema at the ICA, London January
4–11th 1976, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1976,
unpag.
11 [
In recent years, renewed scholarly and curatorial interest
for the history of the avant-gardes and neo avant-gardes
has led to several books and catalogues about the history
of expanded cinema and related practices. For writings
that specifically address expanded cinema see: A. L. Rees,
Duncan White, Steven Ball, David Curtis (eds.), Expanded
Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, London: Tate Publishing,
2011; Lucy Reynolds, British avant-garde women filmmakers
and expanded cinema of the 1970s, unpublished PhD
thesis, University of East London, 2011; Andrew V. Uroskie,
Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded
Cinema and Postwar Art, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014; and in French: François Bovier and Adeena Mey
(eds.), “Cinéma élargi,” Décadrages 21–22, Lausanne:
Publications universitaires romandes, 2012. For published
works that place expanded cinema in relation to contemporary moving image work or artists’ film and video at
large, see respectively: Maeve Conolly, The Place of Artists’
modernist work of art as advocated by Clement
Greenberg. 8 [ The interdisciplinarity of its intellectual determinations furthermore undermines
artistic autonomy, both on the level of the work
itself and on that of the artistic institution. Also,
expanded cinema conceived as both a theoretical
proposition and as a set of artistic and media
practices emerged as part of a larger dynamic of
expansion of the arts—set against what was discussed in terms of a crisis of modernism and of
aesthetic autonomy—as best exempliied by the
visualized art-historical genealogy of George
Maciunas’ Expanded Arts Diagram (1966) 9 [ and in
Dick Higgins’ essay “Intermedia.” 10 [ � 3. Among
recent scholarship on expanded cinema, 11 [
Jonathan Walley’s writings stand as some of the
most eloquent. He posits ilm practices that place
ilm outside of the “standard” apparatus in the
context of anti-Greenbergian strategies, through
his concept of “paracinema,” which he developed
to discuss works such as Anthony McCall’s Line
Describing a Cone (1973). For Walley, “paracinema
identiies an array of phenomena that are considered ‘cinematic’ but that are not embodied in the
materials of ilm as traditionally deined. That is,
the ilm works I am addressing recognize cinematic properties outside the standard ilm apparatus, and therefore reject the medium-speciic
premise of most essentialist theory and practice
that the art form of cinema is deined by the
speciic medium of ilm.” 12 [ Ö ¤ Å ® ë ý Ā ¤ Ë
53
Cinema: Space, Site and Screen, Bristol / Chicago: Intellect
Books, 2009; Tanya Leighton (ed.), Art and the Moving Image:
A Critical Reader, London: London: Tate Publishing/Afterall,
2008; Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation
Art, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
As part of a movement toward the historicization of expanded
cinema and its understanding, in relation to other artistic
practices that use projected images or which have a performative dimension, through restagings or reconstructions
of historical artworks, see the catalogues: Chrissie Iles
(ed.), Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art,
1964–1977, New York: H. N. Abrams, 2001; Matthias Michalka
(ed.), X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s
and 1970s, Vienna: MUMOK, 2004; Christopher Eamon (ed.),
Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works,
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005; Joachim
Jäger (ed.), Beyond Cinema, the Art of Projection: Films,
Videos and Installations from 1963 to 2005, Ostfildern: Hatje
Cantz, 2006. For a re-reading of the histories of minimalism
in which expanded cinema appears in a network of art
practices, complicates canonical readings, and departs from
conventional art and film historical categories (minimalism,
structural film, conceptual art) see: Branden W. Joseph,
Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after
Cage, New York: Zone Books, 2008, also his The Roh and
the Cooked: Tony Conrad and Beverly Grant in Europe, Berlin:
August Verlag, 2011.
12 [
Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of
Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies AvantGarde Film,” October 103 (Winter 2003,) pp.15–30. Walley’s
definition borrows from Ken Jacobs, who coined the term
“paracinema” to describe his performative pieces known as
Shadow Play and Nervous Magic Lantern, which use no
celluloid or involve multiple projections. See Lindley Hanlon,
Walley’s distinction between cinema as an idea
and its “materials” (and therefore its materiality
and physical existence) enables him to bring
what he names paracinema close to conceptual
art, in that—following Lucy Lippard’s formula of
a “dematerialization of the art object” 13 [ —it
“dematerializes” cinema from its medium, equated
here with the situation described by traditional
apparatus theory. 14 [ If Walley’s heuristic claims
to locate “cinematic properties” and identify ilm
outside of the movie theater are praiseworthy,
he does so at the price of reiterating, as George
Baker rightly points out, “a false and ultimately
Platonic separation of ‘matter’ and ‘idea’ that is
one of the most common and banal of the
misreadings to which so-called Conceptual art has
been repeatedly subjected.” 15 [ ÷ As a matter
of fact, the paracinematic strategies described by
Walley, which take part in the spectrum of intermedia practices and of the expansion of the arts,
consist more in a process of rematerialization than
dematerialization, a set of movements through
which “cinema” unfolds in the form of multiple
materialities, as they appear in Pavle Levi’s precise
analysis of a Cinema by Other Means. 16 [ Levi’s
argument is set out using as case studies a range
of little known Yugoslavian avant-garde works,
such as the “written ilms” of the Hypnist and
Zenitist movements active in the 1920s, or 1970s
experiments with the physicality of ilm (Nikola
Djuric’s Remembrance from 1978; Tomislav Gotovac’s
55
“Kenneth Jacobs, Interviewed by Lindley Hanlon (Jerry Sims
Present), April 9, 1974,” Film Culture 67–69 (1979,) p. 65–86.
13 [
Lucy R. Lippard, John Chandler, “The Dematerialization
of Art,” Art International vol. 12, no. 2 (February 1968),
pp. 31–36.
14 [
Jean-Louis Baudry, Alan Williams, “Ideological Effects
of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly
vol. 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974–1975), pp. 39–47.
15 [
See George Baker, “Film Beyond Its Limits,” Grey Room 25
(Fall 2006), pp. 92–125.
16 [
Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (see note 1).
17 [
Ibid., p. 27.
18 [
Ibid.
19 [
Ibid.
It’s all a movie as documented in a photography
by Ivan Posavec in 1979). Hence, “cinema by other
means” relates to “the practice of positing cinema
as a system of relations directly inspired by the
workings of the ilm apparatus, but evoked through
the material and technological properties of the
originally nonilmic media.” 17 [ × × × In Levi’s
argument, the “medium” thus appears as both
a concept (“a nexus of different elements, understood and/or imagined as capable of generating
speciic effects”) and an actual apparatus (“as
concrete technology embodying this nexus of relations”). 18 [ Ø Finally, to render his deinition
as synthetical as possible, he makes the point that
“cinema by other means” suggests a “conceptualization of the cinema as itself a type of practice
that, since the invention of the ilm apparatus,
has also (simultaneously) had a history of execution through other, often ‘older,’ artistic media.” 19 [
By extension, we could say that in Pavle Levi’s
reformulation of ilm history, “cinema” and “cinema
by other means” always coexisted. Δ Debates
in ilm history can be divided, schematically, into
two different types of explanation, according
to the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill and his study
of the “coordinates” of the debate. The irst type
is technological. From this point of view, the birth
of cinema in the 19th century was enabled by
emerging technical possibilities of ixing, projecting, and reproducing movement as an optical
phenomenon. Such possibilities had as corollary
57
20 [
Gabriel Rockhill, “Le cinéma n’est jamais né,” Revue
Appareil 1 (2008), https://appareil.revues.org/130 (accessed
Sep 1, 2015).
21 [
François Albera, “Introduction,” in: S. M. Eisenstein,
Cinématisme: Peinture et cinéma, Dijon: Kargo/Les presses
du réel, 2009, p. 11.
the scientiic understanding of the phenomena
themselves. The second explanation is “notional”
and is based, roughly, on the idea that the material
technologies of cinema could only be designed
within a favorable intellectual context. Hence, in
this schema, idea precedes technology, 20 [ and,
by extension, cinema by other means can be said
to articulate these two vectors—technological
and notional—in a dynamic process. ₹ 4. What
we identify under the labels of expanded cinema,
paracinema, and cinema by other means can
be subsumed into two other categories, that of
Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of “cinematism” and
of Karel Teige’s “poetism.” The idea of cinematism
emphasizes fundamental principles of cinematic
art such as montage and movement and identiies
forms of cinema that unfold outside of traditional
ilmic material, embodied in other arts, such
as painting, architecture, drawing, or literature.
Hence, as ilm historian François Albera has written,
through the concept of cinematism, Eisenstein
could see in cinema “a way to go beyond art (from
a diachronic perspective) and, by the same token,
a kind of general model to understand all the arts
(from a synchronic perspective).” 21 [ If indeed
cinematism both serves to identify objects that
open up ilm to the world at large and offers a
tool to think of the latter in cinematic terms, the
problem remains that “cinema” still acts as the
frame of reference; we might call “cine-centrism”
the conceptual foundation upon which the idea of
59
22 [
Among the many elements inspiring poetism, Peter A. Zusi
cites “film, jazz, and circuses, and even […] activities
such as tourism and athletics.” Peter A. Zusi, “The Style
of the Present: Karel Teige on Constructivism and Poetism,”
Representations 88 (2004), p. 103. I am here willfully
taking the formulation of poetism out of its historical
context—where it stands, according to Teige, in a
dialectical relationship with constructivism—to use it
as a tool to rethink the objects addressed in this essay.
cinematism is built. Formulating the contours of
an a-foundational frame to think about expanded
cinema would exceed the present essay. But, as
a irst step, we can suggest at least one element
toward the multiplication of heuristic tools through
which we can rethink and recast expanded cinema and its multiple means, and that is poetism.
Coined and theorized by the Czech avant-garde
artist and critic Karel Teige, poetism identiied a
spectrum of work in poetry and painting that had
managed to break from, respectively, literature
and representation, and eventually provided a
conception of art cutting across disciplines and
embraced modern life at large. 22 [ As Teige
put it: “We have created pictorial poems: compositions of real colors and shapes within the system
of the poem. The animated pictorial poem: photogenic poetry. Kinography. We have tried to formulate a proposal for a new art of ilm—pure cinematography, photogenic poetry, a dynamic picture
without precedent. Luminous and glittering poems
of undulating light—we saw in them the leading
art of our epoch: the magniicent synthetic timespace poem, exciting all the senses and all the
sensitive areas of the viewer via sight. We deined
ilm as a dynamic pictorial poem, a living spectacle without plot or literature; black-and-white
rhythms and possibly the rhythm of color too; a
sort of mechanical ballet of shapes and light that
demonstrates its innate afinity with light shows,
pure dance, the art of ireworks (and the art of
61
23 [
Karel Teige, “Poetism Manifesto,” in: Timothy O. Benson
and Eva Forgacs (eds.), Between Worlds: A Sourcebook
of Central European Avant-gardes, 1910–1930, Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002, pp. 598f.
gymnastics and acrobatics). The art of movement,
the art of time and space, the art of the live
spectacle: a new theatre.” 23 [ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ From this richly illustrative
and quasi-programmatic passage, poetism might
appear as a useful concept to think about expanded cinema as an expanded form of poetry,
complicating the genealogies of the spectrum
of audiovisual practices we are discussing. In fact,
expanded cinema seems to suggest that categories are dynamic and that the dynamics of art
practices themselves always create new relationships between ideas and materialities, creating
the necessity for the critic or the historian to ind
other means.
63
Do you see yourself as an artist?
77.4 % Yes
18.9 % It depends
3.8 % No
International online survey, 2014 | Question 1
65
If yes: do you see yourself as
a performer / performance artist?
85.7 % Yes
14.3 % No
Question 2
67
Do you create audiovisual artworks
e.g. for art exhibitions ( installations,
video art, etc. )?
92.5 % Yes
7.5 % No
Question 3
69
Do you produce analog artworks e.g.
for the fine art market ( prints,
video stills, etc. )?
28.3 % No
28.3 % Yes, for the fine art market
28.3 % Yes, for other purposes
15.1 % Yes, for commercial customers
Question 4
71
Do you write and/or publish
theoretical texts about ( your )
audiovisual work?
52.8 % No
47.2 % Yes
Question 5
73
Which of these terms applies
best to your work (short definition
supplied)?
59.6 % Live Audiovisual Performance
19.2 % Other definitions
11.5 % VJ ing
7.7 % Expanded Cinema
1.9 % Visual Music
0 % Live Cinema
Question 6
75
Which words or definitions do you use to
describe yourself as an artist/performer?
49.1 % Other
41.5 % Visual Artist
32.1 % VJ
28.3 % Media Artist
17 % AV Act
15.1 % Visualist
7.6 % Projectionist
5.7 % Live Cinema Artist
multiple answers possible
Question 7
Which fields are fundamental to your work?
69.8 % Music
67.9 % Video
60.4 % Performance
54.7 % Video Mixing Software
50.9 % Animation
47.2 % Motion Graphics
43.4 % Light
35.9 % Photography
34 % Film
34 % Generative Software
32.1 % Graphic Design
28.3 % Other
multiple answers possible
Question 8
79
Do you prefer any context
or location to show your work?
54.7 % Club
52.8 % Other
50.9 % Art Gallery
43.4 % Museum
35.9 % Theater
20.8 % Cinema
18.9 % Commercial Event
multiple answers possible
Question 9
Do you prefer any context to show your work?
83
LIVE CINEMA
85
1[
Mia Makela, “The Practice of Live Cinema,” in: Media Space
Journal 1 (2008), p. 1; available online at miamakela.net/
TEXT/text_PracticeOfLiveCinema.pdf (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
2[
Christian Metz, “Story / Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of
Voyeurism,” in: Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods
Volume II, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985,
p. 548.
3[
Makela, “The Practice of Live Cinema” (see note 1), p. 1.
Gabriel Menotti
For anyone familiar with the scholarship on
VJing and contemporary modes of moving image
presentation—or anyone participating in its
scenes worldwide—the deinition of live cinema
may be grasped almost intuitively. You could say
that the practice encompasses forms of audiovisual performance that actively engage with
traditional cinematographic conventions. Precisely
which conventions depends on whom you ask.
Mia Makela, a performer who has written a
master’s thesis on the subject of “Live Cinema:
Language and Elements” (2006), implies it has to
do with speciic contexts of presentation and
regimes of attention. For her, live cinema may
involve works similar to VJing being shown in a
setting such as “a museum or theater.” The public,
instead of being absently lost amid multiple
projections, is often “sitting down and watching
the performance attentively.” 1 [ Therefore, audience behavior leans toward the hyper-perceptive
and sub-motor state that, according to Christian
Metz, characterizes the classic cinematic situation. 2 [ ∫∫∫∫∫˚ Yet while some elements of
the medium may be considered proper to its live
variation, others are deemed antithetical—for
instance, aspects of linear storytelling, particularly
those “based on actors or verbal dialogues.” 3 [
This is where Makela draws a distinct line between
87
4[
Ibid., p. 6.
5[
Ibid., p. 5.
6[
Amy Alexander, “Audiovisual Live Performance,” in:
Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann (eds.), See This Sound:
Audiovisuology Compendium, Linz: Ludwig Boltzmann
Institute; Cologne: Walther König, 2010, pp. 199–204; online
at http://www.see-this-sound.at/compendium/maintext/
54/1 (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
one audiovisual form and another. According to
her deinition, live cinema is exempt from cinema’s
chief constraints, namely narrative continuity and
a ixed spatial arrangement. Even setting up the
projections is incorporated “as part of the creative
process,” intensifying the practice’s kinship with
the ields of expanded cinema and interactive
installation. 4 [ Such extensive freedom of coniguration favors works whose evocative structure is
closer to poetry than to the prosaic linearity that
distinguishes most movie genres, thus suggesting
improvised, free-lowing abstractions. Considering
how “the live context enforces the possibilities
of participation of the audience,” 5 [ the main
dialogue that should be happening in live cinema
is the two-way, instantaneous feedback between
the creator and the public. ∆ But this is just
one approach to the term. Some of the features
that Makela rejects from the cinematographic
medium are precisely the ones that other audiovisual performers might be claiming. One such
aspect is the development of loose, linear narratives, as remarked by Amy Alexander. 6 [ The idea
that live cinema can be characterized by storytelling is taken further by Toby Harris, aka *spark,
another artist who has entered academia in order
to relect upon his own practice. For several years,
Harris has been working as a VJ, both solo and
in collaboration with seminal collectives such as
D-Fuse and The Light Surgeons. In the course
of his doctoral investigation about “liveness,” he
89
7[
Tobyz.net, “rbn_esc >> urban escape,” http://tobyz.net/
tobyzstuff/projects/rbnesc (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
8[
Tobyz.net, “Live Cinema Documentary,” http://tobyz.net/
tobyzstuff/projects/livecinemadoc (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
articulates how the monotony of everyday VJing
presentations—“stuck in nightclubs and treated
as wallpaper”—led him to incorporate elements
of narrative and character creation in his pieces.
This process resulted in the “VJ ilm” RBN_ESC
(2004–2006), an hour-long performance that,
employing continuity within and between episodes,
“invites the audience to construct narrative and
cultural critique.” 7 [ ‡ These strategies appear
central to Harris’ idea of live cinema, and their
use is also acknowledged in his Live Cinema Documentary (2010). 8 [ This short movie adopts the
point of view of a performer, showing a continuous
capture of his computer desktop, which gives
the viewer a glimpse of the operations involved
in assembling realtime audiovisual sequences
by navigating and interacting with the control interfaces. |’ In the documentary, the connection
between live cinema and narrative is verbalized
in a statement by Chris Allen, a member of The
Light Surgeons, who describes their work as a
“deconstructed, exploded kind of ilmmaking that
involves narrative and storytelling.” He is referring
to pieces such as the multi-screen True Fictions
(2007), whose plot, in the tradition of interviewbased documentaries, is mainly guided by testmonies and voice-over narration. Even its contiuous
musical score seems to serve a larger rhetoric
project, instead of sheer sensorial pleasure. ◊ ◊
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ Altogether, Harris presents live cinema as
a situation similar to oral storytelling or a poetry
91
9[
Toby Harris, “About the Live in Live Cinema,” 2012, p. 7,
http://tobyz.net/projects/2010-12-06-about-the-live-inlive-cinema/tobyharris-aboutliveinlivecinema-2012.pdf
(accessed Sep 1, 2015).
10 [
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on
the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in: Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings vol. 3: 1935–1938, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002, p. 146.
recital, in which “the performers need to play their
audience, not their computers.” 9 [ In view of his
call for a high level of “in-the-moment awareness,
responsiveness and expression” from everyone
involved, we could evoke Walter Benjamin’s characterization of storytelling as a regime of narration
that involves deep exchanges of experience
between the storyteller and the audience. 10 [ The
light projected onto the screen is like a campire
around which the public gathers to absorb the
performer’s tales. The performer is an actor whose
main job would be to pursue communication
through this process, keeping it meaningful for the
audience. In that sense, computer technologies
seem to allow cinema—a mechanically reproducible medium par excellence—to recuperate some
of the “aura,” as if it belonged to a pre-modern era
in which the inscription of sound and image was
still not a given, and audiovisual narratives were
impossible to separate from their enactment. Just
like a story is interwoven in—and by—narration,
so is live cinema intertwined with the operation
of projection. ΩΩΩ Views such as Makela’s and
Harris’ emphasize virtually opposed attributes
of live cinema. How can a term that is meant to
distinguish a type of audiovisual performance, and
to make its deinition clearer, be treated so ambiguously? To answer this question, we might start
by considering the question how enlightening
the word “cinema” can still be, when its meaning
has become increasingly blurred. After all, the
93
11 [
Makela, “The Practice of Live Cinema” (see note 1), p. 1.
12 [
Mia Makela, “Introduction: Live Cinema—Realtime
audiovisual creation,” a mínima 22 (2008), p. 7; online
at http://www.miamakela.net/TEXT/text_INTRO_
AMINIMA_final.pdf (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
13 [
Makela, “The Practice of Live Cinema” (see note 1), p. 2.
digital systems that made interactive media ubiquitous are the same that have triggered the
obsolescence of photographic ilm, eroding what
used to be considered cinema’s most unequivocal
mark of speciicity. Both cinematographic practices and the ield of ilm studies are being entirely
reshaped. Is there anything a taxonomist of contemporary moving images can take from their
lexicon—is there any meaning we must not ourselves supply? � � A closer reading of Makela
might give some hints. On the one hand, she
indeed asserts that cinema now includes “all forms
of coniguring moving images” (quoting from a
Transmediale festival program). 11 [ Nevertheless,
she insists that live cinema is “in essence artistic,”
and therefore can be set apart from VJing. In the
introduction of an issue of the a mínima magazine
on the topic edited by her, Makela even remarks
that “many Live Cinema creators feel the need to
separate themselves from the VJ scene altogether,
in order to establish their own artistic goals, which
would rarely ind an appreciative audience in a
club environment.” 12 [ Ω Her position seems to
suggest a sort of hierarchy of values in the realm
of audiovisual performance. We imagine that VJs
would be more like commercial directors for hire,
paid by the hour, dealing with second-hand material,
willing to follow popular trends. Meanwhile, live
cinema creators would occupy a place equivalent
to that of ilm auteurs, whose goals “appear to
be more personal and artistic.” 13 [ The irst thing
95
this position presupposes is a larger degree of
creative control over the performance as a whole.
Even more than making one’s own source material,
performing live cinema means not falling into
contingent collaborations with any DJ, lighting
engineer, or set producer that might be on that
day’s shift, as a VJ often has to do. In live cinema,
the performer directs every aspect of the spectacle, never being relegated to a secondary role,
while the activity of other professionals from
other areas is aimed to create an experience for
the audience. ≈ Aesthetic autonomy is not the
only thing implied by auteurship, though. Think of
all the directors that inspire cinephilic devotion:
hasn’t the public also become used to expect some
sort of excellence from this breed of creators?
Particular qualities that set them apart from the
rest? In that sense, perhaps what audiovisual
performance draws from cinema is not any kind
of morphological trait, but rather the legitimacy it
has accumulated over the years. The century-long
history of this medium, central to the invention
of the modern world and western subjectivity,
certainly provides a worthy lineage for any improvisation with sound and image. Thus, live cinema
is not simply a deinition, but a proposition: a statement that certain works are not merely part of
a technological fad—even when they might be—
but exemplars of a late avant-garde. ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
◊ ◊ ◊ To call a performance “live cinema” is more
than invoking a background. It is to inscribe this
Which words do you use to describe
yourself as an artist? | Other (49.1%)
3D mapping artist
intermedia artist
multimedia artist
performance artist
sound and visual artist
transmission based artist
video operator
video performer
visual music artist
experimental media artist
97
visual researcher
mixed media artist
scholar in the field of
audiovisual studies
total artist
video artist
Question 7
performance in a tradition, supposedly dissolving
any suspicion that might exist about its cultural
relevance. This is not done by the magical powers
of the word alone. Even as a digniied shorthand
for experimental practices, the label may have
very pragmatic applications. Creating an exclusive
segment in the wider territory of VJing, what the
live cinema category loses in broadness it gains in
coherence. The ensuing conceptual density favors
negotiations for funding, space, media buzz, or
any other resource within the established circuits.
Strategically applied, this sort of branding is essential for articulating places where new practices
could it and platforms to sustain them as such.
# A case in point is the Mostra Live Cinema, a
Brazilian event entirely dedicated to the category.
Conceived by Luiz Duva, one of the national
pioneers in audiovisual performance, it started
in 2007 as a special program of the Rio de Janeiro
International Film Festival, but has since grown
autonomous. Every year, a number of works are
selected or commissioned for presentation at the
event, both local and from abroad. However, the
signiicance of the role the Mostra plays in promoting live cinema in its home country seems mostly
to lie in the sort of public relations it accomplishes
for the practice as a whole. Since the beginning,
it has reached toward traditional cinematographic
elements, venues, formats, and even sponsors.
The screenings that inaugurated the event were
held in Rio’s Odeon, a movie theater from 1926 that
99
14 [
Mostra Live Cinema website, “Histórico,” http://
livecinema.com.br/en/historico/ (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
hosts different ilm festivals. In two of its irst
editions, well-known directors were invited to
perform live feature ilms. And it might also
be worth mentioning that both the Mostra’s 2009
itinerant program and its 2013 workshops were
sponsored by Petrobrás, the semi-public energy
company that is one of Brazilian cinema’s main
benefactors. 14 [ + In cultivating these associations, the Mostra actualizes the hypothetical
interfaces between cinema and live performance
come true, thus contributing to the crystallization
of the practice. The event’s regulations literally
legislate over what live cinema should be, at least
within its conines, as they set up rules for participating. For the 2013 edition, these only comprised
a standard duration (30 minutes maximum) and
a common space of presentation (the stage of the
Oi Futuro auditorium, measuring 5m width, 7m
depth, and 3.6m height). Any audiovisual performance that it these criteria could be endorsed
at the curators’ discretion. As works of the most
diverse calibers are made to comply with these or
similar parameters, isn’t it likely that they become
sort of common denominators, feeding back into
the genre? So, almost casually, an event like the
Mostra Live Cinema might operate in the guise of
a mechanism of speciication, shaping the reality
of live cinema. Through it, the deinition of the
practice is being continuously reined. � As
it upholds a particular cultural meaning and relevance, the concept of live cinema can be useful
101
Do you have any further statements on
audiovisual art you want to share with us?
not only for audiovisual performance, but also for
cinema itself. For instance, let’s consider how the
term has recently entered the vocabulary of the
medium via another route: as a reference to the
realtime streaming of sport events and theatrical
spectacles—such as operas, concerts, and plays—
to movie theaters worldwide. This service is already
provided by traditional British companies like the
Royal Opera House and National Theatre, giving
the audience a cheaper and more accessible alternative to their tickets. For cinemas, one of the
reasons to adopt this exclusive content is to have
another trait to distinguish them from the increasingly competitive channels of digital distribution,
peer-to-peer networks, and video-on-demand.
Nevertheless, it should be noticed that the liveness
at issue is equivalent to that of a TV broadcast or
web streaming, in which the presence of the spectacle is extended beyond its original location and
often hypermediated by the means of multiple
framings and camera angles. What a term such as
live cinema does, is to solve this paradoxical state,
as it indicates that the medium has absorbed
some novelties of computer networks without
caving in to them. Thus, instead of challenging
cinema’s speciicities, its distinction from other
media actually becomes enforced, allowing it
to keep a certain prominence. It is not hard to
imagine audiovisual performances being deployed
in the ilm market in a similar way. ∆∆∆˚ And
just as it can affect the economy of the medium,
103
15 [
Makela, “The Practice of Live Cinema” (see note 1), p. 2.
16 [
Metz, “Story/Discourse” (see note 2), p. 546.
17 [
Harris, “About the Live in Live Cinema” (see note 9), p. 5.
18 [
Duncan White, “Live Cinema (interview Guy Sherwin by
Lynn Loo and Duncan White),” in: Duncan White et al. (eds.),
Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, London:
Tate Publishing, 2011, p. 252.
the idea of live cinema may create opportunities
to renew our understanding of it, highlighting the
diverse vitalities that permeate cinema. As Makela
reminds us, performances were already happening
in the silent ilm era, in the form of oral narration
or musical accompaniments that supplemented
every screening—tasks that have recently been
recreated as a trend. 15 [ In any case, one does not
have to look for such liveness in the past history
of the medium. Even today, all we have to do is to
turn away from the stage, to the auditorium in
front of it: it is full of activity. Classical apparatus
theory once afirmed that the image “is brought
into being by nothing other than the look” 16 [ —
in other words, that the movie exists primarily
through the public’s cognitive labor. If we consider
that a work depends on the interplay between the
artist and the audience, as is often said, then this
practice of audiencing should be at least half of
the process, right? Nevertheless, little attention
is paid to it, even in the specialized literature. 17 [
√√√√√√√√™™√√√˚ A thorough interpretation
of live cinema would mean taking these and other
elements that collaborate in the continuing production of moving images more seriously into
account. It would mean tackling the medium’s underpinnings and its back stages, revisiting territories
once explored by expanded cinema pioneers such
as Guy Sherwin, for whom live cinema was the
performance of projection, 18 [ or structural ilms
like Projection Instructions (Morgan Fisher, 1976).
19 [
Ibid., p. 253.
This short 16mm piece deserves a special mention
for the way it engages the projectionist both as
105
public and performer. It consists of a series of title
screens accompanied by a monotonous narrator,
commanding the operator to perform an action on
the apparatus: “volume up,” “turn tone to treble,”
“throw out of focus,” etc. The proper enactment
of the work depends on these instructions to be
strictly followed and executed during projection.
Whether this happens or not, we become conscious
of the presence of the projectionist and the many
possibilities of intervention he or she always has
at hand. / * 0 < \ m { « º ¹ Ð ÷ į œ « ū ʲ — « ‡ •
•••••••••‹™↑№\№∑0¤¥¬¬/\\d{¿Œ˚
Ŕ Ǿ — ‰ → Ω ™ № m m m № ∞ Allowing such
interferences to be framed not as exceptions, but
as premises, live cinema’s most compelling effect
is heuristic. As we understand that images are
never inished, but rather continuously result from
the network of activities that surround and sustain
them, the “screen essentialism” that plagues
visual media begins to recede. In fact, when we
look back at screens, we ought to see them in the
way that Sherwin does: as materials in action,
exercising their affordances, standing still, absorbing and relecting light in particular ways. 19 [
Hence, every single screening comes out as performance—the joint effort of running machines, of
the workers that operate them, of the audience’s
gaze and affective investment. The mere act
of pressing play always involves a degree of risk.
107
In face of that, it seems to matter less if a work
is done in realtime than whether it is committed
to embracing or concealing the fact that all
cinema is live.
Which terms apply best to your
work? | Other (19.2%)
cinematic assemblage
immersive and interactive
design
biomedia performance
mixed media
multimedia performance
live living performance
realtime live video show
Question 6
109
VJ ING
111
1[
See 375 Wikipedians, VJing, Greyscale Press, 2010,
back cover.
2[
A note on live coding: this includes, for instance, performances with generative softwares such as vvvv, Jitter,
or Processing. Live coding is defined as algorithm-based
visual work with code and programming language in
realtime.
3[
“Live” as in “live performance” stands for the performative act of an artist at a certain place, within a certain
timeframe, for a certain public. The German theater scientist Erika Fischer-Lichte defines “liveness” as “the bodily
co-presence of actors and spectators” (“die leibliche
Ko-Präsenz von Akteuren und Zuschauern”); in: Erika
Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance:
A New Aesthetics, New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 38
(German original: Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp 2004, p. 114). In an additional meaning,
some VJs are using “live” broadcasting technologies, such
as live cameras, in order to mix the filmed footage with
prerecorded visual footage.
4[
“Realtime” means “the actual time during which a process
or event occurs,” see http://www.oxforddictionaries.
com/definition/english/real-time (accessed Sept 1, 2015).
“Realtime” in computer technology describes system
response: realtime programs must guarantee response
within strict time constraints. In VJing, generative programs
such as vvvv, MAX/MSP or Quartz Composer are used for
visualizations based on digital coding. The visuals respond
to musical parameters in realtime. In contrast to the
Eva Fischer
VJ � The term VJ has evolved as an acronym
for “video jockey,” describing “video performance
artists who create live visuals, in parallel with
a disk jockey.” 1 [ VJing as artistic practice stands
for video mixing, visual jamming, or visual live
coding, 2 [ and deines itself via the act of selecting
and intuitive jamming live 3 [ as well as the processing of visual contents and realtime 4 [ settings.
� This corresponds to the collective deinition
of VJing, developed by 375 Wikipedians within the
framework of a Wiki Sprint Project at the 2010
Mapping Festival in Geneva: ∆ ∆ ∆ ∆ VJing is the
manipulation or selection of visuals, the same way DJing is a selection and manipulation of audio. One of the key elements in the
practice of VJing is the realtime mix of content from a “library of
media.” In addition to the selection of media, VJing mostly implies
realtime processing of the visual material. The term is also used
to describe the performative use of generative software. 5
[
�
Aesthetics, Content, Technology, and Formal
Parameters � Aesthetically, VJing is inluenced
by the ine arts on the one hand—experimental
ilm, television, performance art, and video and
media art—and by music, the performing arts,
and sound art on the other. ○ Blending various
image formats, such as real video loops, generated
visual material, found footage from movies or
photography, and their structural fragmentation,
and creating collages and mixes, VJing has deve-
113
loped into a visual format which deies traditional
forms of visual narration. 6 [ � Fragments are edited
in software, mixed and recombined with the aim of generating
[ � The
development of VJing is inseparably linked with
its counterpart, DJing, and is itself based on
musical parameters such as jamming. 8 [ Constants
of electronic music such as scratching 9 [ and
remixing 10 [ are also formal strategies of VJing.
� Besides the term “visual jockey,” the VJ is also called a “visual
new meanings, different from the original ones. 7
meaning of “live,” neither artist nor public are needed for
a realtime process, which can be automatically executed
by the computer.
5[
375 Wikipedians, VJing (see note 1), pp. 17f.
6[
For narration theory cf. Ansgar and Vera Nünning (eds.),
Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär,
Trier: WVT, 2002; Franz K. Stanzel: Theorie des Erzählens,
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979; Monika Fludernik,
Towards a “Natural” Narratology, London: Taylor & Francis,
1996.
7[
Daniela Tordino, “Musical Language in the VJing Art,”
VJ Theory.net, 2007, vjtheory.net/web_texts/friend_text_
tordino.htm (accessed Aug 3; 2014; retrievable at http://
web.archive.org/web/20090913070053/http://www.vjtheory.
net/web_texts/text_tordino.htm). See also: N_DREW
(aka Andrew Bucksbarg), “VJing and Live A/V Practices,”
VJ Theory.net, 2009, vjtheory.net/web_texts/friend_text_
bucksbarg.htm (accessed Aug 3, 2014; retrievable at
http://web.archive.org/web/20120414003114/http://
www.vjtheory.net/web_texts/text_bucksbarg.htm) and
VJam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual
Performance, Falmouth: Realtime Books, 2008, p. 33.
8[
A jam session is defined as “a gathering or performance
in which musicians play together informally without
any preparation: a session in which musicians jam with
each other; an often impromptu performance by a group
especially of jazz musicians that is characterized by
improvisation.” Merriam Webster, online dictionary, http://
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jam%20session
(accessed Sep 1, 2015).
jammer” in some countries. That designation creates a link with
music and it might be even more appropriate, since just like in jam
[ �
The performative character of a VJ performance
is closely connected to the structural and formal
inluences of the music: composition, rhythm,
the desire to create immersive 12 [ spaces, and the
use of samples, 13 [ loops, 14 [ or patterns, 15 [ all
of which can be compared to the development of
electronic music and DJing. Much as in electronic
music performances, which go well beyond the
act of pressing the play button, it is not suficient
for something to be deined as a “VJ performance”
to produce a video clip which is played back and
projected. This kind of event would rather be called
a music video screening or some similar term. ⁄˚
VJing—as any other performative format—stands
for liveness, transience, and uniqueness. But even
more than, for example, a live cinema performance,
which usually is based on a dramaturgical audiovisual concept, VJing is pure improvisation.
sessions, improvisation is the basis of VJing performances. 11
115
9[
DJs use the term scratching for the production of special
sounds by quickly and rhythmically moving a record playing
on a turntable back and forth.
10 [
A musical piece which uses parts of an already existing
track, alienating them, mixing the components differently,
and integrating them into the new piece.
11 [
Daniela Tordino, “Musical Language in the VJing Art”
(see note 7).
12 [
The term immersive, when applied to “a computer display
or system,” means “generating a three-dimensional
image that appears to surround the user.” See http://
www.oxforddictionaries.com/de/definition/englisch_usa/
immersive (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
13 [
Sampling, in music, is the extraction of long or short parts
or individual sounds from already existing pieces, which
are then integrated into a new piece or a new performance.
14 [
Sound tracks or video clips repeating themselves in an
endless loop.
Participation, reciprocity, and interaction are some
of its characteristics, as well as enduring and appearing in the very moment. The VJ performance—
other than realtime processes—does not exist
without the performing and improvising VJ. + +
VJ performances are embodied, in other words, they include interfaces and controllers that require the movement and gesture of the
performer or participant for control, as well as the use of expressive
movements of the body in space that are translated into audio-
[ ¬ ¬ ¬ The viewer response plays
an important role. Interaction with the audience,
albeit on a subconscious level, has a big inluence
on the result of the performance, which never
occurs in the same manner twice. Since there is
a great deal of improvisation, each performance is
different. Much like music, theater, or opera, visuals can be perceived and processed in a temporal
sequence only. Because of its performative and
improvised character, the factors time and space
are the foundation of VJing. � ˚ ˚ Collaboration
and Response ⁄+ At the root of [the definition of VJing]
visual material. 16
lies its [interdisciplinary] combination with artistic expression through
15 [
audio; examples of realtime visual manipulations to silence are rare
Repeating structures or patterns in music or in
visualization.
exceptions. This means that VJ work is of a collaborative nature,
16 [
N_DREW, “VJing and Live A/V Practices” (see note 7).
17 [
375 Wikipedians, VJing (see note 1), p. 11.
[ † In its
essence, VJing always visualizes something else—
music in most cases and, frequently, the live,
spontaneous, and improvisational music mix of a
DJ. +++ As discussed above, VJing cannot
be examined separately from the music, as it has
developed in deep entwinement with DJing. Never-
especially with musicians, sound artists and DJs. 17
117
theless, a crucial difference to the other audiovisual formats discussed in this publication (such
as visual music and live audiovisual performance)
needs to be observed: in terms of the musical
level, there is a shift in priorities between these
genres. VJing as an action addresses the visual
side which, however, always occurs in combination
with another level. Without implying that the
visual part is secondary or less worthy, a VJ always
visualizes something else. ↘ VJing as a visual
component, therefore, always refers to a responsive action, a cooperation with someone else,
a DJ, a live audio act, or a band, and so forth.
Only in rare cases do VJs perform the visual level
alone, which would require a special qualiier in
the description—such as, for instance, “mute VJ
performance” or the like. The distinction from live
cinema or live audiovisual performance is that,
unlike VJing, these genres are already fundamentally deined via their inherent relationship
with a musical level, i.e., they already include the
musical component in their own deinition and
their audiovisual dramaturgy, which VJing does
only via external collaboration with another genre
or performance. Having developed from a desire
to produce and stage sound and image in actual
interplay and in a constant and conceptually
integrated coexistence, many VJs and visualists
have united with musicians in order to work on
a joint live audiovisual performance. Audiovisual
live performers simultaneously create sounds and
119
18 [
David Bernard, “Visual Wallpaper,” VJ Theory.net, 2006,
vjtheory.net/web_texts/friend_text_bernard.htm (accessed
Aug 3, 2014; retrievable at http://web.archive.org/web/
20120526005723/http://www.vjtheory.net/web_texts/text_
bernard.htm).
19 [
Ibid.
visuals as a collective or as solo artists. A joint
choreography, joint conceptual and substantive
considerations, or those pertaining to both media,
are inherently integrated into the performance. |
Visual Wallpaper {˚ In recent years, many artists
seem to have gradually turned away from pure
VJing. One reason for this development within the
VJ scene is discussed in the article “Visual Wallpaper” 18 [ by David Bernard, which describes the
competitive behavior that occurs, time and again,
particularly in the club scene. The article sees the
origin of this behavior in the dissatisfaction of
many VJs, who report being treated and perceived
increasingly unfavorably by hosts and audiences
compared to the musicians. David Bernard describes the situation: � The anti-wallpaper camp often
unites in the “steal of the focus” crusade: in their quest to get their
work appreciated as it should […], they often aim to compete for
the top spot usually reserved for the DJ or main music act. Unfortunately, this can often translate as a race to capture the audience’s
undivided visual attention with the screen(s) becoming the dominating focus of the space rather than a complement to the other
visual stimuli such as lighting, decor as well as the stage performers
and the audience themselves. Content […] becomes everything and
having a cinema-style environment to the club where the whole
audience is glued zombie-like to the screen(s) is seen as a satisfac-
[ Δ Bernard is correct in stating
that visuals should be inserted into the experience
as a whole in clubs and concerts, instead of overshadowing the music. However, a critical examination of the situation is complicated by the fact that
tory outcome. 19
121
20 [
See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and
Heterotopias,” in: Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture:
A Reader in Cultural Theory, New York: Routledge, 1997,
pp. 330–336.
VJs have long been ighting for a fairer treatment
and for recognition as equal artists. Especially in
reference to the “performance” and its “liveness,”
it is acutely important to grant VJs their space
on stage in order to make their performative
approach visible to the audience in the irst place.
The audience cannot easily recognize the difference between a DVD that is played back and a live
or realtime performance on the projection surface,
unless the VJ is on stage and discernible as a
performer. Stage visibility has a considerable
inluence on the general situation and organically
integrates the performer of the visuals into the
overall picture. ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ Nevertheless, the VJ
must not forget that on the one hand he or she
still responds to something else—the music or
the space—and on the other hand the club audience is volatile by nature. One must attempt to
create an atmosphere rather than telling complex
stories, especially in a club situation. If one wants
a focused audience glued to the screen, one
should choose venues like a movie theater or an
opera house. The club context requires something
else; it wants to remain the “other space,” 20 [
a space where it is not necessary for visitors to
focus, where they can just let go. Club atmosphere
is characterized by the very ickleness of perception, the looseness of being adrift, the charged
atmosphere, and a strong communicative element.
Presently it becomes clear why so many
artists increasingly have turned away from the
123
What is an important source
of inspiration for your work?
concept of VJing and have conquered other spaces
instead: because they want greater attention for
their art. Since the term VJ clearly refers to the
club context in almost all cases, artists would
amend their job description by a second or third
job title comprising other activities. One frequently
hears: “I am a VJ and media artist,” “I am a VJ
and designer,” or “I am a visual artist and VJ.”
This development away from pure VJing toward
interdisciplinary work becomes apparent in our
international survey. Another survey conducted in
Austria additionally points to the fact that here
the term “visualist” was introduced as far back as
the late 1990s in order to extricate the performer
from the connotations of the term VJing and
thus to willfully include a broader range of art
approaches. ˚ Art versus Party ˚ International
experts are of two minds when it comes to the
question: “Can VJing be deined as an artistic practice?” Answers vary, depending on whether they
come from an inside or an outside point of view.
However, opinions also differ in internal discussions.
Here, it is more dificult to tie the issue of “art
or no art” to a speciic context—the club or the
established cultural institution. Dada and Fluxus
already demanded a fusion of life and art, and have
made this fusion socially acceptable. Why, then,
from a contemporary point of view, should not
art take place in a club as well? In the
international and Austrian surveys, approximately
80 percent of participants answered the question
125
of whether they saw themselves as artists in the
afirmative. Less than four percent said no, and
about 20 percent stated it would depend on the
context. Some respondents saw themselves as parttime artists. Their self-perception primarily had to
do with the market: VJs are rarely able to make
a living from their assignments at clubs, festivals,
and art institutions. Therefore, the commercial
sector is a signiicant part of the working reality.
It is important not to regard the leap between the
two contexts as negative. Many VJs do not come
from the artistic-academic, established ield of
high culture, but from a more technical training
for example in the multimedia branches of applied
sciences or design. Accordingly, they do not have
the oficial status of a trained artist. Parallel to
this, some of them express the view that they want
to throw parties, not make art. The art discussion
can become problematic due to the heterogeneity
of the scene. In this area in particular, where the
parameters of strong and established institutions
such as the art market, museums, and theaters
cannot be translated one-to-one, it is dificult to
draw objective lines. The mere act of calling oneself an artist does not yet render one’s own work
art. So, even if nearly 80 percent of participants
classify their work as art, there is by far no consensus about the actual deinition of the term. Δ Δ
Despite this unsettled state it is certain that VJing
has developed an artistic community, which has
been searching for new concepts and has estab-
Do you prefer any context
or location to show your work?
| Other (52.8%)
art spaces
chapels and churches
Internet
outdoors
public spaces
domes
industrial sites
out-of-context spaces
festivals
music concert screenings
127
lished new demands. The artistic processes remain
rooted in the original creative idea to select, to
make collages, to remix or sample, and to make
something else visible—live and in realtime. This
has developed into a unique form of art and
creativity, which, in turn, has greatly inluenced
other genres.
non-commercial events
site-specific
Question 9
129
LIVE AUDIOVISUAL PERFORMANCE
131
1[
Amy Alexander, “Audiovisual Live Performance,” in: Dieter
Daniels and Sandra Naumann (eds.), See This Sound:
Audiovisuology Compendium, Linz: Ludwig Boltzmann
Institute; Cologne: Walther König, 2010, p. 199; online at
http://www.see-this-sound.at/compendium/maintext/
54/1 (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
Ana Carvalho
Live audiovisual performance is a term applied to
contemporary artistic expressions of live manipulated sound and image, deined as time-based,
media-based, and performative. Live audiovisual
performance is complex because it does not comprise a speciic style, technique, or medium, but
instead gathers a series of common elements that
simultaneously identify a group of artistic expressions as well as speciic works, which don’t necessarily it within either of the particular expressions
that constitute the group. � � ∆ � � We will
start by segmenting the deinition to describe the
elements constituting the term live audiovisual
performance. To start with, “audiovisual” denotes
audio and image, the two general outcomes of the
action and their combination as a resulting expression. Amy Alexander traces a common starting
point for audiovisual performative practices in the
color organ, stating: “What is common to most
color organs throughout history is that they correlate the performance of light to the performance
of sound—whether metaphorically or literally.” 1 [
Since the beginning of these practices, there has
thus always been an interconnection between
sound and image, which sometimes becomes apparent and at other times remains intuitive. “Performance” takes its cue from Allan Kaprow’s concept
of event-based artistic practices, such as perfor-
133
2[
Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings,
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1956; see excerpt at http://
web.mit.edu/jscheib/Public/performancemedia/kaprow_
assemblages.pdf (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
3[
E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) was an organized
group of artists and engineers who came together to
develop artistic projects at the convergence of the arts
and sciences. The results of ten months of work were
presented at a series of events titled 9 Evenings: Theatre
and Engineering, which took place between 13 and 23
October 1966.
4[
William Kaizen, “Live on Tape: Video, Liveness and the
Immediate,” in: Tanya Leighton (ed.), Art and the Moving
Image, London: Tate Publishing/Afterall, 2008, p. 264.
mances, happenings, and situations. 2 [ In his
writings and his practice, we can ind the grounds
for all the complex dynamics between the presence of the artists and its meaning for the inal
result presented to the audience, the dynamics
of presence. “Live” addresses the relationship
between performance (presence) and the technology necessary to create, manipulate, and project
sound and image. Here we take the historical
E.A.T. 3 [ events as a major reference point that
combined performance with technology. Since
sound and image are always mediated, technology
occupies a central position, it shapes the results.
A feature of live audiovisual performance is improvisation, implicit in “live” and “performance.”
Improvisation becomes possible when the technology used allows for production in realtime. As
William Kaizen explains: “Paradoxically, it was the
intervention of video as a means of recording that
produced ‘the live’ in live television as liveness
became an ideological as much as a technological
limit condition.” 4 [ The televisual immediacy grew
into liveness. The cameras, mixers, and software
for image and sound manipulation have been
derived from television equipment and now permit
to capture and present simultaneously while an
action is happening. Realtime is a technological
capacity that allies presence with manipulation
of sound or image source material. � � � The
term live audiovisual performance is often used as
a generic umbrella that extends to all manner of
135
5[
See the survey in this publication, p. 71.
6[
Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund, “Editorial,” in: C. and H.
Lund (eds.), Audio.Visual: On Visual Music and Related Media,
Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2009, p. 12.
7[
Mapping Festival 2014 website, “About,” http://www.
mappingfestival.com/2014/en/about (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
audiovisual performative expressions, mainly to
VJing, live cinema, expanded cinema, and visual
music. From this perspective, live audiovisual performance identiies the common issues of these
practices. Most artists identify themselves within
this deinition, 5 [ even if they mention other more
speciic ones as well. Cornelia and Holger Lund
deine visual music through the complexity of
cross-referencing and of contradiction within the
genre as “audiovisual productions pursuing the
basic objective of evenly balanced or equilibrated
interplay between visual and acoustic components.” 6 [ Amy Alexander differentiates between
VJing and live cinema, but does not address live
audiovisual performance (or “audiovisual live
performance,” in her term) as a practice with its
own particular features. ‡ Events for live visual
performances, especially on festivals, take place
all over the world. They provide a moment for
understanding the practice in its most innovative
expressions. Since the community—deined by
those individuals interested in and involved with
the creation, production, and fruition of the genre—
is located globally, its online presence, especially
through dedicated websites, becomes central
to its representation. When we take the websites
of two European festivals, Mapping Festival and
sound:frame as examples, what can their programs
tell us about their self-deinition? The Mapping
Festival is identiied as an event “dedicated to
audiovisual art and digital culture.” 7 [ The artworks
137
8[
sound:frame festival 2014 website, “About sound:frame,”
http://2014.soundframe.at/en/festival-2014/aboutsoundframe (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
9[
For the project VJTheory see www.vjtheory.net (site
temporarily suspended in 2015; retrievable through the
Wayback Machine on archive.org).
10 [
“What Is VJing and Realtime Interaction,” VJ Theory.net,
http://www.vjtheory.net/what_is.htm (accessed Aug 3,
2014; retrievable at http://web.archive.org/web/20150223
180310/http://vjtheory.net/what_is.htm).
11 [
“About,” VJ Theory.net, http://www.vjtheory.net (accessed
Aug 3, 2014; retrievable at http://web.archive.org/
web/20150223212048/http://vjtheory.net/index.htm).
presented in the program of the 2014 edition were
divided into installations, performances, clubbing,
and movies. The festival had a VJ contest and
related activities including workshops, lectures,
as well as a section of special events. On the other
hand, sound:frame “deals with audiovisual forms
of expression within the contexts of exhibitions and
performances.” 8 [ The 2014 program was broadly
divided into an exhibition, a series of presentations,
a conference, and live AV performances, taking
place at art-related spaces, such as museums,
and in clubs. Both festivals address the audiovisual
in two directions: object-oriented, that is, exhibiting installations and videos, and event-oriented,
that is, presenting performances. “Audiovisual”
seems, therefore, to be used, in both events, as
the generic term. ①②③ From the generic to the
particular—what could be seen as the contribution of a single practice to live audiovisual performance as a generic term? For example, the project
VJTheory 9 [ has described VJing as “the action of
mixing visuals in a live/performance environment
such as a club,” 10 [ but not exclusively. VJing is
understood beyond the club and the party context.
By expressing that the “project intends to develop
a community actively discussing and relecting
on philosophy and theory related with VJing and realtime interaction,” 11 [ references to all sorts of live
manipulation and interactivity are also emphasized,
extending the scope of the project’s intentions
to installations as well. Elsewhere, Mark Amerika’s
139
12 [
Mark Amerika, META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007, p. 80.
13 [
Dick Higgins and Hannah Higgins, “Intermedia,” in:
Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 1 (Feb 2001), p. 52; online at https://
muse.jhu.edu/journals/leonardo/v034/34.1higgins.html
(accessed Sep 1, 2015).
deinition of the VJ describes, beyond the practice
of live manipulation, a philosophy of improvisation,
extending from live audiovisuals to artists and
writers engaged with technology. The performance
of the VJ is experienced as a method of inquiry
through life as improvisation, a “lifestyle practice.” 12 [ ∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫ So far we have presented
live audiovisual performance as a generic term,
applied to a group of artistic practices which, each
on their own, have features that can describe
and contribute to the generic term itself. Having
said that, the term also acknowledges works with
speciic features that it within neither the cinematic context of live cinema nor the club context
of VJing, that can neither be deined as expanded
cinema nor through a connection to visual music.
Live audiovisual performance identiies the speciicity of a work by highlighting its intermediality.
These are “works which fall conceptually between
media,” 13 [ as described by Dick Higgins. While
live audiovisual performance, as a combination
between sound, image, and performance, by itself
doesn’t need this association with intermediality,
still each performance potentiates unlimited possibilities through the combination of these same
elements (sound, image, performance) with other
media, such as drawing or text. ĺ ĺ ĺ The endless
creative and expressive potential that lies in the
combination between artistic areas—dance, generative art, video, theater, and others—is easy to
recognize when intermedia connections in the work
141
14 [
Mia Makela, “Introduction: Live Cinema—Realtime
audiovisual creation,” a mínima 22 (2008); online at http://
www.miamakela.net/TEXT/text_INTRO_AMINIMA_final.pdf
(accessed Sep 1, 2015).
15 [
For the Satellite Jockey project see: http://ricksilva.net/
satellitejockey.html (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
16 [
See e.g. Parsifal at Hotel Pro Forma: http://www.hotel
proforma.dk/projects/parsifal (accessed Sep 1, 2015).
17 [
Tanya Leighton, “Introduction,” in: T. Leighton (ed.),
Art and the Moving Image, London: Tate Publishing/
Afterall, 2008, p. 12.
of speciic artists and collaborative teams become
pronounced. Presenting a position that demonstrates the difference between two of the practices,
Mia Makela explains: “Many Live Cinema artists
work in close collaboration with musicians and form
AV-groups (Rechenzentrum, Telcosystems, Pink
Twins, etc.), symbolizing that their approach has
gone far beyond creating visual wallpapers to
accompany the DJ.” 14 [ These collaborative dynamics are even more obvious in live audiovisual
performances where audio and visual artists work
together with other professionals to create unique
unclassiiable events—through the construction
or appropriation of tools, as for example the use
of Google Earth by Satellite Jockey, 15 [ or through
the combination with dance and opera, as for
example in some events by Hotel Pro Forma. 16 [
Ť Ŧ ţ Ť Ŧ ţ Ť Ŧ Holding in mind, as suggested by
Tanya Leighton, that technology-based contemporary artistic expressions are radically heterogeneous, 17 [ the formulation of closed deinitions
and clear segmentations presents itself as impossible. To address the circumstances that deine
our contemporaneity, it would be more appropriate
to construct lexible structures connecting the
different works rather than using a rigid series of
deinitions. Seen like this, a theoretical framework
speciic to live audiovisual performance would
be in permanently changing formulation (without
ixity), relating the speciities of a single practice to
what is common to the group of practices involved,
143
always pointing ahead to the next turn that will be
provoked technologically, politically, aesthetically,
or by affections between the elements of the
community.
Do you prefer any context to show
your work?
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Acknowledgments
The AV Breakthrough project team would like
to thank all those who have supported the
project, encouraged us by different means,
and given us valuable input: our Indiegogo
supporters, the artists donating their work as
supporter rewards, the sound:frame Festival
for Audiovisual Expressions, the participants in
the survey, the participants of the discussions
during the Audiovisual Breakthrough presentation at sound:frame 2014, all those who have
responded to us individually via the Internet or in
personal discussions, our copy editor Lutz Eitel.
Special thanks to the most generous of our
Indiegogo supporters ∫ Benton C. Bainbridge,
New York / Marcus Bastos, São Paulo / Hartmut
Bernecker, Bietigheim-Bissingen / Alexander Mink,
Stuttgart / Ravann, Vevey / Rolf Stueger, Wien
Do you have any further statements on
audiovisual art you want to share with us?
Authors
Fischer wrote her magister thesis on “Audiovisual
Tendencies” and has widely published and lectured
on interdisciplinary artistic approaches and cultural
management. Since 2011, she has been holding
a lectureship on “Audiovisual Media” at the IKM/
University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna,
and since 2013 she has been teaching “Experimental
Media” at the St Pölten University of Applied Sciences.
She has been curator of international exhibitions
and audiovisual live performance programs in New
York, Moscow, Melbourne, Shanghai, Milan, Berlin,
and other cities, and is performing as a visualist
at international festivals and events.
Cornelia Lund is an art and media theorist
and curator living in Berlin. Since 2004, she has been
co-director of fluctuating images, a platform for media
art and design with a focus on audiovisual artistic
production (www.fluctuating-images.de). Currently,
she is research fellow in a DFG research project on
German documentary film at the University of (↘
151
Ana Carvalho is a live video composer
and performer, who writes on subjects related to
live audiovisual performance. She holds a PhD on
“Communication and Digital Platforms” from Faculdade
de Letras da Universidade do Porto (FLUP). Her thesis
was titled “Materiality and the Ephemeral: Identity
and Performative Audiovisual Arts, Its Documentation
and Memory Construction.” In 2005, together with
Brendan Byrne, she initiated VJTheory, an editorial
project available online as an archive. Ana Carvalho has
organized several events from a point of convergence
of theory and practice in the UK and in Portugal.
Currently she holds a position as invited lecturer at
the Instituto Universitário da Maia (ISMAI).
Eva Fischer is an Austrian art historian,
curator, and visualist based in Vienna. She is the
founder and director of the sound:frame Festival for
Audiovisual Expressions in Vienna, which she started in
2007. Since then, sound:frame has become one of the
most important international festivals in that field. (→
Hamburg. For many years she has been teaching
design theory at various universities, such as the
University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg, University
of Applied Sciences Hamburg, and the University of
the Arts Bremen. Cornelia Lund is co-editor, together
with Holger Lund, of Audio.Visual: On Visual Music
and Related Media (Arnoldsche, 2009) and Design
der Zukunft (AV Edition, 2014). She is also co-editor
of the online platform Post-digital Culture (http://
post-digital-culture.org). Her work as a curator includes
numerous screenings and exhibitions (e.g. Mapping
Festival Geneva, Academy of the Arts Berlin, Index
Festival New York, Hamburger Architektursommer).
Gabriel Menotti is an independent curator
and lecturer in Multimedia at the Federal University
of Espírito Santo, Brazil. He is the author of Através
da Sala Escura (Intermeios, 2012), a history of movie
theaters from the perspective of VJing spaces, and
co-editor of Besides the Screen: Moving Images
through Distribution, Promotion and Curation
(Palgrave, 2015). Menotti holds a PhD in Media and
Communications from Goldsmiths College at the
University of London, and another from the Catholic
University of São Paulo. He has published work in a
number of research journals and books, as well as
contributed to international events such as the (→
São Paulo Biennial, Rencontres Internationales Paris/
Berlin/Madrid, and the transmediale festival.
Adeena Mey is a critic, curator, and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Lausanne,
Switzerland. He studied Aural and Visual Cultures
at Goldsmiths College in London and Science Studies
and Critical Theory at the University of Lausanne. From
2013 to 2015 he was a visiting researcher at Central
Saint-Martins, London. During this time, he also ran
the independent project space PastVynerStreet, nested
in a railway arch in East London, with co-curator
Sandra Sykorova. With François Bovier, he is the editor
of the books René Berger: L'art vidéo (JRP-Ringier,
2014); Cinéma Exposé / Exhibited Cinema (ECAL/Les
presses du réel, 2015); Exhibiting the Moving Image:
History Revisited and Cinema in the Expanded Field
(both forthcoming in late 2015 from JRP-Ringier).
He is currently a critic in residence at Cheongju
Art Studio in South Korea, where he is curating the
exhibition Kunsthalle Archeology. Mey’s writings
address the intersection of experimental and artists’
films, exhibition history, and critical theory.
Eva-Maria Offermann is a German designer
whose work is based on concepts shifting between
art and design. She has mainly concentrated
on print design and shown her posters in design (→
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exhibitions around the world, garnering prizes from
the Tokyo Type Director’s Club, the International
Poster and Graphic Design Festival Chaumont, the
Taipei International Design Award, among several
others. Offermann studied fine arts and design at
Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, receiving
her degree in communication design in 2012. Since
then she has been running her own studio, while also
taking up work as a visual communications assistant
at Kunsthochschule Kassel the following year.
Maria Pfeifer is an Austrian cultural manager
and scholar of comparative literature, based in Vienna
and Linz. She is part of the core team running the
sound:frame Festival for Audiovisual Expressions
and wrote her master thesis on the visualization
of literature. Since 2011 she has also been involved
in various projects of the Linz-based Festival Ars
Electronica and the Ars Electronica Futurelab. Currently
she is holding a lectureship on event management
and exhibition practices in the field of literature
at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg.
The Audiovisual Breakthrough
Editors � Ana Carvalho, Cornelia Lund
Authors � Ana Carvalho, Eva Fischer,
Cornelia Lund, Gabriel Menotti, Adeena Mey
Survey � Maria Pfeifer
Copy editing � Lutz Eitel
Design � Eva-Maria Offermann, Kassel
Printed by � Collin&Maierski Print GbR, Berlin
Printed on � Geese Pegasus
Font � GT Cinetype
Supported by � our Indiegogo supporters
PDF for download � http://www.ephemeralexpanded.net/audiovisualbreakthrough
© 2015 the authors and
luctuating images. contemporary media art e.V.
Willdenowstraße 10 D-13353 Berlin
www.luctuating-images.de
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be
reproduced or used in any form or by any means
(graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including
photocopying or information storage and retrieval
systems) without written permission from the
copyright holder.
ISBN 978-3-00-051072-4
Printed in Germany
ISBN 978-3-00-051072-4