book - Indipendent Curators International - ISBN 0916365719
The experiments on the relationships between sound and images have their roots in the analogue Seventies, and many of those ideas are now revisited and developed into new concepts using the paradigms of digital technologies. From the historic works by Nam June Paik / Jud Yaslkut, Gary Hill and Steina / Woody Vasulka we are gradually guided through those by Robin Rimbaud / Scanner, the D-Fuse collective, Steven Vitiello, Atau Tanaka, Granular-Synthesis and Fred Szymanski, exploring many different aspects of the links between visual and auditive stimulations, from the induced generation of one of these two factors (sound conditioning the graphics and viceversa) to the emulation of synaesthetical phenomena, from sound in all its possible morphological characteristics, to voice, indissolubly tied to the face of the person it belongs to, this catalogue, an expression of the exhibition with the same name hosted at the Eyebeam in New York, reproduces well the marriage between images and sounds. One can only wonder why this marriage isn't always present in the audiovisual works of today. Granted, the link between a changing image and the sound in the background is stronger and stronger, but the usual 'synchrony' is different on many levels from the 'symbiosis' this work strives for. In music videos/vjing and soundtracks (two opposite ways to elaborate an element starting from the other) and in artistic installations, the two elements (visual and auditive) are independent from each other. This way, their very genetic code transforms to absorb the alien particles of the other element, in a reciprocal mutation that enriches and innovates them both.