Abstracts
Ian Andrews - The Expanded Contracted Field of Recent Audio-visual Art
A certain form of live audio-visual performance (AV) has emerged in the first years of the 21st Century. While related to VJ culture, AV seems to be closer to post-digital music and its related genres. Recent AV performance works share a history with the avant-garde, abstract cinema of the 1920s, optical-audio kinetic art, lightshows, expanded cinema, structural film, and video experiments of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but what is it that differentiates AV from these earlier movements? Obvious answers would point to its live performance aspect, its integral relation to sound/music, and new advances in technology. Yet none of these aspects come close to universally demarcating the genre from its predecessors. In privileging sensate experience, AV represents a return to formal concerns of kinetic imagery and the modernist trajectory towards human self-perfection through the expansion of the senses, or the exploration of altered modes of consciousness (psychedelia). In other respects it constitutes a contracted self-reflexive examination of its own materials, albeit a reflection whose central concern is not the problematisation of representation. This paper will examine the implications of these issues for a pedagogy of music and sound design, and the relation that AV has to my own work. I argue that the most interesting aspect of AV work is not (syn)aesthetic experience, nor the self-reflexive foregrounding of the material substrate, but rather the imposition of (sometimes severe) compositional limits for real-time presentation.
Darrin Verhagen - Audiovision, Psy-Ops and the Perfect Crime
Given the limitations of conscious attention, schemas assist us in prioritising components within an incoming flow of information. In a search for meaning and significance, we draw upon previously established templates to assist us in making these choices, ultimately assisting us in minimising cognitive load. Sound designers and composers, whether consciously or unconsciously, exploit our fundamental desire to register as "known" particular types of audiovisual logic, thus rendering "invisible" the manipulative tools of their trade. Drawing on the extremes of Verhagen's works - vicious screen-based assaults of sight and sound (composed for the industrial underground), large scale robot soundtracks for contemporary dance, role playing scores for computer games, through to station ident jingles for corporate cable, the relationships between sound and vision, and the templates of the different platforms (whether used to disarm, pander, manipulate or decoy) will be explored.
Tom Ellard - Music Outside Of Sound
Music doesn't equal audio; as a discipline and aesthetic it has a place across all the arts - once named the 'muses' and now called 'media'. Harmony, counterpoint et al. are useful factors in all composition. Likewise elements in architecture, writing and visual design have potency in what is currently called 'music'. Some current stagnation in 'music' stems from a needless isolation of ideas and practice, especially disappointing at a time where technology is checked more by a lack of ideas than computational power.
This isn't another call for 'hybrid arts' or 'multimedia', which implies joining multiple practices after their conception - rather it's a call for a more fundamental Music that is expressed by all and every means appropriate. Art is diluted when schooled as 'audio', 'video' and so on. A little rebellion is needed here - at least in refusing terminology and in using tools against their implicit rules.
In this session I'll present some of my misuses of technology. While simple they lead to Music with a broad appeal.