The boundary between visual art and aural modes of creative practice is porous. Today, sound art is a burgeoning area of creative discourse and intermedial practice. Its conceptual and historical roots can be traced back to aesthetic and philosophical theories of colour and music developed the classical era, ideas that would be consolidated in the Enlightenment and late modern periods.

Sound art emerged at the confluence of new technologies for visualizing and recording audio material in the nineteenth century and the attempts by painters in the early-twentieth century to extend visual art practice beyond the boundaries of the strictly visual. Throughout the twentieth century, there was an endeavour, albeit fitful, to establish coalitions, correspondences, and connections between the two domains. Artists and musicians crossed over into one another’s territories in order to extend their field of competence, to collaborate on audio-visual works, to establish theoretical and mutual methodological underpinnings, and to operate and cooperate in the interstice of their disciplines. During the period of late-Modernism, visual artists and musicians, either in collaboration or independently, explored syntheses and correspondences between image and sound, compositionally and performatively. The resultant works eluded categorization, and represented a variety of reciprocal inspirations between and across visual art, music, dance, theatre, and creative writing.

Since the late 1970s, postmodernism’s emphasis on plurality, stylistic fusion, and the amalgamation of disparate material has further ruptured the membrane that separated mediums, styles, and art forms. Alliances have been encouraged, within the wider cultural discourse, by the growth of interdisciplinary, intermedial, and transmedial studies (whereby different art forms and media are made and observed to combine, fuse, or productively co-relate), a renewed interest in the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), and ‘transgressive’ thinking (across the boundaries of subject fields).

New conceptualizations of knowledge acquisition, which emphasize interaction and simultaneity of form and perception, have also helped to foster a climate conducive to the visual-audio research and practice. The convergence and crossover has been further enabled by the rise of further new technology. Digitization has given visual artists, musicians and sound artists a common framework for creative development and the facility to seamlessly combine and manipulate different media as information, which can be preserved, and accessed and shared via the Internet. Recently, art historians too have begun to engage with the acoustic aspect of objects, spaces, and architecture, visual codifications of sound, and sound as an accompaniment to visual experience and contexts.

The module provides a historical overview of this prolific, varied, and ground-breaking period in the coming together, exchange, and mutual influence of visual art and sound-based practices. While the curriculum surveys a broad span of time, its focus is upon the period from modernity to the present day. The module also examines, as a backdrop to the discussion of more recondite practices, correspondences between the development of art culture and music culture during the Modernist and Postmodernist periods. The intention is to explore, contextually, the visual artist’s engagement with sound, noise, and music while at the same time recognizing the traffic of musicians and sound artists moving in the opposite direction, who aspire to cultivate visual analogues for their work. The module will discuss theoretical perspectives, historical trajectories, methodologies of thought and practice, key concepts, case studies, and exhibition contexts.

Further information about this module is available at:
johnharvey.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Art-Sound_Curriculum.pdf