Aural Affects and Effects: Explicit and implicit sounds and rhythms in contemporary visual media
Day: Friday 6 April
Convenors
Olga Nikolaeva (University of Gothenburg)
Christine Sjöberg (University of Gothenburg)
Johnny Wingstedt (Dalarna University)
Session Abstract
When the body ‘looks out’ it does not only see, but it also perceives the visual by means of other senses than sight. Different kinds of intermedialities enhance the notion of the entanglement of the senses. Sounds in digital environments of, for instance, the internet amplify the experience of different types of imageries, while movements such as loops, short films and GIF-animations seem to create visual rhythms. In the space of, for instance, pop and rock live concerts, digital technologies are used to create advanced visual imagery, engaging aural, pictorial and embodied notions in the construction of a gesamtkunstwerk. Thus, in examples ranging from live concert environments to, for example, digital fashion magazines, visual imagery is merged with aural affects and effects in different ways.
This session is interested in how sound and audial resources affect the visual and how the visual creates phenomenological experiences of the aural within contemporary visual media. The questions this session seeks to evolve are: What happens to the space of the visual when explicit and implicit audial means are involved? How does the beholder’s space become affected by this? How can art historical methods and methodologies be adapted to and challenged by this?
Speakers and Papers
Lisa Deml (Independent scholar) Louder than Words. Quietude as a practice of everyday resistance
Astrid von Rosen (University of Gothenburg) Scenographing Sound in the Dance Archive: Affective atmospheres and
transformative materialities
Fiona Davies (University of Sydney, Australia) A Bedside Medical Monitor’s Song
Melissa Warak (University of Texas at El Paso) The Clothes Make the Band: Nick Cave’s ‘soundsuits’ and the body sonic
Dawna Schuld (Texas A&M University) Sculptural Acoustics: Colouring the silence in Doug Wheeler’s Synthetic Desert