SESSION: Sound, Vision, and the Spatial Imagination
From the resonant acoustics of sacred spaces to the immersive soundscapes of film and digital art, art, architecture and visual culture can connect with, challenge, support or subvert the sonic dimensions of space and experience. Drawing inspiration from scholars such as Bissera Pentcheva (Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium, 2017) and Brandon LaBelle (Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, 2010), this panel investigates how audiovisual interplay can shape our perception and experience of space, whether physical, social, or psychological. We seek papers exploring the varieties of meanings that sonic and visual modalities can co-produce. Topics might include (but are not limited to): music, performance and soundscapes within gallery and museum contexts; stage and scenographic design in live performances; architectures of listening and performance and their cultural politics; soundscapes and visuality in urban, rural or digital environments; the multisensorial or synaesthetic dimensions of works of art and architecture, and depictions of music-making and/or sonic responses.
The panel seeks to enable cross-cultural and transhistorical dialogues between art historians working on sound and image relations across different geographical areas and time periods. It welcomes proposals from diverse historical and cultural contexts, particularly topics that engage with questions of race, gender, politics, religion, diasporas, or technology.
Session Convenor:
Rachel Coombes, Downing College,Heong Gallery and Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge
Onur Engin, Darwin College, Faculty of Music and Cambridge Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge
Laura Slater, Peterhouse, Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge
Session Speakers:
J Lucien Midavaine, Independent Scholar
Art Against the Arts: Reconstructing the Sensorial Space of the Salons de la Rose+Croix
Throughout the nineteenth century, European artistic circles sought to dissolve the traditional boundaries separating art forms that had long underpinned aesthetic theory. From the opera stage to the concert hall and the art gallery, artists experimented with ways to unite image, sound, colour, and even scent into coherent sensory experiences. Few initiatives, however, were as ambitious as the Salon de la Rose+Croix, inaugurated in 1892 by the writer Joséphin Péladan—a rigorously staged exhibition that he described as “a manifestation of Art against the arts.”
Scholarly discussions of Péladan’s salons have generally focused on discrete aspects of these events, from their Wagnerian influences, to, more recently, Péladan’s role as a proto-curator. Building on previous research on Symbolist salons through the lenses of music performance and mysticism, this paper proposes a holistic interpretation of the Salons de la Rose+Croix as multisensory, religious, and immersive environments designed to evoke contact with realities beyond the sensible realm. It asks how the Salons de la Rose+Croix can be understood—and perhaps reconstructed—as a unified multisensory experience, and what such an approach reveals about the possibilities and limits of simultaneous perception in fin-de-siècle art and culture. Considering the salons as indivisible aesthetic wholes raises specific questions about the aesthetic, cognitive, and physiological effects that emerge when multiple sensory modalities are intentionally combined in one artistic event.
Sonia Arribas, Pompeu Fabra University and Irene Valle, Granada University
Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?: The “Singespiel” as an Acoustic and Visual Territory of Interwar Berlin
Recent art-historical discourse has expanded the study of space beyond the visual and architectural, exploring how modern artworks construct spatial experience through sound, movement, and performance. Within this context, this paper examines Charlotte Salomon’s (1917–1943) monumental visual autobiography, Life? or Theatre?: A “Singespiel” (1941–42), which fuses painting, text, and music to narrate her life in interwar Berlin. Crucially, while the visual narrative has received substantial attention, the work’s musical structure and acoustic components remain largely under-researched.
Our presentation argues that Salomon’s “Singespiel” format produces an “acoustic territory”—a performative space where trauma, memory, and identity are negotiated through acts of seeing, reading and listening. The work, structured as an operetta, centres its Main Part on a dramatic, unrequited love story. The main dramatic personae—the lover and family members—are drawn from the author’s intimate circle, forming the work’s central tragic conflict. Drawing on close visual, textual, and musicological analysis, we investigate how Salomon integrates images, musical notation and intimate commentaries. These elements function as a crucial document, capturing both the broad sweep of German culture and the emotional landscape of the author’s personal experience.
We contend that the “Singespiel” operates as both an aesthetic form and a psychological device: it re-stages personal tragedy through operatic performance while situating individual experience within the broader urban soundscape. Ultimately, this paper positions Life? or Theatre? as a vital case in the sensory mapping of experience, expanding art-historical understandings of how modern art charts the sensory geographies of twentieth-century urban life.
Joana Burd, IE University (Madrid) and University of Barcelona
Touching Sound: Spatial Ecologies and Haptic Acoustics
The paper positions Biohybrid Buzz—a sonic-haptic installation centred on the Brazilian electric daisy (Acmella oleracea)—within debates on sonic spatiality, bioart, and multisensory installation. Drawing on Bissera Pentcheva’s notion of resonant space and Laura Marks’s haptic visuality, it examines vibration as an architectural and relational material that reshapes spatial perception. The paper asks: How can vibration and mouth-based resonance reconfigure spatial experience by blurring boundaries between living and non-living matter?
Presented in low light with a 4.2-channel surround array and guided video, the work choreographs low-frequency sound with the plant’s chemesthetic (oral tingling) “buzz.” Plant-derived datasets are translated into a spatial sonification, allowing oscillation to create dialogues between bodies and environments. Methodologically, practice-based research and sensory ethnography guide the project: field notes mapping temporal oral sensation scaffold the spatial composition and its parameter mappings (the sensing and sonification pipeline is specified in the paper).
Framed by Jane Bennett’s account of vibrant matter and feminist aesthetics of touch, vibration operates as an architectural, relational medium that destabilises organism/artefact and interior/exterior dichotomies. The paper advances a post-ocular account of spatial imagination, foregrounding the political and ecological stakes of proximity, consumption, and access. By situating Latin American materials and lineages within global sound art and architectural genealogies, it offers a cross-cultural perspective on sound–image relations. Ultimately, it proposes vibration as a shared, transmedia language that articulates hybrid presences and expands how art history theorises audiovisual space—acoustic, visual, and somatic at once.