Sounding the Gallery

Abstract

Abstract This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music. Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video became integral to the experimentalism of New York City’s music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, allowing composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images in a quick and easy manner. Video also enabled the creation of interactive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. The medium’s audiovisual synergy could be projected, manipulated and processed live and the closed-circuit video feed drew audience members into the heart of the experience. Such activated spectatorship resulted in improvisatory and performative events, in which the space between artists, composers, performers and visitors collapsed into a single, yet expansive, intermedial environment. Many believed that audiovisual video signalled a brand-new art form that only began in 1965. This book suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatialising their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. Pioneering video work allowed these two disciplines to come together. Shifting the focus from object to spatial process, Sounding the Gallery uses theories of intermedia, film, architecture, drama and performance practice to create an interdisciplinary history of music and art that culminates in the rise of video art-music in the late 1960s.

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