CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference

Putting Two and Two Together to Make Yellow - Synaesthesia, Media, Art and Life
Rob Flint, Nottingham Trent University, UK

‘I'm hearing the light from the window
I'm seeing the sound of the sea
My feet have come loose from their moorings I'm feeling quite wonderfully free’ Mike Nesmith, 'Rio'

This paper addresses the implications for visual culture of the linking of sound and image in new hybrid media forms. This convergence is viewed in the context of the modern quest for the synæsthesic 'sensis communis', from Baudelaire's Correspondences, through the Theosophists’ influence on modern painting and early abstract film animation, to the instant collisions and manufactured causations of audiovisual software.

The historical context is outlined; how the senses were once held to be borne out of one single 'common sense', and how this idea remained alive into the nineteenth century as a proof of a suprasensible, or spiritual realm, an idea whose influence on the arts is made known in the works of Kandinsky and Scriabin.

A comparison is drawn between this idea (now scientifically discredited) of 'objective' synæsthesia, and the quasi-synæsthesic function of software that reduces all information to a common language of bits, allowing different sensory modes to share common sets of values. Max/MSP, for example, used to programme many interactive art works and other applications is designed to enable communication between media forms that address different senses.

The presentation of the paper also draws on some possibly unexpected instances in recent art, especially from film, video, and performance, to show how current reflection on inter-sensory experience is not confined to software-based art forms.

Although the paper deploys varied and sometimes contradictory theoretical frameworks (Deleuze, Marx) it asserts with Benjamin the idea that the 'content' of media is not distinct from their form, and that the meaning(s) of what we see and hear is historically transformed by its mediation through changes in production and transmission.

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