IMAGES FROM LECTURE: 28.08.06
Norwegian Theatre Academy

During this lecture I attempted to map the path of synaesthetic performance to the rise (and fall) of the VJ in the Acid House Club Scene (referring to, amongst others, Annet Dekker's paper Synaesthetic Performance In The Club Scene and Sadie Plant's book Writing on Drugs).

About synaesthesia:

Clinical: where a sensation in one sensory mode triggers a response in another and creates unusually joined sensations such as seeing sounds, tasting shapes, feeling smells.

The sensations are experienced as being very real, sometimes profound. A synesthete cannot turn their strange ability on and off - it is an involuntary experience. They can either be projected outside the body, or perceived in the "mind's eye". There are many types of synaesthetic connections - and it is a very subjective phenomenon. Talking to one synesthete about my project, she said that it was even impossible for one syn to comprehend how another syn experienced their unusual sensations. Synaesthetic experience can have an emotional impact on the lives of synesthetes. For example, I have met a man who experience smells in connection with names. He has not been able to maintain relationships with women whose names evoke a bad smell.

Today psychologists and neuroscientists study synesthesia not only for its own sake, but also for what it might tell us about cognitve and perceptual processes that occur in everyone, synesthete and non-synesthete alike. A leading figure in the feild, Richard Cytowic (US), has proposed that we are all born with synaesthetic abilities that diminish as we grow older, but why some people retain their abilities is still an unanswered question. The image below is an an illustration of the experience of someone who perceives numbers simultaneously as colours - an ability that can aid memory.

(Devised by Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001)

Synaesthesic art: the creation of one media out of another (with the intention of evoking unusual sensations and emotions).

Throughout several centuries people with synesthesia have used their synaesthetic experiences as part of their creative process. Many non-synesthetes have attempted to create works of art that may capture what it is like to experience synesthesia. Others have simply used the idea as a strategy for making artworks. In synaesthetic art one sense should not overrule another, but rather the combined sensations should interact, and ideally, give a heightened state of consciousness.

While the history of synaestetic art practice is centuries old it reached a peak in the early 1900's - a new century that exploded with discoveries in technology and science, and new perspectives on spirituality, psychology, etc. Inspired by the changes that were taking place in society, artists from various disciplines searched for ways of transcending representation, and to put the viewer on a more sublime sensory level.

Having already freed itself from the shackles of representation, music (instrumental) became a model to which visual art might aspire: a "pure" and abstract form that stretched beyond perceivable (accepted) reality and suggested another place of seemingly limitless space and time.

STRANGE CONNECTIONS:

Which one is "booba" and which one is "kiki?"
Why do we think this?
Is it the shape of the mouth: rounded when we say Booba?
The sharpness of the sound of Kiki?
The bright colour and the "bright" sound of Kiki?
What would "k" look like?

This test is used to shown that the connection between the people attach sounds to shapes may not be artbitary. (The words booba and kiki are said to have derived from a "remote tribe" - but I can find no reference to the actual tribe in question.)

ASSOCIATIVE IMAGES BETWEEN ART AND FOOD
(art/life - high form/ - social form?)

SEE, HEAR, TASTE
EAST MEETS WEST: Richard Cytowic, a renowned neurologist of recent times wrote a book called "The man who tasted shapes" that made the phenomenon of synaesthesia accesible to non-scientists. About synaesthesia and culture, he says that, while synaesthesia has been the subject of research and debate for several centuries in the western world, it is interesting to note that in other cultures synaesthesia, as a perceptual phenomenon, is hardly known. Speaking particularly about olfactory synaesthesia in Japanese culture, neurologist Richard Cytowic writes that:

"Japanese culture understands “synesthesia” as metaphoric whereas it hardly knows the perceptual phenomenon. Possible explanations include a cultural attitude of interrelated experience". Hence, the images that you should have seen at the beginning of my talk when I mentioned Kandinsky ......

L. Kandinsky's painting: music for the eyes.
R. A feast - for the eyes?

DRUGS

I do actually believe that taking perception-changing drugs is the most fool-proof way to have something like a synaesthetic experience, but I do not advocate it.

In her book, "Writing on drugs", Sadie Plant describes how perception-changing drugs from afar have influenced our society since they were first introduced. Not only the drugs themselves, but how interactions with other cultures via trade (and trade wars) have also brought philosophies from other cultures with them. Drugs were brought to Europe from afar: china/northern america, etc, based on extracts from plants/flowers. Each drug has its own code - the way it works in our bodies. They have also influenced ideas about art, and art production.

An example, Antonin Artaud speaks about opium in connection with his work:

"It is not opium which makes me work but its absence,
and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present."

Some drugs make you more introvert than others. Some more social - like Ecstasy, ESPECIALLY if you are sharing an experience with others who take it.

Ecstasy is a synthetic drug - not made of chemicals extracted from plants like in earlier times. It is a synthesized experience (analogy to audio/visual technology: audio/video synthesizers that do not work on any "real material" or rely soley on camera to generate image - or a sound source for audio.) It turns on and off, and remaps signals/connections in the brain.

People with synaesthesia have subjective cross-wired experiences that are difficult to categorise, and to find out why they happen. Their experiences are not elaborate - in visual terms - say, a pastoral image appearing in the mind's eye when listening to Beethoven. They are more abstract - more analogous to abstract art.

HISTORICAL NOTES

MID 1700's:

Louis Castel-Betrand
Inventor of the Ocular harpsichord - an intrument for the deaf to experience what music is like, and to prove his theories of colour/sound corespondences.

Compare Castel-Betrand's colour scheme to Newton's and you will see that they don't match. He also wanted to show that there was a dynamic connection between colour - via light - and sound, but historical records show that he was never satisfied with his invention and its ability to prove his theories.

(A little diversion .........

COLOUR MUSIC - VISUAL MUSIC

Remembering that synaesthesia is a personal experience - one person may hear/see C as being red, while another may have a blue experience, below is a chart of several people's colour-scale relationships:

Note-colour schemes - 1700's - 1970's (Fred Callopy - RhythmicLight.com)

SPECULATION:

The ecstasy smiley icon is usually yellow - "e" - like Newton's colour/scale version - in most cases. Isn't that strange! Newton, like many others, maintained that there is a real analogy between elementary colors and the notes of the musical scale. )

1800's

DIORAMA
- another world (hyper real?)
- an immersive environment.

Developments in technology - especially those of image and sound have left their mark on approaches to synaesthetic performance/art - and vice versa. One such early example of an audio/visual spectacle is the diorama of the 1800's. It combined the use of a development of an early projection device - the Magic Latern (see: http://www.magiclantern.org.uk/history1.htm ) - with the notion of panorama. Here is a dictionary description.

(Diorama (Di`o*ra"ma) n. [Gr. to see through; = dia` through + to see; cf. that which is seen, a sight: cf. F. diorama. Cf. Panorama.]
1. A mode of scenic representation, invented by Daguerre and Bouton, in which a painting is seen from a distance through a large opening. By a combination of transparent and opaque painting, and of transmitted and reflected light, and by contrivances such as screens and shutters, much diversity of scenic effect is produced.
2. A building used for such an exhibition.Websters Dictionary, 1913
(http://www.bibliomania.com )

L: This engraving was exhibited by G. Cromer in Paris in 1924 as supposedly showing the audience at a diorama by Daguerre in the 1830s.
R: Diagram of John Arrowsmith's Diorama, 1823, showing the projected image - a technique based on an earlier invention, magic lantern.
Images from: http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/DIORAMA_WOOD_1_1.html

I mentioned dioramas becuase they are an example of bringing things together - music, light, image, special effects. You could call it an early synaesthetic performance. But while they used special effects like fog and light to generate an emotional landscape, they were pictorial - not abstract.

1900's

The interest in the relationship between sound and image/colour/light and their related technologies used to produce them has dominated the history of synaesthetic art . The notion of synaesthesia, and the correspondencies between the audio visual realms exploded in the early 20th C. Three main modes eveolved:

1. Abstract painting that aspires to the principles of non-representational music. (eg. Kandisnky)
2. Music that aspires to evoke visual impressions (eg. Scriabin)
3. Colour organ performances that aim to free the visual image from the "surface" (eg. Scriabin + Rimington)

(and out from these early experiements came abstract film making)

Artist Wallace and composer Alexander Scriabin.

1915
L: A. Wallace Rimington's colour organ scheme for Scriabin's "Prometheus. Poem of Fire".
R: Scriabin's colour-sound system simply applied to keys on a keyboard.
(for more on Rimington's ideas of the "new art" of colour music, see: http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld/files/newart.html

Rimington's colour organ.

Simplest light instrument used by Scriabin
From: http://prometheus.kai.ru/ck+kand_e.htm

Scriabin's system colour/scale/emotional impact.

Another example:

In 1924 Russina Fururist painter, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, had the first presentation of his octophonic piano during a performance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. It was a synaesthetic keyboard instrument that could create sounds and coloured lights simultaneosly, but was based on a series of rotating projected disks, rather than just lights.

Images from: http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/machines/optophonic/index.html

EARLY ABSTRACT FILM MAKERS WERE ALSO INSPIRED BY THE NOTION OF SYNAESTHESIA, SUCH AS .....

OSKAR FISCHINGER

1942: 2 still images from Oskar Fishinger's Visual Music film, "Allegretto".
Abstract film makers devloped their own techniques for creating their artworks.
(Images from: http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/ )

(Fischinger moved from Germany to the states in 1936, and was employed at Paramount pictures, where he designed the Bach "Toccata and Fugue" sequence for Disney's Fantasia. However, he quit without credit because all his designs were simplified and altered to be more representational.)

(Late 1950's: "Happenings" - a term coined by Allan Kaprow. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happening)

1960's: Tune in, trun on, drop out.

The interest in synaeasthesia returns.
Counter culture.
Drugs such as LSD evoke psychedelic experiences comparable to synaesthesia.
The search for a radically new way of perceiving the world was on.
Mind and awareness expansion, spirituality and transcendence.

POP CULTURE

L: 1966 "Exploding Plastic Inevitable": multi-screen immersive environment (documented in the style of synaesthetic cinema).
R: The Factory: it was often hard to tell who were the artists and who was the audience.

Parallel Approaches:

Nam Jun Paik: gallery objects, humanizing technology.
Vasulkas: articulating a specific language for video.

1969: TV AS A CREATIVE MEDIUM EXIBITION (Intermedia)
TV as a creative Medium: Film and Video Documentation: http://www.eai.org/kinetic/ch1/creative/film_video.html

TV Bra (an instrument ....): http://www.paikstudios.com/gallery/27.html
TV Bra (for live performance ......) http://www.paikstudios.com/gallery/18.html


STEINA AND WOODY VASULKA (MIXING SIGNALS - DEVELOPING TOOLS)

Vasulkas: still image from Noisefield, 1974
from: http://www.vasulka.org/Videomasters/pages_stills/index_42.html
(you can see a quicktime movie on this page too.)

See more of Vasulka's video work here: http://www.vasulka.org/Videomasters/MA_index.html

The Vasulka's founded The Kitchen Live Audio Test Laboratory in 1971.
Go here for The Kitchen: http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/

And here for the full Vasulka archive: http://www.vasulka.org

1970's: Psychedelic rock

Joshua Light Show: create large scale events with artists such as .......

By MID 1970's: Analogue Synthesizers were on the market.

Late 1970's - 80's DISCO: Lights/disco balls, smoke, etc. used as special effects to enhance the music, with little, if any, ideology.

MID 1980's

HOUSE PARTIES (youth culture)

HOUSE MUSIC: This new style of music was imported to Europe from the states - Chicago/Detroit in the early 80's.

House parties were initially held in small clubs or private homes. Shunning the commercial music scene (disco and "woodstock" music), young people gathered together to enjoy/dance to the new music. "Free" clubs - outside the control of the legalised club scene. The idea was that the public also made the event.

Mid 1980's: VJ - "IMPORTED" FROM MTV
The term VJ popped up on MTV as the boy/girl next door who hosted the music shows. VJ's soon appeared in the house scene, collaborating with the DJ to create live video mixes, accentuating the experience of clubbers on the dance floor - creating an immersive environment that united sound, image, light, etc. - performance in a social, celebratory event. Ecstasy became the drug (mainly) associated with House Parties.

VJ's first used analog video mixers, cameras and video players. Later, digital equipment and software as they became more accessible and affordable. They could process both sound on image on one computer. The message of their work was as varied as the number of VJ's, but generally the themes realted to reactions against a decaying society - such as Thatcherism in the UK etc. By the end of the 90's the House/rave scene had been commodified to the extent that it seemed as if almost every club had its own resident VJ. The flashing lights and imagery were used to maximize the effect of the music, and the ideology related to the earlier house period was more harder to find. Many VJs left the club scene started to find other arenas for their work.