Module Information

The module will:
a) discuss, describe, exemplify, and present individual and collaborative contemporary practices in art and sound;
b) examine the commonalities, distinctives, and relationship of image and sound in terms of their essence, methodologies, technologies, theories, aesthetics, historical trajectories, and modes of discourse;
c) study curatorial and presentational methods and practices related to the historical study, presentation, installation, and preservation of sound-art presentation, installations, and preservation.

The module provides a historical overview of this prolific, varied, and ground-breaking period in the coming together, exchange, and mutual influence of visual art and sound-based practices. While the curriculum surveys a broad span of time, its focus is upon the period from modernity to the present day. The module also examines, as a backdrop to the discussion of more recondite practices, correspondences between the development of art culture and music culture during the Modernist and Postmodernist periods. The intention is to explore, contextually, the visual artist'r engagement with sound, noise, and music while at the same time recognizing the traffic of musicians and sound artists moving in the opposite direction, who aspire to cultivate visual analogues for their work. The module will discuss theoretical perspectives, historical trajectories, methodologies of thought and practice, key concepts, case studies, and exhibition contexts.

Please give an outline of content, week by week, indicating lectures, seminars and/or other forms of delivery
LECTURES (15 will be chosen from the following):

1. Light > Colour > Sound > Light: From Newton to Goethe to Kandinsky to Scriabin
2. Print-making-waves: Photography, Phonography, and the Visualization of Sound
3. The Artist and the Talking Dead: Jurgenson and Electronic Voice Phenomenon
4. The Rise of the Machine: Futurism and the Industrial Soundscape
5. Still-life with Violin: Real-World Synthesis from Synthetic Cubism to Music Concrete
6. The Artist Sings: Chance and Indeterminacy from Duchamp to Cage
7. The Composer Draws: From Schoenberg to Cage
8. The Painter Dances: Abstraction and Jazz from Mondrian to Pollock
9. Make Something Up!: Improvisation in Art and Music
10. FluxOff: Intermediality and Protest since the 1960s
11. Image and Sound: The Case of Cinema
12. Image or Sound: The Written Word in Art; the Spoken Word in Music
13. Rock Art: Musicians in British Arts Schools since the 1960s
14. Album Art: Visualizing Popular Music from Rock n? Roll to Punk
15. Box with the Sound of its Own Making: From Minimalism to Neo-Conceptualism in Art and Music
16. Sound with the Box of its Own Making: Sculpture, Space, and Sonic Materialism
17. Sound in Space: The Acoustics of Architecture (Sacred and Secular)
18. Noisy Art Historians: The Sonorities of the Object, Place, and Time
19. Quiet Bell: Seeing Silence in Millet'r The Angelus (1857-9)
20. `Hearing is Another Form of Seeing?: Theories of Aural and Visual Perception

SEMINARS:

1. DIY: Art and Sound in the Digital Age
2. Duchamp Sings: An Analysis of Musical Erratum (1913)
3. Silent Pictures: Signifying Sound through Visual Art
4. Electric Lady: Women Sound-Art Performers

PRACTICAL/WORKSHOP:
1. Using PowerPoint and Audacity Software