Audio Culture in the Visual Era

If photography can be held accountable (by circumstantial evidence) not only for painting’s move away from portraiture and toward abstraction but also for the conceptualization of painting as something about the brush-stroke, about color, about the canvas—that is, if the foregrounded material properties of painting shifted, or were even discovered in response to its relationship with the emergence of a new visual technology—then we might expect something parallel to have occurred with other media of representation. Does this pattern of retrofitted “essences” cross over broader perceptual categories? Could our understanding of sound have been shaped, in part, by the relations of the audio to the visual? If so, are the highlighted aspects of the visual also produced, in part, due to a relationship with sound?

We hope to engage with, but to move beyond, a mapping of vision to spatial representation and sound to representations of time. Time’s place in moving images is clear, and photography’s corollary time-severing; but less emphasized is sound’s capacity to generate a spatial field with discrete positions within it using stereophony, or its ability to nominate the visual and special in a way that both engages and eludes specificity.

This workshop comes at a crucial time for the emerging field of sound studies, and at a point where important correlations to developing disciplines in visual culture can most effectively be made.