The Audiovisual Breakthrough

Visual music, expanded cinema, live cinema, VJing, live audiovisual performance—these are concepts enough to create some confusion in the wide realm of today’s artistic audiovisual production. While each of these concepts is widely propagated and suggestive of its own line of history and shared practices, they are not as yet sufficiently defined for theoretical debate and clear practical use. To untangle this confusion was the aim of our project, The Audiovisual Breakthrough, which brought together six international researchers to solve the problem in a collaborative effort. This book is the result.

Its main purpose is to make the entangled complexities of the field manageable by putting forth and elaborating on definitions for the five main concepts named above. This book is addressed to artists, curators, researchers, students, and teachers within these practices, and to anyone working at their intersection with other fields of knowledge.

Eva-Maria Offermann’s design takes up the topics addressed by the texts and develops a parallel argument: Typographically, the chosen font, GT Cinetype, is based on the design of cinematic subtitles, thus opening a rich set of references up to the cinematic context and, in consequence, to moving images, to projections, and to translations from one medium to the other.

The motif underlying the layout is the grid as structural reference to musical composition. The grid becomes visible in information graphics, whose reduced simplicity reminds of notations. The idea of notation is developed further by the use of certain signs: re-notation at the end of every paragraph in the texts, indicated by a continually changing sign.

Cinematicity and notation therefore serve as the main elements in the design concept to express the idea of translations, which is so fundamental for audiovisual thought.

Design
Eva-Maria Offermann

Fotografie
Carolin Ludwig

Text
Ana Carvalho
Cornelia Lund
Eva Fischer
Gabriel Menotti
Adeena Mey

Buchnummer
978-3-00-051072-4

Kontakt
fluctuating-images@gmx.de