Mary-Ellen-Bute: Rhythm in Light

Artists today take an engagement with the sound of this world for granted. The former predominance of the visual has meanwhile been replaced by a multifaceted interplay of image and sound. Even though contemplative quiet still largely predominates in museums, sound, experimental composition, audiovisual media and pop culture have become central references for visual art in the 20th century. See This Sound documents this development from the perspective of visual art and refers to the respective contemporary discussions and promises.

In eight separate sections, See This Sound exhibits a number of important milestones and socio-historical reference points, in connection with which artists have worked with sound and composition and reflected on the medial relationship of image and sound.
Starting from the filmic sound visualizations of the 1920s - so-called Eye Music - it traces the topos of traversing genre boundaries in the 1960s and questions psychedelic trance machines and multimedia sound environments about their social-political potential. The illusion of a "natural" interplay of image and sound, for instance in Hollywood movies, is countered by works that disclose the discrepancies of this purported synthesis, all the way to the loss of sound and the power of speech. In addition, there is a special focus on the local production conditions of sounds (industrial cities and industrial sounds), and on sound as a medium of institutional critique. Astonishing promises have always been associated with the interplay of image and sound, with the crossover of visual art and music, in short: with "intermediality" - and sometimes still are up to the present, if we think of the idea of an "expanded visual culture" in the era of YouTube.