Projections: The Development and Politics of Digital Media in Audiovisual Performance

This essay serves as the point of transition between the two general sections of this edition of Offscreen: “Sound in the Cinema and Beyond.” The first section having been comprised of two forums and three essays addressing various aspects of audiovisual integration in the cinema, Mitchell Akiyama’s piece reaches into the realm of sound conscious filmmaking and then leads us out into the world beyond its borders, a world where artists strive to find new models for the joining of image and sound. In so doing, Akiyama takes us on a journey through the world of live audiovisual performance, from its historical beginnings through to its modern day implementations in the world of laptop concerts. Much more than a valuable history lesson, Akiyama strives for an assessment of the issues that artists have long been struggling with –in the cinema and beyond- when trying to find more organic solutions to the joining of sound and image. Along the way he engages with questions surrounding the relationship between performance and recorded material, synaesthetic experience and its potential exploration by new media, and the work of numerous contemporary audiovisual performers in search of the state of the art: a new audiovisual language.

• Projections: The Development and Politics of Digital Media in Audiovisual Performance
  By: Mitchell Akiyama
   

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