Center for Art and Visual Culture presents “What Sound Does a Color Make?”

Opening on February 2 and continuing though March 16, UMBC’s Center for Art and Visual Culture (CAVC) presents “What Sound Does a Color Make?,” a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (iCI) that explores the fusion of vision and sound in electronic media.
“What Sound Does a Color Make?” connects the recent boom of digital audiovisual art to its pre-digital roots, presenting ten contemporary works by an internationally diverse group of artists. The exhibition will include a selection of single-channel videos from the 1970s and feature several sensuous new media environments that fascinate both technophiles and general audiences alike, heightening awareness of human perception and cognition.
For some people, a stimulus to one of the five senses evokes the sensation of another sense, as when hearing a sound produces the visualization of a color. For contemporary audiovisual artists, the possibilities inspired by this phenomenon, known as synesthesia, have expanded with the advent of recent digital technologies that translate all electronic media, whether sounds or moving images, into the zeros and ones of computer bits.
United by similar and overlapping premises, the works in the exhibition are widely divergent in their results. They range from large-scale immersive installations with moving forms that morph to corresponding tonal compositions, to discrete DVD stations inviting viewers to access electronic music pieces in different combinations with videos. One of the recent works, Self-Portrait of Paul (DeMarinis) by Jim Campbell, is a portrait of a colleague who uses sound in his own art. In Campbell’s work, an LED grid is activated by playing a recording of that man’s voice, and the gridded lights resemble pixels that gradually build up an image of the man, with his voice’s high tones representing white and the low tones representing black.
Another contemporary work is an interactive installation by D-Fuse, a London-based collective of artists and musicians, which layers different music soundtracks onto dynamic video clips, creating a distinctive audiovisual experience.
The earlier works from the 1970s, by such pioneers of video art as Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, and Gary Hill, place the current interest in synesthetic media art in a broader historical context, offering a unique perspective on this phenomenon. The exhibition will encourage a high degree of individual engagement and self-reflection, as well as further thought about the ways that visual and aural stimuli are electronically, digitally and perceptually connected.
On Thursday, February 2 from 5 to 7 p.m., the CAVC will host an opening reception for What Sound Does a Color Make? At 6 p.m., Kathleen Forde, curator of the exhibition, will lead a gallery tour. Forde is curator at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She also curates and writes on a freelance basis.
On Thursday, March 16 at 7 p.m., the CAVC hosts a lecture by sound a media artist Stephen Vitiello, location to be announced. In his work, Vitiello is particularly interested in the physical aspect of sound and its potential to define the form and atmosphere of a spatial environment.
For more information, visit www.umbc.edu/cavc or call (410) 455-3188.
Photo credit: Atau Tanaka, Bondage, 2004