Abstract:
This thesis explores the significance of sound in art by investigating how certain multimedia artworks manipulate sound, encouraging different intensities of conscious attentive listening and seeing. Through these different artworks, we can better understand crucial differences between attentive „listening‟ and „looking', as opposed to less attentive (or even inattentive) „hearing‟ and „seeing‟. The thesis examines some of the special ways in which these artworks encourage fluctuating states of attentiveness across the different senses, helping to mediate our experience of body, time and space. Starting with a brief overview of changing perspectives in sound and music, the thesis reveals how visual artists began experimenting with, and incorporating sound in their practice. An application of phenomenology and cognitive psychological models helps us to understand the differences in looking and listening as opposed to seeing and hearing. Various examples of artworks that sustain or disrupt attention are studied, with a particular focus on the visual works of Christian Marclay and the audio-visual works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The artworks discussed have been chosen for the ways in which sound and image interact, in the case of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, as well as in the conceptual use of sound via visual triggers, in the case of Christian Marclay. An examination of the visual art of Christian Marclay draws our attention to multisensory experiences involved with looking and listening, while Cardiff and Miller‟s installations and audio walks help us to understand how multisensory experiences complicate the attentive and inattentive experiences of the viewer. It is my hope that a new way of looking at, thinking about, listening to and talking about art will arise from this cross-disciplinary approach.