Introduction: Synesthetic Fusion in the Digital Age

LEONARDO, Vol. 32, No. 5, pp. 391–92, 1999 391 Synesthesia is an anomaly in the brain whereby information received by one sense is experienced in another: people with synesthesia can “hear” color, “taste” shapes, and so on. Therefore synesthesia can be used as a metaphor for transposing elements indigenous to one medium into another. A piece of synesthetic art might involve creating a structural analysis of a work in a sound medium and transposing this information into visual form. The possibilities for melding together structures from different media into a single new entity have increased exponentially with the computer. Complex strata of information interact with one another to make something utterly different from the individual components . The popularity of chaos and complexity theories in the later part of this century has contributed to this process of fusion. Multiple information systems can be layered over one another, thereby interacting in unpredictable ways, and finally producing something which has much more complexity than the original parts. In 1936, Kurt Schwitters wrote to Alfred Barr, the founder of New York’s Museum of Modern Art: I am building a composition without boundaries, each individual part is at the same time a frame for the neighboring parts, all parts are mutually interdependent [1]. Schwitters was discussing the Merzbau, his legendary installation piece, but his idea has relevance today as it also describes the integration process that the world is presently experiencing . In Dick Higgins’ seminal 1965 essay “Intermedia” [2], he describes the separation of the arts into the separate units of painting, sculpture, etc., as reflecting the rigid categorizations of a compartmentalized Renaissance society. Higgins suggests that avant-garde artists like Al Hansen and Alan Kaprow were fusing the media together in their “happenings ” by transposing elements from dissimilar environments and integrating them into a single structure. He saw this as a reflection of current cultural norms, giving intermedia a deep significance. These ideas were nurtured and developed in the 1960s by the group of artists called Fluxus, whose work continues into the present. For example, Alison Knowles makes musical scores by fusing the processes of time, space, drawing, and found objects into an inseparable mix. Her scores are then performed by live musicians. Knowles weaves together all of these elements so that the boundaries between disciplines and media dissolve. She and other Fluxus artists found early encouragement and permission for these avant-garde fusions in the ideas that emanated from John Cage’s class in musical composition at the New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1960 in New York [3]. These developments came before the wide use of computers in art. Introduction Synesthetic Fusion in the Digital Age© 1999 Jack Ox 392 Introduction, Synesthetic Fusion in the Digital Age Today’s computers, being the most agile of cut-and-paste collaging tools, are creating new language forms from this process alone. Collage is an important tool in the creation of synesthetic and intermedia works. You can cut and paste between different media, between different layers. All of a sudden working in layers is less permanent : you can take them apart and relayer them in a different order. As Paul Hertz points out in his essay “Synesthetic Art: An Imaginary Number?”, the computer is also an ideal tool for fusing elements together because of its ability to create mathematical correspondences between, say, visual and audial data. But as Hertz also says, this brings to the fore a very real danger: that the associations made across media may ultimately seem somewhat arbitrary. Hertz stresses that these connections need to have symbolic component. I could not agree with him more. There are so many people making arbitrarily chosen images jump, twist, and mutate. The results are similar to the light shows of the 1960s, when similarly arbitrary blobs of colored oil bounced in a water-filled pan to the rhythm of the music. Here there is little flow of meaning. As the new tools become easier to handle, profundity becomes an ever-greater challenge. The invention of photography meant that anyone who could pick up the camera and push the button could “capture an image.” In this way the magic of drawing and...