Sound is a Visual Medium.

The following collection of entries is intended to be the outline

of an essay that may never be written, but is rather better

communicated and demonstrated through my artistic practice

itself; After all, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain

silent”; - Ludwig Wittgensteing, Tractatus-Logico-Philisophicus

“The audience has eyes as well as ears.”-John Cage

“When you look at a Painting in a gallery you hear somebody

talk behind you about their feet hurting. You hear all the noises

around you. You start to talk to other people and that is how

you see art. So why not hear it as well as see it all at the same

time? ... everything is moving along at the same time. [The

aural and the visual] are both growing at the same time. There is not one dominant.”— Lawrence Weiner,

Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, 16

“There are no purely visual media because there is no such thing as pure visual perception in the first

place...The problem with the term ‘visual media’; is that it gives the illusion of picking out a class of

things about as coherent as ‘things you can put in an oven’; Writing, Printing, painting, hand gestures,

winks, nods and comic strips are all ‘visual media’, and this tells us next to nothing about them.” — W.J.T.

Mitchell, There Are No Visual Media, Media Art Histories, 403

Thesis

The instability of the term “visual art”; and the context from which sound art emerged as a conceptual

medium in the wake of installation art, land art, etc. put it more in common with visual art forms such as

sculpture, architecture, and installation, than with even the most radical experimental music; and while

modern technology has done much to advance the emerging discipline of “Sound Art”, it is my belief

that just as many, if not more meaningful aesthetic gestures can be made without the use of computers,

relying on the materiality of the plastic arts themselves, using a philosophical approach to sound that

causes us to reassess what our experience of the “visual art” object can be.

Topics:

• What is Sound Art? How is it different than music?

• How do we define Visual Art?

• Is Visual Art a stable designation?

• Does the instability or stability of the label Visual Art allow for Art that is Sound based to be

included in the definition?

• What are the implications for visual art if we approach Sound as a visual Medium in conjunction

with sculpture, painting, performance, drawing, architecture, installation, etc.?

• How can an art form be labeled visual if it centralizes the experience of listening?

• How is the act of listening like the gaze?