Sounding the Gallery Video and the Rise of Art-Music [Paperback]

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

Introduction
1 Composing with Technology: The Artist-Composer
2 Silent Music and Static Motion: The Audio-Visual History of Video
3 Towards the Spatial: Music, Art and the Audiovisual Environment
4 The Rise of Video Art-Music: 1963-1970
5 Interactivity, Mirrored Spaces and the Closed-Circuit Feed: Performing Video
Epilogue: Towards the Twenty First Century
Index

Video art is conventionally approached from the perspective of the visual arts. By approaching it from a musical perspective--by foregrounding its time-based nature--Rogers rethinks it as a practice that drew on, synthesised, and transformed developments already under way in? both visual and musical culture. In short, she rethinks video art as video art-music. Drawing on art history and media studies as well as musicology, this impressively wide ranging and perceptive study addresses fundamental issues of generic identity and authorship, places video art-music both historically and in terms of its sites of consumption, and reveals its indispensibility to an understanding of contemporary digital media. --Nicholas Cook, University of Cambridge

With the new audiovisual turn we need to think more deeply about the relations of sound and image. Holly Rogers's magisterialSounding The Gallerycovers the key early period of the 1960s lÔ