Aspectual Relationships Between Energy and Audiovisual Culture Greg Delapaix January 2015

It should be noted at the outset that this writing is not about a reconciliation between empirical materialism and metaphysics, as to me there is no point in even attempting to do so. It is becoming apparent to leading edge science that the relegation of metaphysics to the realm of ‘psuedo-science ‘ is in fact a collectivist deprecation of the dynamic source of our more static physical reality, a deprecation which may ultimately be seen as a limiting and self defeating posture. What is needed, as conceptual artist Joseph Beuys pointed out to us sixty seven years ago, is a bridge across the divide, in the form of a more ‘enchanted’ mindset, one in which we regain our place as an integral part of the natural world within which we live and breathe, and which makes possible our ongoing existence. Notwithstanding some of the glaring falsehoods currently promoted under the collectivist posturing of empirical materialism, namely the notion of “survival of the fittest,” the idea that our solar system and the universe at large is mostly a “dead” place, and the idea that our minds are the product of some sort of “meat computer,” vast areas of knowledge previously closed off to us can be made available simply by reconsidering belief systems we are indoctrinated with from birth. In a pyramidal social system of power, those at the top dictate what those below will be taught. Limiting belief systems constrain our power by means of these indoctrinations. By expanding at least what we are willing to consider, the range of our considerations expands, and along with it our ability to not only perceive, but to better understand larger aspects of our reality. Energy figures prominently in this larger reality, as it seems to nourish and/or inform all aspects of our perceptions as embodied beings. Scientific understandings of energy of course deal with what is objectively measurable and quantifiable. Certainly energy as it is apprehended and measured in its various forms through mainstream science complicates knowledge of the myriad and subtle ways that energy can affect human beings, many of which are currently immeasurable. I see the creative realizations of audio-visual works as a viable interrogative arena perfectly suited for crossing some of the operative yet occult boundaries created by this dichotomy. In a larger cultural sense, based on the idea of energy as a variable feature of both artistic works and the cultures they engage with in a reciprocative sense, new territories of knowledge can additionally be ascertained and developed. In a global sense, the movement of artistic works through the cultures they are entangled with facilitate highly variable manifestations of energetic effect, apart from whatever intrinsic energies these artistic works may theoretically or measurably possess. This aspect alone offers new channels of analysis, especially in relation to subjective affectivity– i.e. how do relationships between subjective/affective and measurable energies modulate as artistic creations are culturally apprehended and circulated? Ideas found in the science of economics, along with those found in media and cultural theory may help to delineate a way toward this kind of study. The Oxford dictionary defines economics as the science of the production and distribution of wealth. It is widely understood that energy must always figure prominently into ways that these systems of production

and distribution work. Creative works of any kind operate within exchange economies as well. How do these channels of exchange operate in terms of energy? Energy is required for the production of art on one hand, and creative productions of all kinds subsequent to their creation operate within economic ecologies of exchange. Economist John Foster points out that the economic system is an energetic system, and states that humans, as living dissipative structures, are seen as seeking to increase access to free energy sources, and/or increase the efficiency of currently employed energy transformation processes to do more work (90). Creative productions today move within complex and mediated components of society (Inglis, 22), and I would assert that their energetic differentials can be mapped out, in terms of their function as variously articulated socio-political commodities. Examples of ways that this can be accomplished might incorporate an analysis of works framed as currencies, in the way that David Joselit does in After Art. By not privileging discreet objects and employing notions of medium and postmedium, we can ascribe new roles to artworks related to their origins, documentation values, and migratory capabilities within cultures (3-9). Contrast this with a more semiotic view of cultural objects in relation to their value offered by theoretician Michael Thompson. Clarifying an essay by Jonathan Culler titled “Rubbish Theory” from Culler’s book Framing the Sign, Thompson identifies three categories of art objects in relation to their economic value. These are transient objects which have finite life spans and lose their value over time, durable objects which maintain or increase their value over time, and a less obvious category of objects which have an unchanging value of zero (T. Crow, 148-50). These categories can also be applied to cultural productions not privileged as discreet objects, as Joselit suggests. Descriptors such as transient, durable, zero-value, migratory, documentative, and origin-valued can allow for mappings of the way these various cultural productions function across society in an energetic sense, by means of the way they move through networks and mediums of exchange as forms of currency, utilized for processes of energy transformation in a qualitative sense. Notwithstanding the more clearly articulated differences between them by the likes of economist Paul Nystrom, who implies that insight and appropriation on the part of entrepreneurs is not the same type of more directly creative work on the part of artists (Runco, 383), they both, along with scientists and engineers, nonetheless utilize overlapping modes of thought. These modes of thought to varying degrees might include aesthetic goals in conjunction with a desire for novelty. More importantly, all are engaged with throughputs of energy during and after production and injection into society of their works. In other words, artworks function in an economic sense just as other products, inventions, or commodities do. Qualitative variabilities based on descriptive terminologies such as those highlighted here can be used to map out verifiable “energetic signatures” of creative works within the fabric of social structures and their multi-contextual networks. Stated a bit differently, identifying the functional roles of itinerant creative works as commodities within networked systems of exchange can allow for mappings of energy based on political and art-as-currency valuations. Artworks can be thought of as aggregators, connectors, neutral agents, or dissipators of energy in an economic system which allows for the tracing of these functionalities. In some sense this crosses the boundary between energy as property and energy as affective agent, particularly where cultural productions can be seen as taking on valuations

translated as aggregated energetic properties. The specific cultural interest is in creative works which incorporate both visual and sonic elements. This in my view demands a special attention to energy, as all cultural productions are not only created, perpetuated, and modulated in various ways by means of energy in its various forms, but are just as, if not more so, culturally affective in an energetic way. Works of art produce cultural affectations expressed as energy. Interrogating these affectations requires not only an identification of the multifarious ways that energy can be expressed and identified in relation to specific artistic works, but ways that energy in these various forms is seen in relation to various human or societal elements that the works affect in a multi-modal sense. I add the term multi-modal here, because my concern seeks additionally to broaden the idea of energy beyond these more objective political, social, and economic variables in order to enlarge the scope of the “map.” For this, and in deference to the more academic channels I seek to address with this writing, I seek to utilize what may best be termed “para-scientific” resources as a kind of lens with which to extend ways of looking at energies intrinsic to cultural productions, and the ways that these energies directly affect the intrinsic and more subtle energies of human beings. What I am referring to are non-physical anatomies of human energy, along with ways that these subtle energy structures can be affected by energies intrinsic to the audio-visual works being experienced. This additional level of inquiry creates a polarity, contrasting territories between the objective/social/cultural/scientific and the subjective/individual/psychic/metaphysical. There is no doubt that energy as sound and light, whether consciously sensed or otherwise, affects the human being on many levels. The subtle energy structures and electromagnetic fields in the human body can also be deliberately affected (Dale, 7-8). The para-scientific aspect of this research involves published literature on the topic of technologies for measuring these human subtle energies in specific capacities and types of manifestation. In contrast with this are the less occult affectations of sound as vibrational energy. Steve Goodman maps out the propagational vectors of vibrational events through what he identifies as networks of cybernetic capitalism in his book Sonic Warfare (xix). Goodman’s extension of vibrational ontology into the “tactical and mnemonic context of viral capitalism” in the context of acoustically designed ambiences of consumption and “the acoustic design of ubiquitous, responsive, predatory, branding environments using digitally modeled, contagious, and mutating sonic phenomena” correlates quite well with David Joselit’s determinations regarding the trajectories of visual art and architecture out of an object-based aesthetic and into a network aesthetic. Joselit points out that the specific formats which artworks assume lend them unique forms of power (After Art, 91). These forms of power connect directly with energy, and this energy propagates via networks. The idea of a network can be amorphous or physical (see methodology) In either case the network can serve to operate as an energetic substratum and multi-modal point of affective reference. Ways that these networks are formatted depend, as Joselit mentions, on the works of art themselves (95). This as a whole is a challenge to conventional academic ways of understanding the role of art today, especially in relation to visuality and audiology as a combined study. How does an ontology of sound as a component of subsuming energy fit within a paradigm of audiovisual culture? Though my interest is in formulating new way(s) to interrogate audio-visual

culture based on ways that specific audio-visual works operate in relation to the permutative forms of energy they are comprised of and which they affect, a meta-historical overview of audio-visual culture in general might be useful. The following are some highlights from such an overview, drawn from a history of such width and depth as to be immeasurable in its own right. The chronology of these highlights points to three distinctive pre-histories, as defined by media theorists Dieter Daniels and Sandra Nauman. These are 1. The theory and practice of relationships between colors and sounds, 2. The evolution of human perception, and 3. The combination of auditory and visual forms of expression in human culture (Daniels, 6). It was mainly after the turn of the century when music and color began to be considered in the same light. This was around the same time that the concept of the ether– the mediating substance between technology, science, and spiritualism (Milutis, xi) began to fade, after centuries of nourishing and informing the metaphysics which eventually gave way to our present-day physics. In 1915, the composer Alexander Scriabin sought musical connections with color, as did Kandinsky and Schoenberg (Tuchmann, 162). It was around this time that color projecting apparatuses were developed, with such names as “Chromola,” “Clavilux,” and Thomas Wilfred’s “Lumia” device (298-99). Precedents to this include Helmholtz’s “Sensations of Tone” (1862), along with the assertion by Goethe that a theory of painting equal to that seen in music did not yet exist. Kandinsky pointed this out in his “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (Kandinsky, 28). In another of his publications titled “Point and Line to Plane,” Kandinsky illustrates Beethoven’s fifth symphony in terms of dynamics within a picture plane. Kandinsky equates gravitation and tonality with his choice of words such as “cool tension toward the center” (Kandinsky, Point, 123). As telegraph wires, and later telephone systems were strung across countries in the early 1900s, sounds began to be heard which had not been heard before (Kahn, 27). This coincided with the development of the microphone (35). As technology was developed to capture and manipulate natural sounds, the scope of sound increased much further. The appearance of sounds through resonance of telegraph and telephone wires, along with railroad tracks and military “earth transmission” technologies, were all directly associated with natural energy. Experimental composers later began to incorporate sounds from the natural environment, including amplified frequencies of the human brain. Here we see relationships between sounds and colors, and sound within environment, to begin to affect shifts in human perception. All of these are/were based on natural energies, yet connections between sound in the early twentieth century and natural Earth and cosmic energies seemed increasingly obfuscated as the twentieth century progressed. This was true even though composers such as John Cage, Hugo Benioff, and Alvin Lucier were not creating sounds; they were using sounds from the natural environment. Composer Edgar Varese was also still characterizing his orchestral works as imitations of environmental sounds, either natural or technological (80). Generally speaking, these sounds began to be thought of in terms of their properties, rather than in terms of energy, especially in relation to physical matter. Beyond this, electronic instruments began to be developed, though initially these instruments were designed to mimic existing orchestral instruments. Experimental composers in the mid twentieth century concerned themselves with the way various pre-existing sounds could be manipulated.

Based on the fact that sound was not incorporated into film as sound track until around 1928 (Sider, 22), it could be argued that when the image was combined with sound for the first time, there was a bifurcation, with one direction toward the way that sounds function in relation to the dynamic visual image, and another in which sound began to seek its own ecology, yet still influenced in a visualogic way. Sounds heard along this secondary path, including seismic activities, were eventually re-identified as being sourced by natural or technological energies. One might additionally argue that when sound and image were married together, the energy of sound went conceptually from environmental to cultural, but then eventually back to culture as environment. Certainly the marriage of sound to film allowed for the emergence of painting as a metaphor for music, as seen in Mondrian’s “counterpoint,” or Pollock’s rhythmic forms (Leggio, 143). The extensive cross pollination between art and music in the 40s and 50s could be in part due to the marriage of image and sound in motion pictures in 1928. As a part of this secondary emergent ecology, composers began to become associated with visual art styles. Here we see new forms of visual and auditory expressions in combination– the third point mentioned by Nauman and Daniels above. During the period of time just before, during, and after 1928, there were concerns on one hand with “machine music,” as well as with primitivism. This dichotomy can trace itself being worked out in later aspects of music, as Jazz seemed to fill the space left between the machine and the primitive mask (Leggio, 203). Reflections of the further evolution of this dichotomy can be seen in American techno-progressivism and the traversing of cultural boundaries. Examples include Mondrian’s “Foxtrot,” and later, Andy Warhol’s “Dance Diagram” artwork in the early 1960s (174). Around the time that Kandinsky had gone to teach at the Bauhaus, composers such as George Gershwin and Aaron Copland (among others) began to incorporate Jazz music into their work. At the same time, abstractions in artwork began to incorporate musical instruments, especially instruments associated with jazz as can be seen in the works of Aaron Douglas, Thomas Hart Benton, George Grosz, and Arthur Dove among others (208-9). There was thus overall a shift in the ways that sound and energy were related- sound went from being a result of natural, environmental, or technological energy to being a kind of cultural energy. This represents a transition from sound energy as a transferrable physical property, to one of human affectation within audiovisual culture. It might be worthwhile here to point out that in the mid-twentieth century experimental composer John Cage claimed that vibratory and thus musical reality is inescapable and there is no such thing as silence (Kahn, 219). Additionally, light artist James Turrell asserted that “there never is no light,” (219), and somewhat later during the late 60s, conceptual artist Robert Barry declared that “there is nothing that is not energy” (220). During the 1960s, works of art as strictly material objects had begun to be challenged. While Cage composed his 4’33” as a direct response to Rauschenberg’s white monochrome canvases (Crow, 123), Turrell was inspired to focus on the tiny patch of the visible spectrum by slide projectors employed for viewing photos of paintings in art history lectures (Kahn, 219), and Barry was introducing forms of electromagnetism as a challenge to the materiality of traditional art forms (220)– energy subsumes all. As Doug Kahn expresses very succinctly in Earth Sound Earth Signal: “The acoustical energy of sound, once it had begun to be loosened from musical sound, offered itself as material to the arts” (218). The waves, fields, and radiations of the electromagnetic, including spectral aspects of

light and color could not be far behind. This mode of thinking continues to expand today based on pioneering works by these and other artists, for example Barry’s January 5-31, 1969, where labels on the wall offered the only way for the viewing audience to become informed of specific radio frequencies being transmitted through the room (220), and Joyce Hinterding’s Electrical Storms of 1992, where high-voltage electrostatic speakers produced high-fidelity amplifications of ambient electrostatics, along with natural radio recordings made at Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field (244-5). Vast expansion of this idea of sound, along with other forms of energetic propagations as artistic material can be seen today in the works of numerous artists. Compendiums of their work are many fold; examples include See This Sound and See This Sound 2 as realized in Web archive, exhibition, published compendium and symposium formats in Europe by Linz Capital of Culture in conjunction with the Ludwig Boltzman Institute of Media Research, and Soundings as realized in exhibition and publication in America by the Museum of Modern Art. In academic circles, color is not generally thought of in terms of energy, rather it is thought of in terms of additive and subtractive process (light and pigment). The same is true for sound, which is often thought of in terms of its properties. When thought of in terms of energy, light and sound are involved in human affectation and in energy transduction in more myriad ways. These energy transductions may be in the form of affectations from music and sound or artwork and light of various types to the audience, from person to person, from instrument to instrument or sound generating element to other elements in the form of sympathetic vibration or transduction, across other elements in the space or of the space itself, and even eventually to those not present where the energy generating work is located, as shown by the power of networks. In the considerations of energy expressed within audio visual culture in a larger sense, ongoing relationships between sound and light should not necessarily be ignored, even when seemingly ineffable. Theoretically, all aspects of sound may in some way be shared by light, and vice versa. Both have wavelength and frequency (implying oscillation). Though in the past light has been thought of as either functioning as particle or wave, sound artist/theorist and experimental composer Pauline Oliveros has stated that sound, in the form of phonons as a sonic particle corollary to photons of light, in fact also exist (Kahn, 175). Bringing together these ideas, along with the idea that human energetic affectation can occur across a broad spectrum is furthermore exemplified by Oliveros, who also theorized that global broadcasts such as the funeral of Princess Diana, or the earlier moon landing of July 1969, each simultaneously entrained brainwaves among viewers worldwide into a “sonospherical synching” (180). This further exemplifies the power of networks as a means of energetic dissemination in a cultural sense, beyond the more literal context of the invisible electromagnetic television signal acting as an agent of antagonistic pairings between commodities and networks, as pointed out by David Joselit in Feedback (7). In the digital age, where the audio-visual can be transcribed as pure information, these types of antagonistic relationships multiply exponentially, along with permutative and varying forms of energetic assignments, artifacts, and affectations. Perhaps it could be stated that a “qualitative thermodynamics” emerges– one based on affectations of creative works within the fabric of social networks on the one hand, and an approach to ways those same creative works produce human affectations based on metaphysical and para-

scientific understandings of relationships between the intrinsic energies and energetic structures of both the works themselves and their audiences on the other hand. Within this polarity can emerge new ways of understanding how creative audio-visual works function, within relativities of knowledge, alchemies of emotion, and within the chimeric oceans of information-as-energy that we move through, and which in turn circulate throughout our physical world as fluid networks. The auditory and the visual are ubiquitous, yet as mentioned previously, these do not have to be in the forefront to be manifest in various ways. Interrogating these energies in a textually fluid manner necessitates locating their points of connectivity. It is not just the globalization of the visual which demands new meaning, but the globalization of the auditory as well. The panopticon as therapeutic social agent is never silent. Sound is sometimes analyzed as a component of visual culture, or in conjunction with it, but not as explicitly integrated with it in an energetic and vibrational sense. Without going so far as saying that sound as frequency politicizes all aspects of culture, it is not going too far to say that there is an affectation across many layers of culture brought about by sound, which may at times be more pervasive than the visual. Where there is “line of sight,” there is no “line of sound.” Visibility and audibility need not be synchronous, though they may emanate from a single cultural nexus. Though vibrational ontology includes image, it can privilege either sound or image. Sound theorist Jacques Attali writes: “If it is true that the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music of the eighteenth century” (Sterne, 29). All are steeped in visuality, which gives way to audiovisuology. In some ways this approach is a corollary to the way that art historian and theorist David Summers proposes a new framework within which to alleviate problems in Western Art history studies via his book Real Spaces. Summers proposes the replacement of the term “visual arts” with “spatial arts,” and in the development of his thesis shows how art history can be studied under a different paradigm. A re-consideration of the visual and the auditory which brings them into a shared conceptual arena might be simpler than the large scale overhaul which Summers delineates, functioning as more of an enhancement to visual culture, but the results can be at least as far reaching. This enhancement allows for more variability of approach, as a vibrational/ frequency ontology is not entirely exclusive to other avenues of methodological thought. George Kubler, in his book The Shape of Time, proposes a supposition in which the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, inclusive of tools and writing, and all of the “useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world,” bringing into coincidence the universe of man made things and the history of art. By means of this supposition, Kubler instantiates an urgency toward finding better ways of considering the entire realm of what is human made (1). According to Kubler, these things mark the passage of time with great accuracy and by means of limited varieties of shapes, for “like crustaceans we depend for survival upon an outer skeleton, upon a shell of historic cities and houses filled with things belonging to definable portions of the past” (1). It is in the unique way that Kubler analyzes historical trajectories of cultural objects which can lend itself to concepts of the audio visual as ontologies of vibration. Creative problems are linked by their solutions, forming what Kubler calls sequences (35).

Sequences can be open or closed depending on whether certain types of problems are still being worked out or not, and they can also be classed in ways which supersede the biographical, and biological, topographical, or other types of analogous considerations. Within the sequencing model are found more “formal” sequences in which there are shifting repetitions of similar traits. While minimal boundaries need to be determined depending on which selections of works are going to be considered, in the determination of these boundaries there are “prime objects” located, which generate systems of replication, reductions, transfers, and deviations in their wake. These various designations can be translated in terms of energy. Kubler’s so-called prime object, influential as it was on the work of David Summers (Summers,14) bears similarities to the nexus of Goodman. An example of one of the numerous forms of nexus that can be discerned in audiovisuology is that delineated by Steve Goodman as he writes about Jamaican sound system practices. These operate as enactments of intense vibrational and competitive environments, highlighting the fact that militaries are not alone as agents of sonic deployments. The environments of reggae, dub, and dancehall locations are multifaceted ecologies of transduction. Here, the body schema, described by Merleau-Ponty as a unified system of inter-connected senses, is re-organized. This is accomplished by what sound theorist Julian Henriques identifies as bass materialism, an aspect of the diaspora of Jamaican pop music where engineered vibrational modulations are central to a competitive culture of sound clashing (Goodman, 28). There are desired crowd dynamics in these environments, and subsequent cultural radiations of affectation, in part accomplished by the dancing crowds themselves functioning as one of many transduction mechanisms. As Pop culture theorist and cyber-reality documentarian Erik Davis points out in his book Nomad Codes, societies have increasingly come to define reality itself (a.k.a. “the action”) by media and information flows (277). These flows, much like those which David Joselit describes in After Art, (xiv), create nexuses of rich intertextuality, where variously situated forms of audio-visual transductions can be interrogated and mapped figuratively or even literally by means of GIS databases. Metaphysical concepts of energy in relation to subtler aspects of human anatomy, along with their relationships to knowledge and emotions, merge with grosser aspects of cultural anatomy by means of affectations revealing intel, which translates quite readily into variegated energetic signifiers through critical differentiation. How do artistic works connect with and affect people in an energetic sense? Are certain kinds of energies affective of certain mental aspects? This is where metaphysics becomes useful, because it provides a granular holism, one where the mind is not constrained by studies of the brain. There is certainly no shortage of cognitive and empirical studies of the mind as a production of the brain, these can be useful also, especially in a psychological and linguistic sense. Various metaphysical texts connect locations on the body with specific energy centers, which in turn are correlated with various emotional and mental processes. The incorporation of metaphysical systems of thinking into my research allows for reciprocative connectivities between artworks, human individuals, and in tandem with more objective data drawn from products of the information age, the fabric of culture in a larger sense. One of many examples to draw from with

regard to this idea is Eastern Body Western Mind, by Anodea Judith, which is an excellent synthesis of Eastern philosophy (centered on the chakra energy system) and Western psychology. The mind as a transceiver implies that it sends and receives. This is accomplished by means of transduction. Geneticists (according to Wikipedia) define transduction as the way that DNA is transferred from one bacterium to another by means of a virus, while Mirriam-Webster’s dictionary offers a more generally useful definition: “the action or process of converting something and especially energy or a message into another form.” This definition accommodates a metaphysically integrated conception of mind-body in relation to the cultures it operates within, and the way that artworks along with their variously expressed artifacts can be analyzed as catalysts of transduction (among other things). One of the fascinating things about the mind and the senses, especially with regard to notions of the physical and the non-physical, is the idea of boundaries between these. In his new book The Self-Actualizing Cosmos, systems scientist and two time Nobel Peace prize nominee Ervin Laszlo points out that in the Fall of 2012, a new state of matter was discovered, called the “Fractional Quantum Hall” state, which Laszlo says underscores the concept that everything we experience as matter is in fact the excitations of an underlying cosmic matrix (22). The 1998 Nobel Peace Prize in physics was awarded to Robert Laughlin, Horst Störmer, and Daniel Tsui in relation to the discovery of this state of matter. At a similar level of difficult-to-perceive phenomena are components of the human brain which Laszlo identifies as sub neuronal networks, consisting in part of microtubules operating at the nanometer range. While scientists assert the presence of 1011 neurons, there are 1018

sub neuronal microtubules (49). According to Laszlo and others, this allows for processing power at “quantum levels,” censored by conscious cognitive limitations. A quick search for scientific peer-reviewed articles dealing with these microtubules produces plentiful examples, most dealing with the movement of energy at the Planck scale (10-33 cm). Subsequent to the ways that energy is utilized in productions of artworks, there is an ongoing variegated flux of influence and energetic commutations between individuals and societal networks in their various contexts. These contexts may include ways that related artifacts generated in relation to primary artworks also operate. As a transceiver, mind becomes a conduit of these energetic flows. The mind as a multi-modal agent of transduction superseding neurological conceptions and influenced by subtle energetic structures ranging throughout the body as mapped by various channels of metaphysical thought compels a consideration of pathologies among other bodily systems and their relations to resulting artistic areas of focus. This information can inform both artistic output and subsequent influence. In measuring the relevance of a somewhat empirical phenomenology tempered by an alliance with the para-scientific, it is curious to note that in the majority of neuroscientific studies relating to creativity, the human body outside of the brain is virtually ignored. A consideration of energy as vibration in direct relationship with consciousness in a larger context can be seen in the work of a man named Luigi Ighini, who lived from 1908 to 2004, and who was an assistant to Guglielmo Marconi, the man often credited with the invention of radio and who shared a Nobel prize in physics in 1909 for his work in wireless telegraphy (Citro, 95). Anticipating

later theories such as today’s superstring theory, Ighini stated during the last interview of his life that matter was “rhythm that pulsated in different ways” (98). Various experiments by Ighini involved the transformation of both animate and inanimate matter through the use of vibrational frequencies. This connects with theories outside of mainstream science which maintain that the bodies of living organisms are more extended than in the way we perceive them– they are dynamic pulsating structures, interacting with the environment and with other bodies in ways which we do not consciously perceive. In short, the relationships between mind and senses as articulated by mainstream science are at one end of a spectrum which reaches into deeper dimensions of reality ranging from difficult to perceive to perceptible only in altered states of consciousness (such as sleep, meditation, or dissociative states), to levels well beyond our current understandings and reach of perception. This entire spectrum can be viewed in terms of consciousness as energy, and all form as vibrational expressions of this energy. These levels of so-called reality are not in any way mutually exclusive, they are engaged with in different ways appropriate to their context. The only way that the full spectrum of creative works manifested in the world can be justly apprehended is by means of a contextual aspect flexible enough to accommodate them. Critics of those artists who employ metaphysical conceptions for their creations are not well-served by empirical materialism, any more than is one who wears a heat-sensing visual apparatus to critique ice sculpture. A finer textual lens can be ground, one which views creative audio-visual works with true holistic perspicuity. At the heart of this process is the unifying presence of energy itself, and its ability to be expressed within a spectrum spanning everything from solid matter to invisible light. Regarding text– the often misunderstood statement by Jacques Derrida – “there is no outside text” is eloquently explained by political theorist Alex Callinicos, writing for The Socialist Review in 2004: “…he was saying that once you see language as a constant movement of differences in which there is no stable resting point, you can no longer appeal to reality as a refuge independent of language” (1). Interdisciplinary methods are in some sense a post-modern form of comparative literature. More succinctly, as Nicholas Mirzoeff points out in the first edition of The Visual Culture Reader, visual culture is postmodernism, while postmodernism is a crisis caused by modern society’s confrontation with the failure of its visual strategies (4). With the addition of ontologies of vibration to an already amalgamated visual culture study, I am introducing another crisis to the mix, that of modern society’s parallel confrontation with the failure of its auditory strategies. Postmodernism is expressed via text, or more appropriately, intertextuality. Cross cultural and intercultural modalities require the use of cross cultural and intercultural text; a dearth of this type of textuality may (at least in part) reflect the real nature of the “failure” of visual or auditory strategies. Invoking Mirzoeff again from the same passage, innovation now ironically appears in the form of comment and critique. Vibratory ontology is a literal unity brought about by my intent to focus textually here, upon culturally produced elements which combine both the visual and the auditory. The power of visual elements are given whole new ecologies of trajectory when considered in conjunction with sound, and vice versa. An allowance for wider considerations reaching into more metaphysical domains increases this exponentially, thus an interrogative map calls for certain specificities in relation textual trajectories within economies of audiovisuology. These trajectories move across cultures and across

sub-cultures via the activities of individuals. How can they be reciprocated, reconciled, or interrogated within a level field of inquiry? Terms such as Classicism or Romanticism may have variegated if not contradictory connotations among different cultures (Stallknecht, 223). This is why in a contemporary sense we tend to see an abandonment of the term “schools of thought” in favor of less definitive terms such as “movement,” or “current.”or “temper” (226). There is also a kind of spontaneous provincialism that can obscure the horizons of the general public – a focus on only the contemporary realm and ignorance of the past, especially among those who have not learned to think in more historical terms (116). An extraction of visual and auditory elements into a kind of meta-level, utilizing qualitative spectrums of frequency and/or energy, based on designations of audio-visual works coupled with articulations of affective energies built upon specified cultural nexuses, may form the basis of an affective analytical methodology. Similarities, contrasts, continuities, and disjunctive aspects of more peripheral elements based on culturally itinerant ideas connected to the nexus allow for further expansion. The subtle energies involved in the creation and contemplation of a Mandala are of a different variety than those involved in a painting by Boccione, just as the contemplative piano works by Erik Satie and heavy metal music both involve different types of energy. In all cases there are different energetic sensibilities acting as connective points to cultural nexuses, this in fluid negotiation with the aspirations and struggles of other cultures, seen within varying levels of granularity. Thus politics figures into ontologies of vibration; artworks are agents of conquest moving across mappings of textuality-as-information-as-energy. The auditory and the visual are ubiquitous, yet as mentioned previously, these do not have to be in the forefront to be manifest in various ways. Interrogating these energies in a textually fluid manner necessitates locating their points of connectivity. It is not just the globalization of the visual which demands new meaning, but the globalization of the auditory as well. The panopticon as therapeutic social agent is never silent. Sound is sometimes analyzed as a component of visual culture, or in conjunction with it, but not as explicitly integrated with it in an energetic and vibrational sense. Without going so far as saying that sound as frequency politicizes all aspects of culture, it is not going too far to say that there is an affectation across many layers of culture brought about by sound, which may at times be more pervasive than the visual. Where there is “line of sight,” there is no “line of sound.” Visibility and audibility need not be synchronous. Though vibrational ontology includes image, it can privilege either sound or image. Sound theorist Jacques Attali writes: “If it is true that the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music of the eighteenth century” (Sterne, 29). All are steeped in visuality, which gives way to audiovisuology. Textuality is a fluid field of information. Just as there are as many definitions of one concept as there may be authors, there are as many interpretations as there are readers. There is much that exists outside of the text, yet the text is voracious. Inadequacies of metaphor as mental image are further borne out when one considers textuality as a component of mental processing. Does the relatively recent shift in our culture, which now immerses us in oceans of digital data, carry any real

weight beyond the purely conceptual? Increased vested interests among discreet and amorphous cultural entities toward zones of vibrational frequency which are clearly articulated by Sonic Warfare author Steve Goodman and others clearly point to yes. All in all, an analysis of creative audio-visual works intersects with comparative literature on some level, at least in relation to a somewhat constrained definition provided by Henry H. H. Remak, writing while comparative literature professor at Indiana University: “Comparative literature is the study of literature beyond the confines of one particular country, and the study of the relationships between literature on the one hand and other areas of knowledge and belief, such as the arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, architecture, music), philosophy, history, the social sciences, (e.g. politics, economics sociology), the sciences, religion, etc. on the other. In brief, it is the comparison of one literature with another or others, and the comparison of literature with other spheres of human expression" (Stallknecht, 3). I am not sure what a robust reconciliation between intertextuality and comparative literature would look like, but given the cosmopolitanic debates regarding exactly what comparative literature is in a global sense, I can only hope that my use of it in this context would sit well with the likes of Susan Bassnett, professor of comparative literature at the University of Warwick and head of the Centre for British and Comparative Cultural Studies. Though she does seem to operate within conceptions of more geo-politically centered comparative literature, Bassnett does allow for a viewpoint aligned with Oxford professor Matthew Arnold, who in 1857 said that “No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures” (Bassnett, 1). The following are examples of literature-based approaches, used in conjunction with mediums of exchange or genres of human expression, and within the context of ontologies of vibration. They thus exemplify in some ways a synthetically enhanced albeit refracted kind of comparative literature. It should be noted that disciplinary approaches here will be seen to be determined and delineated by the scope of terminologies and forms of textual expression utilized within the context of specific mediums of exchange, and ways that these lend themselves to more narrowly defined ontologies of vibration specific to particular cases at hand. In the 2013 book Vibratory Modernism, English professors Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower bring together a collection of essays by writers who approach literary works, art movements, the work of specific visual artists, theatrical productions, photography, and theory in terms of certain types of vibrational ontologies framed by the role that vibrations assume in the interplay between physics, spiritualism, physiology, technology, and the arts. While each essay frames a type of vibrational ontology within a specific genre, providing clues as to the way that well-clarified terminology and temporal contexts can be used in tandem with each other, the book also further underlines the assertion by Sonic Warfare author Steve Goodman regarding the politics of frequency. At the front of Vibratory Modernism, the “Notes on Contributors” states that of the thirteen authors listed, seven are currently involved in writing new books on sound, noise, physiologies of perception, and the relationships between science and the arts (viiix). It is hard to imagine politics and frequency being very far beyond the scope of these concerns.

Of particular note is the way that the various authors in Vibratory Modernism use terminologies appropriate to the specific genre they write about, along with the way that everything is carefully historicized. Cultural research specialist Michael Pickering makes the case that in any research involving cultural studies, temporal placement is at least as important as well chosen terminologies and definitions where required (Pickering, 13). As Pickering mentions, history tends to get bogged down in the past and is empirically meticulous while lax in conceptualization, and cultural studies tend to become bogged down in the present while being empirically selective and emphasizing of conceptualization. This generalization might not necessarily be a liability for one engaged in audio-visual cultural studies, as long as effort toward finding a balance between the two is made. In the first chapter of Vibratory Modernism, early connections between modernism and occultism are mapped out. It is argued that “the language of vibration” shows how translations were accomplished between literary aesthetics and metaphysical thought. Some of the ways that languages of modernism and occultism converge in the twentieth century can thus be seen (31). With these, it is then suggested that an equally distinct strain of vibratory occultism emerged during the late nineteenth century. A focus on an early twentieth century writer named Algernon Blackwood, who tended to transfer occult ideas directly into his text, is coupled with an analysis of the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who both include concepts of vibration in their writings, but which are less directly connected to the occult (32). The Society for Psychical Research, The Theosophical Society, and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were all active esoteric organizations at the turn of the century, influencing many writers. In common to all of these are notions of vibration which naturalize them as a physical basis for occult forces, psychologize them as a relationship between consciousness and human bodily functions, and which treat these vibrational notions as metaphors for the areas of permeability in the boundaries between science and occultism (38). The language of vibration used by nineteenth century writers directly influenced writers situated within a modernist canon. To lesser and greater extents, terminologies of vibration are treated in similar ways by other authors in the pages of Vibrational Modernism, and subsequent chapters illuminate these ideas further. In another Vibratory Modernism essay, a definite connection is made between fields of force as written about by Clerk Maxwell, who at the time was known as an ether physicist, and the Vorticist art movement, spawned in large part through the writings of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, who were deeply engaged with depictions of science in art and within literary stylings (80). In a larger sense, it is shown by author Andrew Logemann that concepts of vortices whirling within the ether were developed, modulated, and translated by a variegated network of artists, writers, and scientists, who in their re-inscriptions of Vorticist ideas brought about a set of related cultural practices. In their aesthetic and cultural displacements, various actors within these cultural practices demonstrate the way that textuality modulates movements or currents of thought outside the bounds that the movements are normally thought to operate within (82). This principle is shown to occur in a number of other systems of thought written about in Vibratory Modernism, based on

etheric, vibratory, mediumistic, ectoplasmic, and photographic cultural networks. Of special interest is an explanation by John G. Hatch of the way that Czech painter Frantisek Kupka, who was the first artist known to exhibit abstract art, based his 1912 paintings on a near singleminded pursuit of elements fundamental to our world, which according to Kupka, are vibratory in nature (145). Kupka was looking at the underlying structure and laws of nature, with an overwhelming focus on wave motion and the vibratory (145). Thus, abstraction from its very inception as a new form of art was based on concerns of science in terms of the vibratory, translated into paintings (157). In a contemporary sense, author Steve Goodman makes it clear that the missing dimension in previous cultural negotiations of power where sound and music are directly connected, is indeed vibration, the force which connects every entity in the cosmos, whether organic or nonorganic (Goodman,xiv). From a speculative position, Goodman’s Sonic Warfare moves through stratums of dense theorization, differentiations of concepts, and descriptive and exemplary episodes drawn from fact and fiction, in order to identify sonically provoked affectations of mood in individuals and groups within society (xvii-xviii). As it focuses on what Goodman calls the “contagious radiation of sonic events through the networks of cybernetic capitalism,” and runs somewhat counter to the traditional focus of sound in the academy by focusing on sound’s capabilities for “bad vibes,” Sonic Warfare provides a model for moving beyond boundaries of the audible. Of course, negative aspects of sonic culture are balanced by pre-emptive, mobilizing, or appropriative countermeasures, and these are not ignored. In fact, though it is not the primary focus of Goodman’s work in Sonic Warfare, an infusion of positive affectations can also be accomplished through vibrational deployments. Using Goodman’s approach as a model, these can be traced and interrogated in similar ways, allowing for movements into other realms of cultural affectation, whether these privilege sound, vision, metaphysics, literature, or any other type of intellectual (textual) framework. Utilizing a nexus based format as a “zoomed in” center point from which social, political, artistic, and cultural affectations can be traced, whether generally inward toward the nexus, as in the case of writers in Vibratory Modernism, or outward from the nexus as in the case of Goodman, can allow for a productive analysis of audiovisual culture. The choice of nexus, whether literary, visual, auditory, event based, media based, or any other format or combination thereof, is one which is made flexible through the employment of networked agents as discussed previously. These agents are not necessarily present within the nexus itself, but influential upon it and/or influenced by it. In relation to more traditional studies of sound in visual culture, the boundaries are now more permeable. It is this permeability that may be thought of as undoing some of the violence imposed upon some of our cultural productions in academia, through their enclosure within the inadequacies of traditional and less interdisciplinary methodologies. The relentless focus on single formats seen in more traditional or historic forms of academic study can in effect produce a kind of camouflage, wherein cross fertilizations among specific disciplines are obfuscated. In his book Baseball and the Music of Charles Ives, Timothy A. Johnson presents a very

compelling case for the way that game structure inherent to the sport of baseball influences the musical structures of the composer Charles Ives. Johnson’s book is a good example of the way that visual thought processes can translate into sound and music in a transitive way. Johnson, utilizing knowledge of the life of Ives and of Ives’ ongoing interest in baseball, along with his own knowledge of the music of Ives and of baseball, was able to construct a fascinating analysis. This simple example points out another way that nothing is immune to the illuminations of visual culture, that baseball can be thought of in terms of visual culture in its own right, or in terms of an auditory culture, as with the music of Ives. Containing the visual and the auditory within notions of vibration and further expanded notions of frequency will allow for wider fields to draw from, by means of this increased permeability of boundaries. This permeability may not automatically anchor research into contemporary practices, as expanded ontologies of frequency unshackle historical mobilities. On a larger philosophical level, the notion of frequency can be applied to what might be termed encryptions within works of art. These encryptions may ground more traditional sound studies and visual studies within their own partialities. To think in ways that better unify the auditory and the visual on one hand by means of frequency and vibration, and better illuminate more ways that vibration and frequency operate across the auditory and visual cultural spectrums on the other hand, allows for a wider net of interdisciplinary reach. This reach moves beyond elevated sets of pre-formed notions regarding either the audio or visual. To position a study within the contrasting viewpoints of those engaged separately with sound or visual studies seems less valuable than to position oneself altruistically, and to seek to dissolve separations between disciplines by means of intertextuality. Within a less compartmentalized intellectual space, criticality can then function as an itinerant nexus in its own right, within panoplies of determinant designating factors. In some ways this approach is a corollary to the way that art historian and theorist David Summers proposes a new framework within which to alleviate problems in Western Art history studies via his book Real Spaces. Summers proposes the replacement of the term “visual arts” with “spatial arts,” and in the development of his thesis shows how art history can be studied under a different paradigm. A re-consideration of the visual and the auditory which brings them into a shared conceptual arena might in some ways be simpler than the large scale overhaul which Summers delineates, functioning less as a reconsideration of historical normatives than as a variable gateway to deeper levels of complexity much less exclusive to other avenues of methodical thought. George Kubler, in his book The Shape of Time, proposes a supposition in which the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, inclusive of tools and writing, and all of the “useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world,” bringing into coincidence the universe of man made things and the history of art. By means of this supposition, Kubler instantiates an urgency toward finding better ways of considering the entire realm of what is human made (1). According to Kubler, these things mark the passage of time with great accuracy and by means of limited varieties of shapes, for “like crustaceans we depend for survival upon an outer skeleton, upon a shell of historic cities and houses filled with things belonging to definable portions of the past” (1). It is the unique way in which Kubler analyzes historical trajectories of

cultural objects, which can lend itself to concepts of the audio-visual as ontologies of vibration. Creative problems are linked by their solutions, forming what Kubler calls sequences (35). Sequences can be open or closed depending on whether certain types of problems are still being worked out or not, and they can also be classed in ways which supersede the biographical, and biological, topographical, or other types of analogous considerations. Within the sequencing model are found more “formal” sequences in which there are shifting repetitions of similar traits. While minimal boundaries need to be determined depending on which selections of works are going to be considered, in the determination of these boundaries there are “prime objects” located, which generate systems of replication, reductions, transfers, and deviations in their wake. These various designations can be translated in terms of energy. Kubler’s so-called prime object, influential as it was on the work of David Summers (Summers,14) bears similarities also to the nexuses which Goodman invokes. For example, one of the numerous forms of nexus that Goodman delineates is that of Jamaican sound system practices which operate as enactments of intense vibrational and competitive environments, highlighting the fact that militaries are not alone as agents of sonic deployments. The environments of reggae, dub, and dancehall locations are multifaceted ecologies of transduction. Here, the body schema, described by Merleau-Ponty as a unified system of inter-connected senses, is re-organized. This is accomplished by what sound theorist Julian Henriques identifies as bass materialism, an aspect of the diaspora of Jamaican pop music where engineered vibrational modulations are central to a competitive culture of sound clashing (Goodman, 28). There are desired crowd dynamics in these environments, and subsequent cultural radiations of affectation, in part accomplished by the dancing crowds functioning as one of many transduction mechanisms. As Pop culture theorist and cyber-reality documentarian Erik Davis points out in his book Nomad Codes, societies have increasingly come to define reality itself (a.k.a. “the action”) by media and information flows (277). These flows, much like those which David Joselit describes in After Art, (xiv), create nexuses of rich intertextuality, where variously situated forms of audio-visual transductions can be interrogated and mapped figuratively or even literally by means of GIS (geographic information science and related technologies) databases. Metaphysical concepts of energy in relation to subtler aspects of human anatomy, along with their relationships to knowledge and emotions, merge with grosser aspects of cultural anatomy by means of affectations revealing intel, which translates quite readily into variegated energetic signifiers through critical differentiation.

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