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Audiovisual Art

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Audiovisual Art

When Image and Sound Share Structure

Ryoichi Kurokawa’s syn_ is an audiovisual performance built as a diptych with 2.1-channel sound. First created in 2011, it has been performed internationally in spaces ranging from Tokyo’s Studio Coast to festivals and arts centres in Europe and North America. Kurokawa describes his broader practice in terms of constructing audiovisual phenomena from field recordings and digitally generated structures.

What interests me from a VJ perspective is that the image does not appear to be decoration placed behind finished music.

Sound and image seem to belong to the same organisational system: fragmentation, rhythm, interruption, density and sudden precision appear in both.

That changes the role of synchronization. Matching a visual flash to a kick drum is the most obvious way of connecting image and sound, but it is only one possibility. Both media can instead share behaviour.

A visual texture can become dense when the sound becomes structurally dense without literally following every beat.

The strongest audiovisual work may happen when you cannot easily decide which medium is leading the other.

https://www.ryoichikurokawa.com/project/syn_.html

#RyoichiKurokawa #AudiovisualArt #LiveVisuals #ExperimentalFilm

Audiovisual Art

Thirty-Five Speakers for One Album

Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s async–immersion transforms an album into something closer to an audiovisual environment. The installation was first shown in 2023 inside the basement of the former Kyoto Shimbun newspaper printing plant. Sound engineer ZAK remixed Sakamoto’s async for a 35-speaker system, while Takatani’s imagery occupied a 26.4-metre-wide LED screen.

What interests me from a VJ perspective is the shift from synchronization to space. Sound and image do not merely meet on a timeline. Their physical scale changes the relationship. A sound can arrive from somewhere in the room while the visual field extends far beyond the proportions of a normal cinema screen.

That makes the architecture part of the audiovisual composition.

On a laptop we usually build visuals inside a rectangle and mix audio between left and right. Installations like this expose how arbitrary those boundaries are. Once the room becomes available as material, composition can include direction, distance, movement and the viewer’s own position.

The timeline is no longer the only place where sound and image can meet.

https://www.sitesakamoto.com/artworks/23/

#RyuichiSakamoto #ShiroTakatani #AudiovisualArt #LiveVisuals