Installation Art

In more recent years, the immersive dimensions of installation art have allowed artists to move even closer towards a union of visual and auditory experience. Although film enabled artists to capture fundamental aspects of music that painting could not, it also limited the viewer to a single, frontal vantage point on a fixed surface. As three-dimensional spaces that envelop with multisensory effects, installations augment and closely approximate the ambient quality of sound. The installation environment reframes visual music in ways similar to the synaesthetic concerts and light shows of the late 1950s and 1960s: the participant’s physical presence and perceptual experience become the keys to synaesthesia and the production of meaning.

While these installations utilize abstract visual vocabularies and probe concepts related to synaesthetic theory, they also look away from the spiritual or cosmic ideals common to earlier explorations of visual music. No longer turning to music as a model for pure and transcendent visual art, contemporary artists such as Jennifer Steinkamp and Leo Villareal have combined various media with synaesthetic notions to ground visual music in the viewer’s experience. Their works—influenced by post-1950s movements including minimalism, light and space art, structuralist filmmaking, and conceptual art—instead stimulate the mind by directly involving the body, engaging the viewer on a phenomenological level. Yet, in so doing, they have carried the tradition of visual music into the present with art that intensifies sensorial experience, extending and elevating perception beyond the everyday.