Michel Chion: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1990–) [FR, ES, EN]

“In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception.

Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don’t see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of such evolving technologies as widescreen, multitrack, and Dolby; the influences of sound on the perception of space and time; and the impact of such contemporary forms of audio-vision as music videos, video art, and commercial television. Chion concludes with an original and useful model for the audiovisual analysis of film.”

First published as L’audio-vision: son et image au cinéma, Nathan, Paris, 1990.

English edition
Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman
Foreword by Walter Murch
Publisher Columbia University Press, 1994
ISBN 0231078986, 9780231078986
239 pages

Publisher (EN)

L’audio-vision: son et image au cinéma (French, 3rd ed., 1990/2017, added on 2020-9-19)
La audiovisión: Introducción a un análisis conjunto de la imagen y el sonido (Spanish, trans. Antonio Lopez Ruiz, 1993, unpaginated, added on 2014-3-8)
Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (English, trans. Claudia Gorbman, 1994, updated on 2012-7-17)

David Joselit: Feedback: Television Against Democracy (2007)

American television embodies a paradox: it is a privately owned and operated public communications network that most citizens are unable to participate in except as passive specators. Television creates an image of community while preventing the formation of actual social ties because behind its simulated exchange of opinions lies a highly centralized corporate structure that is profoundly antidemocratic. In Feedback, David Joselit describes the privatized public sphere of television and recounts the tactics developed by artists and media activists in the 1960s and 1970s to break open its closed circuit.

The figures whose work Joselit examines—among them Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Melvin Van Peebles—staged political interventions within the space of television. Joselit identifies three kinds of such image-events: feedback, which can be both disabling noise and rational response—as when Abbie Hoffman hijacked television time for the Yippies with flamboyant stunts directed to the media; the image-virus, which proliferates parasitically, invading, transforming, and even blocking systems—as in Nam June Paik’s synthesized videotapes and installations; and the avatar, a quasi-fictional form of identity available to anyone, which can function as a political actor—as in Melvin Van Peebles’s invention of Sweet Sweetback, an African-American hero who appealed to a broad audience and influenced styles of Black Power activism. These strategies, writes Joselit, remain valuable today in a world where the overlapping information circuits of television and the Internet offer different opportunities for democratic participation.

In Feedback, Joselit analyzes such midcentury image-events using the procedures and categories of art history. The trope of figure/ground reversal, for instance, is used to assess acts of representation in a variety of media—including the medium of politics. In a televisual world, Joselit argues, where democracy is conducted through images, art history has the capacity to become a political science.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262101203, 9780262101202
210 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-10-5)

Sean Cubitt: Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (1993)

“Videography is an attempt to discover the conditions under which it is possible to speak, write and teach about the electronic media. It provides a materialist account of video and computer media as they are practised and used today. A theoretical section tests the claims of various theses in art history, media and cultural theory to account for the variety of video practice in the contemporary scene. The remainder of the book is devoted to close analysis of work, from amateur video to computer graphics.”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 1993
ISBN 0312102968, 9780312102968
239 pages

Publisher

PDF (no OCR; some pages missing; updated on 2012-11-4)