lynette design

Futurism and audio art

Russian Futurism focused more on the audio and performing arts aspects of Futurism (more than Italian futurism). They embraced the noise and sounds that the mechanical revolution had given them.

Russian Futurism begun in 1912 with an article called A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which called for new linguistic innovations, dislocated syntax, and strange word placement as elements of spoken word.

Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, as well as Wassily Kandinsky, Nikolai Kublin, and composer Aleksandr Scriabin experimented in alternative sound creation.

Khlebnikov wrote a futurist play called Zangezi: A Supersaga in Twenty Planes. The hero of the play is a man who attempts to explain the language of birds, stars, insects and gods to a gathered mass. He manages to do this by creating a new language.

Russian Futurists made radical innovations in music. Wassily Kandinsky assigned each individual note a certain colour. He used dissonance in almost all of his works, and challenged the idea the sound must coincide with the actions on stage. Kandinsky is more known for his visual art than his audio art, but there is a great deal of his visual art that was inspired by his music. He would ‘see’ colours in music and paint what he saw. Then he would challenge audiences to guess which musical score inspired which painting.

In my audio piece I want to record some modern city noises, like the futurists. I want to experiment with spoken word and recording ambient conversations, to explore everyday usage of language rather than stricter gramatical usage, like the futurists broke away to use. I also like the idea of thinking towards the animation, with sounds corresponding to colours. If an abstract sound piece about one sqare metre could trigger futurist visions of the sound illustrated and animated.

posted by nicole @ 1:19 pm