David Rokeby: Very Nervous System, 1983-94, Version 1991

Opening hours:
August 28th 2009 – January 10th 2010
daily 10.00 AM – 6.00 PM, Thu 10.00 AM – 9.00 PM

Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1, 4020 Linz
www.see-this-sound.at

Promises in Sound and Vision

There are sounds and noises all over the museum, as artists today take an engagement with the sound of this world for granted. The former predominance of the visual has meanwhile been replaced by a multifaceted interplay of image and sound. See this Sound documents this development from the perspective of visual art and refers to the respective contemporary discussions and promises.

In eight sections the exhibition focuses on important milestones and historical-social points of reference, but without imposing a linear development. Starting from the filmic sound visualizations of the 1920s – so-called Eye Music – it traces the topos of traversing genre boundaries in the 1960s and questions psychedelic trance machines and multimedia sound environments about their social-political potential. The illusion of a “natural” interplay of image and sound, for instance in Hollywood movies, is countered by works that disclose the discrepancies of this purported synthesis, all the way to the loss of sound and the power of speech. In addition, there is a special focus on the local production conditions of sounds (industrial cities and industrial sounds), and on sound as a medium of institutional critique.

Collaboration with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research has also enabled the scholarly treatment of specific media history issues presented within the framework of a web archive and in the exhibition.

Artistic and Scientific Lead: Stella Rollig and Dieter Daniels
Curator: Cosima Rainer
Assistant Curator: Manuela Ammer
Project Coordination: Veronika Floch
Scientific Collaboration LBI: Sandra Naumann