The Acoustic Image: Experimental Sound & Expanded Collage after World War II
This book project demonstrates how the integration of sound transformed intermedia artistic practices in the decades following the Second World War. With the commercial availability of new technologies like the tape recorder, artists could suddenly project, cut, glue, and layer sound as a raw material.
Comparative in nature and international in scope, this study delves into the wide-ranging work of three under-studied French artists, Henri Chopin (1921–2008), François Dufrêne (1930–1982), and Gil J Wolman (1929–1995), and traces connections with a range of international practitioners, spanning Europe, Asia, the United States, and South America, between 1948 and 2008.
This project mines the social dimensions of new media, including experimental film, performance, sound, and collage, by showing how these technologies equipped artists to address the subjectivity and the sociality of the individual body through technological mediation.
