It happened on the surfaces. I called it a concert, it was a sculpture—Rolf Julius
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Sculpture is where the interchange between hearing and seeing happens: on surfaces, like the ones of Julius’ loudspeakers or, like the surface of the lake and of memory. Surface is the form of the contact between different mediums, a dimension that can in turn generate new forms. It has claims to a certain immediacy, a way into presence. Here, it says: not there. (Cascella 2015, p. 65)
Daniela Cascella’s evocation of an experiential surface that mediates between senses is reminiscent of W. J. T. Mitchell’s proposal for the tactility of sight. Touch forms our most immediate channel to experience surfaces and textures, so perhaps it’s not surprising that tactility is also mobilised in some ghosted form when it comes to other senses, particularly sound and sight. Mitchell tells us that Ancient Greek theories of optics involved a material stream of “visual fire” flowing between eye and object. Descartes, Mitchell says, inspired by the blind person’s ability to navigate with canes, proposed sight to be “a more refined, subtle, and extended form of touch” (Mitchell, 2007, p. 402). (For more on Cascella see chapter 4, “Ficto-criticism as Performative Research”.) ¶ 1
There is also the notion of the haptic image explored by Laura Marks, in which the “representational power of the image” is de-emphasised, making way for the “material presence of the image” (2000, p. 163). The haptic image described by Marks is affective, embodied and incomplete. Citing Deleuze, these are “those images that are so ‘thin’ and unclichéd that the viewer must bring his or her resources of memory and imagination to complete them” (p. 163). The haptic or “affection-image” also has a temporal aspect that “brings us to direct experience of time through the body” (p. 164). Interestingly, these qualities of the haptic image have resonances with qualities of Schaeffer's objet sonore or sound object (sound considered creatively beyond its source)—non-figurative, temporal, ineffable, embodied. Marks does briefly offer a possibility of a “haptic hearing…that brief moment when all sounds present themselves to us undifferentiated, before we make the choice of which sounds are most important to attend to” (p. 183). However, I would propose that those who listen to sounds with intention (as opposed to the ambient defocussing she proposes) are always engaging in haptic understandings, seeking to hear beyond cause and representation, to feel the bodily affect and the presentness of temporal flow. Considering Marks’ notion of the haptic image in relation to sound is to realise that sound and image meet through the notion of the haptic, that tactility offers a bridge, a skin between sound and sight (sound and smell, even sound and taste), brought to the fore when we consider the notion of the surfaces of these senses. ¶ 2
This interface of the senses moves beyond the metaphorical when experiments in neuroscience are considered. Firstly, there is the cross-modality that occurs in synaesthetes in which one sense triggers neurological responses in brain segments meant for other things. Or the neuroplasticity of the differently abled, who repurpose brain regions from one sense to consolidate their other senses (for example, the blind person whose visual cortex activates in response to tactile navigation). Studies have also shown that in hearing sounds and music, a range of “imagery” can be triggered, firing synapses in sensory cortexes responsible for visual and kinaesthetic activity, such as speech and larger bodily movements (think dancing) (Hubbard, 2010). ¶ 3
These neurological empirical findings give credence to Mitchell’s argument that, just as there are no senses in isolation, there are also no pure media:
The specificity of media, then, is a much more complex issue than reified sensory labels such as “visual,” “aural,” and “tactile.” It is, rather, a question of specific sensory ratios that are embedded in practice, experience, tradition, and technical inventions. (Mitchell, 2007, p.400)
However, while Mitchell proposes that it is not useful to talk of visual media, he does believe that we can talk of visual culture that questions and problematises the visual rather than taking it for granted. Focusing on visual culture, he suggests, “offers a way to get beyond these ‘scopic wars’” so that “we would study the intricate braiding and nesting of the visual with the other senses” (p. 404). ¶ 4
This proposal could then also be applied to the notion of a sound culture, one in which oppositional definitions and the sidelining or undervaluing of the aural compared to the visual doesn’t prescribe a predominately defensive position. In an attempt to begin to escape this binary battle, I propose we think for a while of sound in partnership with the tactile. Not purely through the very physical presence of sound pressure waves as they act upon our bodies—pushing the air from lungs with heavy bass beats or vibrating our skulls with ultrasonic frequencies—but also in the associative tactile images that accompany aural experiences; the sensation of surface that is activated through the texture of sounds. In this way, it is possible to think of sounds through touch and sight as having their own surfaces; to think of the skin of sound. ¶ 5
Cascella, D. (2015). F.M.R.L.: Footnotes, mirages, refrains and leftovers of writing sound. Zer0 Books/John Hunt Publishing.
Hubbard, T. (2010). Auditory imagery: Empirical findings. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 302–329.
Marks, L. U. (2000). Haptic visuality. In The skin of the film: Intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses (pp. 162–193). Duke University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2007). There are no visual media. In O. Grau (Ed.), MediaArtHistories (pp. 395–408). MIT Press.