There is no soundtrack: Rethinking art, media, and the audio-visual contract (Rethinking Art's Histories)

There is no soundtrack is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art by artists ranging from Chantal Akerman to Nam June Paik to Tanya Tagaq. It contextualises these works and artists through key ideas in sound studies: voice, noise, listening, the soundscape and more. The book argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’, it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, building new, more complex and reverberating frameworks to collectively sonify the study of culture. Front matter Dedication Contents List of figures Acknowledgments Prologue: film without images Introduction: rethinking the audio-visual contract Radical otherness: voiceover, autoethnography, performativity History, noise, violence: Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag Media soundscapes: listening to installation and performance Sounding a politics of place: acoustic communities, aesthetic colonization, and sound imperialism Epilogue: notes on acoustic time Index There is no soundtrack amplifies new and radical audio-visual relationships in experimental media art. It addresses the lack of diversity in the study of art, media and sound through careful audition of marginalised voices that speak of race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, colonialism, nationalism, violence and the politics of space. -- .