Day Three: Saturday 8 November
10am-12pm: Talk 3
Lecture Theatre, Stockwell Street Academic Building
Cornelia Lund & Ana Carvalho – Lines between Sight and Sound. New Developments in AV Performance
AV performances involving the real-time processing of images and sound have long been an integral part of artistic expression in areas such as the arts, music, theatre, design, or clubs. In the 2000s, when the technical possibilities of combining images and sound in real time were still new, a whole landscape of festivals, venues, and events dedicated to exploring these new AV forms emerged. At the same time, related discourse, teaching, and research developed. However, AV performances have become less visible over the last few years, with festivals and venues closing down or changing direction. Recently, though, a revival has become palpable through the emergence of new festivals and venues, and a younger generation of artists. And there is a renewed interest in the related discourse – as evidenced by the growing number of downloads of our publications.
We, the three presenters conducted the above diagnostics independently, but subsequently joined forces to initiate a research project exploring the contemporary field of AV performances. We plan to interview artists, curators, and other actors in this field to find out more about: 1) artistic approaches to AV performance, 2) important artistic and theoretical references, 3) the use of (new) technologies; and 4) performance topics. Our different geographical and linguistic backgrounds (Columbia, Portugal, Germany) open up many opportunities for the interviews. Furthermore, the project team comprises different generations: Ana Carvalho and Cornelia Lund are key figures of the explorative phase of the 2000s, Sara Luna Ruíz belongs to a younger, very diverse and international generation of actors.
We will start the interviews in July 2025. At the Sound/Image Festival, we plan to present the project and share its first results. We hope for an animated discussion and highly welcome critical feedback!
Ana Carvalho is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maia and a researcher at CIAC (University of the Algarve). She coordinates the project Ephemeral Expanded and co-edited The Audiovisual Breakthrough. Her curatorial work includes the exhibitions Omniscience: Strategies of Fracture and Escape (2021) and Abducted Realities (2023). Since 2016, she has organised the Encounters of Expressions between Sound and Image. Her research focuses on the intersection between digital technologies, their social implications, and ecological concerns.
Dr Cornelia Lund is an art, film and media scholar, and curator living in Berlin. Since 2004, she has been co-director of fluctuating images, an independent platform for media art and design (www.fluctuating-images.de). Currently, she is a Research Fellow at the University of the Arts Bremen. Her curatorial work includes Connecting Afro Futures. Fashion x Hair x Design (2019), Laboratoire Kontempo Kinshasa–Berlin (2021/2022), and Under Construction (screenings and DJing, 2023/24).
She is co-editor of Audio.Visual – On Visual Music and Related Media (2009), The Audiovisual Breakthrough (2015), and the online platforms Post-digital Culture (2016–), Lund Audiovisual Writings (2017). Her research interests include audiovisual artistic practices, documentary practices, and de- and postcolonial theories.
Sara Luna Ruíz is a visual artist and VJ from Medellín, currently based in Berlin. She teaches video mapping and curates digital art at ARTKA, a creative platform based in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work focuses on interactive installations, real-time visuals, video mapping, and experimental media art, often exploring themes related to complex systems, politics, and the intersections of science, art, and technology. With over eight years of experience in the field, she has received several awards and has presented her work at international festivals including Glastonbury (UK), Draaimolen (Netherlands), and numerous events across Columbia.
Heather Stark – Rhythm as a cross-modal relational principle in sound and image works
Before technologies enabled the separation of sound and image, our embodied participation aligned the elements of our experience. Today we have a powerful capacity to generate and reproduce sound and image both independently and abstractly. But what should we do with this capability, and why? Less prescriptively, what do we do with it?
We lack shared vocabulary for the structural principles underpinning abstract AV works, from the point of view of both experiencer and creator. In this talk, I draw on concepts from previous approaches to propose a rhythm-based approach. I investigate this option from several angles:
Ontological challenges – examples from two recent abstract and semi-abstract immersive AV works (404.zero, 2023), and Reflections of Being (Cooper, 2025)) illustrate the challenges involved in developing a vocabulary. I ask: what even is this stuff?
A simple analytical approach – I outline an approach based on the different ways that rhythms of the auditory and the visual channels relate to each other. This approach builds on Chion’s (1994) work on the uses of sound in film and Zettle’s (1973) cross-media TV aesthetic, as well as others. This abstraction is compatible with emerging models of cross-model perception, and, with a bit of stretch, with object-based approaches.
Creative test drive – we will explore a set of constructed samples which demonstrate a variety of rhythmic inter-relations between sound and image, to explore its potential as a generative design principle, as well as an analytic lens. Finally, I speculate about which abstractions in our creative tools would enable us to use this principle more freely.
The potential benefit of a shared vocabulary is to understand aesthetic impact better, and to enable us to create with more ease and impact. Rhythm offers an interesting option for this.
Heather’s current creative work combines poetry and procedural animation in haiga form, inspired by changes in the natural world. She has been researching AV composition independently, as a way of informing her creative practice. Two themes that thread through her long and diverse career are a drive towards making sense out of phenomena, and a passion for creative tool use. Recently, she worked as a design researcher in streaming media, looking at multi-device media experiences. She also helped develop a creative 3D application through researching interactions with prototypes. In addition, she has worked in games, as consultant, as a technology analyst, and as an academic HCI researcher. Long ago, she earned a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics, which focussed on the impact of narrative devices and structural cues on attention and interpretation.
For further info please see: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherstark/
Nicholas Cope – Where Are We Now: How to Navigate Contemporary AV Electroacoustic Movies – A Talk celebrating the Visual Music collaboration of Tim Howle and Nick Cope
The tenth Anniversary of Sound/Image offers an opportunity to reflect on a twenty-year visual music collaboration between former professor of contemporary music, Dr. Tim Howle and film maker Dr. Nick Cope, resulting in the production of ten short film works between 2003-2018, which have been screened individually around the world, as well as generating wider research outputs in the form of conference presentations, screenings and papers, online and off line journal articles, book chapters and a PhD thesis, contextualizing the collaboration and creative practice.
For Reflecting Forwards we have proposed an Installation presentation of work which has been recognized as an exemplary visual music practice (and distinctive sound/image collaboration) through international peer review and publication yet rarely seen and screened as a body of work.
In addition to the installation Dr. Nick Cope is proposing a talk about the collaboration; and if the Installation proposal is not accepted, then proposing the talk alone to celebrate and contextualize the long-standing inter-disciplinary, cross-institutional and multi-discipline creative research practice. The collaboration explores notions of what it means to compose with sound and moving image in works where the sonic and visual are treated as commensurate partners.
Most recently written about in ‘Electronic Visual Music : The Elements of Audiovisual Creativity’ Payling, 2024) where an interview with Tim Howle is featured in the chapter ‘Communicate: Electronic Visual Music Conversations’. We have written ourselves at length about the collaboration in the journals Studies in Australasian Cinema and Huddersfield University’s Divergence Press. Videos have been published on DVD and in online journals, including MIT Press’ Computer Music Journal, ScreenWorks, and Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy.
The proposed talk will unpack these contexts in relation to screened extracts of the work.
Dr. Nick Cope is an artist, filmmaker and academic based in Vietnam and recently retired from RMIT University Saigon campus. Former Senior Research Fellow and Head of Humanities & Social Sciences at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China; Nick has also worked for the Universities of Sunderland, Hull and Southampton Solent. He has been a practicing film, video and digital media artist since 1982, and completed a PhD by Existing Creative Published Work in October 2012. This locates a contemporary visual music practice within current and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this practice to initial screenings of work as part of the 1980s British Scratch video art movement, and later collaborations with electronic music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire and others. Collaborating with electroacoustic composer Professor Tim Howle since 2002, work has been screened and presented and papers given relating to the collaboration at conferences, concerts, galleries and festivals, nationally and internationally. A close and prolonged engagement with Practice Research agendas has accompanied this creative media practice since the early 2000s, developing strong academic network links and a variety of published outputs, including DVD and online publication of video material, journal articles and book chapters.
A personal website and archive is online at http://www.nickcopefilm.com
Simon Ratcliffe – The Immersive Score: Recording Media Music for Dolby Atmos
As we approach a century of sound in film, and a half-century long quest for enveloping audio synchronised to moving image, a clear line can be drawn between the aspirations of the earliest film makers, musicians and composers to engage with their audiences through the immersive qualities of music production and the recent adoption of commercial formats such as Dolby Atmos. However, with established norms of recording and producing music deeply entrenched in media workflows and studio practices, there has been limited recording research and praxis on commercially viable workflows within the industry to exploit Atmos as both a means of creative expression and a technical solution in media and orchestral scoring, with most of the focus in this area falling to sound design, even thirteen years after the first Atmos film title. In this talk, we will discuss and listen to the progression of various arrays and techniques for Atmos film and game music with a specific focus on end-user experience and practicalities borne from the scalable nature of the format.
Simon Ratcliffe is a score mixer and producer, film co-producer, and MD of the multi-national Sound & Motion Studios which he founded in 2002.
A music and film background led to his specialisation in game, streaming and film score mixing and supervision with clients including Arenanet, Disney, Netflix and Amazon Prime, and he has won over two dozen industry accolades with his team such as Emmy Primetime, FrightNight, SAFTAs, Songlines World Music, SAMA, and Global Music awards.
With a 14 year background in education and a focus on Dolby Atmos, he has collaborated with studios in the UK, Europe and the US, given workshops on immersive mixing and film score production at the AES Immersive Conference, Huddersfield University APL, ACM, Metropolis and UCL London, and has a practice-based masters degree from Hertfordshire University. Simon is an engineer and researcher on the Echo Project focus group on immersive score recording, lead by Air Studios and Huddersfield University.
(https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5684856, https://scoremixer.com)