The Voice and the Lens: Facing Technologies in the Audio-visual Installation

The Voice and the Lens is a study of the interconnecting technologies that constitute contemporary audio-visual installations. The thesis focuses on how these technologies ‘face’ each other – how they are positioned both towards one another and in confrontation. These technologies necessarily include our own corporeal apparatus, and by interrogating ‘the voice’ the human body is inevitably mobilised. Of fundamental importance to the study is the way in which accepted audio-visual relationships can be displaced while drawing attention to the originative gesture: new sights and sounds are created in the process.
The Voice and the Lens is deliberately iconoclastic in that it seeks to break down a range of physical and theoretical boundaries encapsulating the work. This, I argue, is something that is already being done by sound and its audience in the gallery. This project, therefore, is a study of the spaces, surfaces and technologies that riddle audio-visual installations – topographies that permeate both the work and body.