inventing the senses

8/9/2019 Inventing the Senses

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KAROL JÓŹWIAK

University of Łódź

INVENTING THE SENSES. POLISH NEW MEDIA ART AND SYNESTHESIA IN '60S - '80S

DIGITAL SENSES

I would like to begin with a very simple observation from Lev Manovich’s famous The Language of

New Media. As the editor claims on the back cover of the second edition of the book, it “offers the

first systematic and rigorous theory of new media” [2001]. Indeed, Manovich formulates a fleshed

out theory of new media, relying on the long history of traditional media such as photography,

cinema, and computing machines. What makes the media “new” is their convergence. Particular

media which were separate suddenly intermingled at the end of the 20th

century, creating new

devices with unprecedented possibilities in the communication, creation of the illusion of reality,

representing space. That convergence, Manovich says, happens in the abstract sphere of digits. He

writes:

“All existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for the computer. The result:

graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets

of computer data. In short, media become new media” [Manovich 2001: 25]

In another fragment he claims:

“Different media elements – graphics, photographs, digital video, sound, and 3-D worlds – were

embedded within rectangular surfaces containing text” [Manovich 2001: 75].

The idea is simple, it is the “rectangular surfaces containing text” where different sensualexperiences meet. As the users of everyday digital devices, containing and processing all kinds of

data, we are no more astonished by that remark. Nevertheless I found it extremely inspiring and

relevant to the questions of synesthesia. It is a digital device which is a good model, or a parallel, of

synesthetic experience where all visuals, shapes, sounds and space equal becoming nothing but

digits. Thus, let me propose a possible result of a reading of the Manovich’s remark: synesthesia is

the basis of the new media. In other words, what differs media from the new media is a synesthetic

convergence of all the variety of senses. Moreover, it is not only the fact of convergence but also the

case of transposing all kinds of sensual experience into one single binary code. Synesthesia is quite a

similar convergence of all different sensations unified into a single experience. In cases of both the

experience of synesthesia and digital data, the same process appears: the visual, sound, and spatial

experience becomes a universal data.

Let me go back to the concept of the digitality as a synesthetic device. It is not surprising to find some

premonition of a digital convergence of senses in the very prophetic text of new media, namely

McLuhan’s Understanding Media. The book published as early as in 1964 had already expressed a

similar idea. In the chapter Number McLuhan compares the abstract number to the sense of touch,

or rather declares “number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating

activity, our sense of touch” [1994: 107]. Moreover, he acknowledges the fact that “the artists have

tried to meet the challenge of the electric age by investing the tactile sense with the role of a

nervous system for unifying all the others” [McLuhan 1994: 107]. Thus, it is a sense of touch and the

number as its extension, playing the synesthetic role of unifying different senses.



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ROMANTICISM’S SYNTHESIS OF ARTS AND ITS CONTINUATION

The way I put the question of synesthesia is utterly opposite to the one most commonly used in the

history of art – namely the Romanticism’s theory of the synthesis of art, or correspondance des arts.

It takes the imagination, or the “state of soul” [Sand, after Starzyński 1965: 190] as the central point

of the convergence of senses, thus, the concept is highly individualistic. The most known example isthe output of the French painter Eugene Delacroixe [Starzyński 1965: 21]. In that time the

comparison of the color palette and the music score became quite common [Starzyński 1956: 45].

Georges Sand, describing a fruitful friendship between the painter and the Polish musician Fryderyk

Chopin, and their intermingling artistic paths, often uses such a poetic phrase as for example

“sounding blue tone” [Starzyński 1965: 46]. Delacroixe in his theoretical deliberations referred to

music and its features such as harmony, tone, chord. Nevertheless, the Delacroixe’s idea of

correspondence between music and painting was most directly expressed later, by a poet of the next

generation, Charles Baudelaire. “Had anybody before [Delacroix – K.J.] allowed the painting to sing

more capricious melodies, more incredible chord of new, yet unknown, subtle, enchanting, tones?”

[Baudelaire, after Starzyński 1965: 75]. French poet elaborated on the theory of color based on

music: “In color we can find harmony, melody and counterpoints. The theory of color is based on

harmony. Melody is the unity of colors, or the universal color” [Baudelaire, after Starzyński 1965: 76].

This idea, starting from the very core of romanticism, lasted till the avant-garde art in the first half of

the 20th

century. The most clear example is the one of Vasilly Kandynsky and his abstract art

accompanied by his theoretical remarks on the correspondence between music and painting. In his

best known book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Painting in particular , he writes about the

harmony in paintings, claiming that particular colors have their tonal equivalents [Kandinsky 1996].

Kandinsky speaks of the “internal voice of the color” [1996: 65]. Similar interests appeared in the

avant-garde music of the 20th

century. In 1960 one of the most important Polish composers of the

second half of 20th

century, Penderecki claimed: “For me the most important issue is the problem of

solving colors, color concentration, as well as operating texture and time” [Mirka 1997: 329]. “I am

looking for deeper interconnections between painting and music” he continued. “The task of music is

to transplant all these elements of time and space, color, and texture onto music” [Mirka 1997: 329].

Nevertheless, in the second half of the 20th

century the situation in the aesthetics is way different

comparing to the Kandinsky’s time. The issues of imagination, internal experience, beauty and

spirituality play less important role. Penderecki and a number of progressive artists of the time are

concerned with the mechanical and technical aspects of the experience. Penderecki’s composition of

that time include Psalmus, his major work of electronic music [1960]. To compose the music he used

only a human voice which he electronically manipulated and rendered artificial:

“Working with the basic elements of speech – vowels and consonants – the composer and engineer,

Eugeniusz Rudnik, recorded, filtered and processed the sound of two human voices, a soprano and a

baritone. These treatments produced long notes which shifted in pith and color. … A ‘natural’

capacity, the human voice, was rendered ‘artificial’ and given task of delivering sounds rather than

singing words. Here the composer was ‘sounding the body electric’” [Crowley 2012: 19-23].

That example shows the displacement of the area where synethesia takes place. It is no more the

imagination and fantasy where the phenomenon happens, but rather the technology. Synesthesia



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becomes a product of such mechanical devices as synthesizers, transistors and oscillators, of

manipulation of everyday experience rather than a spiritual vision.

MECHANICAL SENSES AND THEIR CONVERGENCE IN THE ARTWORK – THE CASE OF POLISH NEW

MEDIA ART '60s-'80s

McLuhan claims, that the unity of different senses paradoxically “has been achieved by «abstract

art», which offers a central nervous system for a work of art, rather than the conventional husk of

the old pictorial image” [1994: 108]. The statement probably confirms the success of the Kandinsky’s

idea. While not being an art critic McLuhan intuitively used “abstract art” as a cliché. What played

more important role in the '50s and '60s, though, was related to a conceptual art rather than the

abstractionism. The movement I mean began as early as in the '30s with such musicians as Nicolas

Cage in The United States or Lev Teremin in USRR, and their fruitful relations to visual arts. New

sounding technologies led to various experiments and the so called intermedialism, where all, the

visual artists, technicians, and composers met. Drawing the context of that phenomenon David

Crowley claims that the movement almost simultaneously became a common interest of both Eastand West: “kinetic art, actions and happenings…, graphic and event scores, experimental films and

environments… formed an international archipelago where sound and image combined and

composers and artists could work together” [Crowley 2012: 11-13]. Although the movement was by

all means international, I will pay most of my attention to the specificity of the Polish, or Eastern

Europe context.

In the Eastern Bloc the new technology gained a particular freedom and it was to a large extent

supported by the State. “In the aftermath of Stalinism, Moscow declared a ‘Scientific -Technological

Revolution’. It was the sign of a cool technocratic rationalism after the paranoia and brutality of the

gulags and show trials” [Crowley 2012:17]. Crowley sees it as a part of both the transformation of the

new world and shaping a new Soviet consciousness [2012: 17]. Nevertheless, the art of that time

managed to defend itself from that ideological content. In the following text I will show how the

synesthetic aspects of art practice allowed and served artists to create a double layer messages

criticizing á rebours the propaganda and system, despite being under a constant censorship control.

In the communist regime based on lies and manipulation, by paying attention to the message behind

the surface and problematizing the issue of perception synesthesia became a serious political device.

It questioned the status quo of the distorted and simplified reality.

VISUAL SCORES

Although the timeline is 60s-70s, I would like to begin much earlier. What happened in the art of new

media of that period was, to a certain extent, anticipated by Wacław Szpakowski as early as in 20s. As

an engineer and architect, he spent all of his life as an ordinary designer in different studios and

construction sites. Simultaneously, from the age of 17 till the end of his life, he was obsessively

occupied by the question of the geometry and the line in particular. In dozens of his sketchbooks he

elaborated on the idea of “rhythmical line” (see photo ), which he emboldened to publish as late as

being 80 (1969). He attached a huge significance to the line and its composition, relating it to both

nature and culture, philosophical aspects of time and eternity, human expression. Let me quote from

his article, apologizing for the loss of the poetic value of the original:



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“The line ideas are way different from any kind of decoration, due to their simplicity pushed to its

very limits. The line ideas are similar to music, especially to a melody due to the rhythm imparted by

the author (they are regular, that is they are liable to a monotonous rule). They are similar to the

geometrical art due to e.g. symmetry, commensuration etc. They have an ‘internal’ content which we

can recognize by reading the line’s dictum, analogically to the writing” [Szpakowski 1969: 9].

Szpakowski had a number of features of a new media artist: technical education, wide variety of

activity, devotion to a scrupulous process of experimentation, a balance between science and

philosophy. He seemed to invent a new logic of communication, new codes. Although he was

contemporary to Kandinsky, Szpakowski with his highly conceptual considerations, belongs rather to

the art of second half of the century. Thus, for a long time he has been forgotten, and only recently

acclaimed as one of the key figures of abstract art by being included in the MoMA’s famous

exhibition Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925. One can perceive his “rhythmical lines” as a premonition

of Manovich’s “rectangular surfaces” containing different kinds of sensual experience.

It is worth to mention that the idea of “rhythmical lines” served to Szpakowski as a visual score forperforming music. Thus, Szpakowski’s sketches take part in artists’ search for a new music score,

fitted to the new music and new experience of mechanical and technical reality surrounding modern

man. Just to give a few examples, let me list such names as Szablos Esztenyi and Krzysztof Wodiczko

(photo 2), or Bogusław Schaeffer (photo 3).

SPATIAL SOUNDS

Oskar Hanses was an architect but in the history of art he is remembered for his idea of the “open

f orm” which actually affected more the visual arts than architecture. According to this idea, a piece

of art or an artifact doesn’t have one single meaning but it always gains new meanings by thechanging external contexts and different interpretations. The artifact works as an empty form always

“open” for gaining independently different contents. Hansen used this theory for abolishing rigid

disciplines’ borders and involving painting and sound experience to the spatial question referred to

architecture. One of the examples is a design of the Pavilion of Music at the Warsaw Contemporary

Music Festival in 1958, My Place, My Music (photo 4). The Pavilion was equipped with dozen or so

speakers “emitting pre-recorded audio material. The visitor was to move freely inside the

construction, controlling the sounds reaching their ears and at the same time observing changes in

nature” [Muzyczuk 2012: 135]. The Pavilon has never been constructed, probably due to its political

message. The design of the public space, where a random passerby was able to choose whatever

sound he/she decided, was against the idea of a single and preconstituted message coined by the

state. In this sense a later work of another artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko, is quite similar. His Personal

Instrument , 1969 (photo 5) “was a device worn on head and hands. Responding to the movements of

the wearer, the device made it possible for the individual to amplify or diminish the flow of sounds

from the environment” [Crowley 2012: 85]. One can hardly understand the message of this work

outside the context of communist regime and its permanent state of surveillance. Nevertheless, what

became more evident here was a new sensibility towards a peculiar blend of technology, personal

experience of a number of senses. After moving to USA Wodiczko still, despite a different political

context, elaborated on this aspect of visual/sound/body communication (photo 6).

VISUAL SOUNDS AND SOUNDINGS IMAGES



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The video artists were interested in a particular way in the electronic relation between sound and

image. In Poland the movement of video-art began quite early, at the beginning of 70s. Established in

1972 at the Łódź Film School artistic group Warsztat Formy Filmowej is considered a leading video-art

group in Central Europe at the time. Warsztat gathered such artists as Józef Robakowski, Wojciech

Bruszewski and Paweł Kwiek. Each of them had his own original attitude to the synesthetic issues

related to the video-art.

Józef Robakowski is often considered as one of the pioneers of the video-art in Poland although he

he started his research in the field of film. First, before even the video appeared, he was agitating for

the idea of “pure film”: “through various kinds of research, attempts, suggestions I will be able to

free film from the ballast of habits brought over from literature” [Robakowski 1971]. The medium of

video appeared to be a perfect tool for autotelic research within the film form. In this sense, the

sensual and synesthetic experience played an important role. A number of Robakowski’s works

include a purely formal experimentation on the relation between sound, image and movement. One

example is Dynamic Rectangle [1971, see photo 7], where purely sensual message is composed of

colors, shapes and sounds, intermingling together in the whole work. The art-piece is an effect of a

cooperation of the artist and an already mentioned musician Edward Rudnik, apioneer of a electronic

music in Poland. Other works, such as Exercise [1972-73], Test I [1971], show an in-depth research in

film form as a perfect device for achieving the upper state of perception, synesthetically combining

various kinds of experience.

Another Warsztat’s artist, Wojciech Bruszewski, was more involved in the technical conditioning of

the medium of film and video. He was interested in the technical possibilities of the new media in

questioning the rigid borders of different disciplines. One of the examples could be the Sound

photography [1971 – see photo 8].

Paweł Kwiek,on the other hand, was an artist of “pragmatic current of the Polish neo-avant-garde”

[Ronduda 2009: 13]. As an art theoretician Łukasz Ronduda claims, ”the main goal of that art was a

constant deconstruction, a constant challenging of seemingly unshakeable truths and critical

approach toward extant socio-symbolic orders, ideologies that organize perception and colonise the

imagination” [13]. Let me pay particular attention to one of the Kwiek’s art-pieces, Video and Breath

[1978, see photo 9]. In this installation artist controlled the TV image brightness with his own breath,

by means of the wires connecting his body and TV set. The image on the TV varies between darkness

and lightness, having in the middle the auto-referential image of the process itself. The work

presents the blurred boarders between the human body and technology. The senses smoothly

transpose to the electronic device. The physiological body process transmutes into the electronic

message.

SUMMARY

I was trying to investigate an alternative art history thread of the synesthesia which is most

commonly connected with the Romanticism’s synthesis or correspondence of arts. Although I

connect it with Romanticism, the phenomenon is much wider: to some extent it consists of such

distanced phenomena as the Antic Pythagorean theories, Hermeneutic theories of Renaissance, up

to the contemporary art. What I was interested in was a completely different phenomenon. The new

media to some extent are per se synesthethic. Thus, with the appearance of new media artists were

provided with unprecedented technical possibilities. In my presentation I tried to pay attention to



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those artists who being conscious of that possibility, treated such new media in an auto-referential

reflection. Especially in communist country such as Poland was, those interests were of the special

meaning, because they served to escape from a distorted, manipulated and simplified reality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

CROWLEY, David. 2012. Sounding The Body Electric. [in:] Sounding The Body Electric. Experiments in

art and music in Eastern Europe 1957-1984. Muzeum Sztuki Łódź

MANOVICH, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. The MIT Press.

MCLUHAN, Marshall. 1994, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press.

MUZYCZUK, Daniel. 2012. Exhibition. [in:] Sounding The Body Electric. Experiments in art and music in

Eastern Europe 1957-1984. Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź.

STARZYŃSKI, Juliusz. 1965. O romantycznej syntezie sztuk. Delacroix, Chopin, Baudelaire. PIW,Warszawa.

SZPAKOWSKI, Wacław. 1978. Linia rytmiczna. Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

ROBAKOWSKI, Józef. 1871, Jeszcze raz o czysty film. Łódź

RONDUDA, Łukasz, 2009, Sztuka polska lat 70. Awangarda. CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Warszawa

ILLUSTRATIONS:

1. Wacław Szpakowski, Rhythmical Line, 1924, Muzeum Sztuki collection.



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2. Krzysztof Wodiczko i Szabolcs Esztenyi, score for Just Radio Transmitters, drawing, 1969.

3. Bogusław Schaeffer, Visual Score, sketch on paper, 1972

4.

Oskar Hanses, My Place, My Music, design for the Pavilion of Music at the WarsawContemporary Music Festival, 1958.



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5.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Personal Instrument , photographic documentation of the performance,

1969

6.

Krzysztof Wodiczko , Porte-parole, “piece of equipment for a stranger”, instrument, 1993-

1997.

7.

Józef Robakowski, Dynamic Rectangle, still from film, 1971.

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