Feelings change. They intensify, they numb, they may even transform from one sense to another. Synaesthesia is the neurological condition of this crossfire (hearing colours, tasting sounds), and it has proven an incredibly suggestive field for artists probing the interface between sense and materials, self and the world. In the last five years, an onslaught of exhibitions have showcased synaesthesia in both aesthetic production and reception — from the colour organs of the 18th-19th centuries to the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger. In our current political moment, this resurgence takes on a new light, for synaesthesia is also usually regarded as modernism's seamy underside, as the Gesamtkunstwerk where totality of affect all too easily becomes totalitarianism. Efforts at creating immersive environments where different senses coalesce are positioned as the progenitors of mass spectacle and suture, or synaesthesia's related dream of a universal language, where sound or image or touch are translatable and share one code (in our age, it is digital) is identified as hopelessly utopian. But this is a narrowly retrospective viewpoint, one that does not account for historical moments when synaesthesia could function as oppositional or otherwise. Glimpses of difference, ruptures or realignments of the increasing colonisation of the body by technocratic means, have each been triggered by experiments in synaesthesia. At its most utopian, synaesthesia served as an escape from regulated and administered life (hence its frequent linkage with spiritualism). But it could also plumb the depths of aesthetic materials or the corporeality of bodily sensation, revealing how these territories have been mediated in turn. The postwar rediscovery of synaesthesia revives the ambivalence of mass ornament and its latent possibilities for sensing truth in surface.
In 1958, visitors to the Brussels World Fair entered the pavilion of the Dutch electronics corporation Philips — to emerge shaken or elated. Inside was an eight-minute spectacle of sound and light, whose sensory effect was amplified by its soaring silver concrete shell. Hundreds of speakers projected swirling arcs of sound. A filmic montage splayed across the curving walls that were bathed in spectrally metamorphosing lights. It was an assault. One Dutch critic described being "in [the work's] stomach; it is as if the pavilion is literally digesting us and exposing us, against our will, to acids that etch us indelibly."1
Philips had asked Le Corbusier to create the pavilion in 1956 to showcase the company's new audiovisual technologies. After much negotiation (Philips wanted someone more traditional), the architect commissioned Edgard Varèse to compose a piece from concrète and electronic elements. A young Iannis Xenakis, then an assistant at Le Corbusier's Rue de Sèvres studio, was responsible for most of the building's design. All worked closely with Philips engineers. It was this combined effort that produced the startling experience of the pavilion — a fantastic electronic game, or Poème Électronique, as Le Corbusier dubbed it — whose effects enacted a new kind of empathy and involvement of the human sensorium. The pavilion posed a synaesthetic relation between the aural, tactile and visual, overturning modernist divisions of medium specificity. It laid bare modernism's deep debt to a humanist discourse of unified sensation.
The Poème played in a darkened, elliptical space. Overhead, a stream of static images interspersed with short filmic shots advanced on 16 mm projectors. From ancient masks to mushroom clouds, mass graves and Godzilla, the images displayed a musée imaginaire of mankind (with all the kitsch that implies). Successive tints of colour drenched the walls. Polyphonic speakers dispersed the sound in various 'routes' along the curved surfaces of the shell. Listeners felt the sound moving through and around them, at times ringing through the parabolic husk as if it were a cathedral, at other moments blunt and dry.
Ear-splitting dissonances, the disjunction of image and sound and palpably pulsating lights enabled mass communication that heightened individual perception. Such a barrage of stimuli enacted the kind of experience that contemporary continental philosophy described as phenomenological "reduction" or breakdown.
Even as it promoted this changing and fractured bodily experience, the Poème asserted a unified sensorium. According to Le Corbusier, all of the perceptual data in the pavilion — "son, lumière, couleur, rythme" — were commensurate as "sensations psycho-physiologiques."2 This echoed his fellow Frenchman, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom all the senses were interdependent — sound synaesthetically related to vision. They "inter-communicate through the medium of my body…a ready-made system of equivalents and transpositions from one sense to another."3 Merleau-Ponty thereby optimistically posited subjectivity as an integrated whole. Any breakdown in normal modes of perception would emphasise such synaesthetic connection.
The pavilion's effects were predicated on this intensified yet cohesive sensory apparatus. All the playback and automation equipment for both sound and visuals was linked into one network. Disjointed colours, noises and images gave rise to associations based on their interplay — not just through referential relations. (And sounds — both concrète and instrumental, synthesized voices and percussive pops — were never just attributes of a corresponding visual "source.") Space itself (what Le Corbusier termed "espace acoustique") was to be 'felt' in the same way as aural vibrations and luminous intensities.
Space and sound came together in the architectural elevation, where Xenakis referenced musical notations of glissandi — rising and falling tones defined by a continuous sliding from one pitch to another. Graphed as time against tone, glissandi formed hyperbolic paraboloids. Having used these figures in his own musical compositions, Xenakis formally repeated them in the ruled surfaces of the pavilion and the design of the pre-stressing wires. Both support and ornament alluded to an underlying mathematical organisation whose basis lay in sound.
This structure was literally heard in Varèse's Poème. Sirens were used as a means of achieving the pitch (frequency) of pure glissandi without electronic production. Parabolic and hyperbolic curves translated from the visual to aural domain as mechanised, vertiginous wails. Like Xenakis, Varèse saw the optical analogue of sound as an intrinsic property of the sound itself. What is more, sound as haptic phenomena could be shaped, directed, diffracted through space as sculptural masses for the ear.
Through these synaesthetic transversals, the pavilion participated in a post-war return to an ahistorical body — the very restoration that characterised Merleau-Ponty's endeavour. Any notion of a disembodied, interior cogito was subsumed by the sensory immersion of the body in the world. To this end, the phenomenology of perception informed the pavilion as a humanist strategy for integrating the subject: each constitutes a re-imagining of the body as whole after its traumatic annihilation in Auschwitz in World War II.
It shouldn't come as a surprise then, that the pavilion's optimistically unified sensorium and subject also fulfilled a more dystopian scenario. The alliance of image, word and sound was not simply an idyllic realisation of the expressionist Gesamtkunstwerk. For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, writing in Los Angeles in 1948, the "Wagnerian dream" of fusing all arts into one work was now the apotheosis of industrial cultural production.4 The Poème's transgression of sensory and media boundaries could not help but echo the fearful homogeneity of technical processes, which vertically integrate "all the elements of cultural production, from the novel (shaped with an eye to the film) to the last sound effect." Like the mass produced record or film reel, the Poème could be played again and again with the push of a button. And the proliferation of such automated technology was inseparable from the site of the World Fair — its sensory assault of commodified display and trade show spectacle.
Not least of these attractions at Brussels was the Circarama, a circular theatre built by Disney for the U.S. Pavilion. (It was Disney who had, of course, commissioned Oskar Fischinger to work on its synaesthetic Fantasia of 1940.) Synchronised projectors and speakers created a 360-degree panoramic view, taking its audience on a sensory tour of the United States that hawked both cartoons and capitalist liberal democracy in one technicolor stroke.
A more liminal case was that of the Vortex Concerts, also seen at Brussels in 1958 but launched the year before. Experimental film-maker Jordan Belson and electronic composer Henry Jacobs crafted a series of magnetic, hyper-speed audiovisual shows that lived up to their sci-fi moniker. Originally performed at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, the concerts used customised projectors and a gyrating, rotary-controlled speaker system to pour sound and light across an ersatz night time sky. Belson could amplify the darkness so that audiences confronted an utterly unnatural pitch black. As frameless, mutating abstract images by Belson, Hy Hirsh, James Whitney and others covered the entire dome to envelop spectators in an infinite, three dimensional depth. Planetarium tricks for suture (Belson even used their constellation projections) became disorienting and uncannily kinesthetic. The Vortex also attempted to immerse its audiences in sound through the playback system and the reverberations of thundering beats or pure sinusoidals (those of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti, or Afro-Cuban polyrhythms). Belson's own abstract films would continue to exert this dizzying gravitational pull (as in his Allures of 1961, which included images from the Vortex). It was as if the tactics of the Philips Pavilion could be brought to some terminal velocity, escaping the orbit of the culture industry by way of sheer excess.
In fact, the revolution in magnetic tape recording and optical printing of the 1950s had brought synaesthesia more fully into the realm of technological production — a level of assimilation Adorno would find horrifying. But then, the philosopher would also have recoiled from the sly slide into pop culture performed by USCO's "The World" discothèque or Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966. These events extended the non-referential and physical aspects of the Vortex into a potlatch of strobe lights, moiré patterns, and the deafening sounds of the New York underground. Less examined than Warhol's EPI, USCO ("The Us Company" — a collective based out of Garnerville, New York) and its "World" got its start collaborating on presentations with Marshall McLuhan. But if the discothèque actively posed media as extensions of man, it also probed the fissures in these prosthetic networks. New York's Roosevelt hangar field was outfitted with dozens of slide projectors and three television cameras, whose lenses took in images from the stage and simultaneously projected them onto an enormous screen surrounding the audience. Rather than perpetuate television's seamless unification of screen and taped image, the 'here' of viewing meshed with the 'there' of recording, this set-up called attention to the normally concealed manoeuvres of television. Synaesthetic experience was no longer a dream of immateriality or transcendence, nor a refuge from administered life. Instead USCO showed it as thoroughly mediated.
Similar events were put on by the San Francisco Tape Center; Mark Boyle, Joan Hills, and Soft Machine in London; the Joshua Light Show; and Electric Circus. These resembled spectral after-images of earlier attempts to bind the self through synaesthesia. Now the body came undone in a psychedelic unravelling that mapped the chemical and mechanical contours of technocratic perception. Walter Benjamin's genteel appreciation of hashish (and its sensory derangements) gave way to mescaline-fuelled euphoria. Unlike the increasing withdrawal of the Fluxus event into ascetic textual score, or the drones and phase shifts of Minimalist composers, these events exploded into a profusion of sensation that was always too much — explicitly revealing how counterculture was always giving way to kitsch (poor Pink Floyd).
Sensory plenitude also went haywire in Experiments in Art and Technology's Pepsi Pavilion for Expo '70 in Osaka. The product of a massive collaboration of 63 artists and engineers, the Pavilion tested the threshold of corporate patronage. A mechanically generated fog surrounded a tremendous 90-foot mirrored dome. Warped and inverted reflections appeared as spectators went inside the pneumatic structure. An intense xenon light momentarily blinded them. Engineers shaped the dome's acoustics to enhance sound works by David Tudor and La Monte Young, creating standing waves and amplified echoes. Robert Breer's sculptural Floats motored slowly around the building: white hovering cylinders that reversed direction as fairgoers bumped into them. Unlike the automated programme of Le Corbusier's Poème, the Pepsi Pavilion mobilised a disarray of ever-changing occurrences. Spectators were forced to negotiate individual sensation with mass event, physical disorientation with the Fair's corporate and nationalist spectacle. The Pavilion advertised the technical and artistic innovation of a business and a nation — yet it undermined its corporate sponsorship by fracturing any illusion of an autonomous, unified perceiving subject or consumer. In fact, after frequent technological breakdowns and fiscal errors, Pepsi terminated E.A.T's control of the Pavilion.
The Pavilion revived an old dream: to alter perceptual processes was to alter the political agency of the subject. But like the Philips Pavilion and psychedelic shows before it, E.A.T.'s work wrestled with the production of individuated experience for a mass audience — one that possessed no such collective political consciousness. Even as it revelled in difference, the Pavilion was all too close to the new-found interpellation of "democratic" individuality and perception by consumer marketing.5 After all, Pepsi's hope for the Pavilion was that it would express its newly minted, youth-oriented advertising campaign for "a new generation."
This state of affairs has been wryly commented upon in contemporary works. If the flame of '68 sputtered and died, our newly tricked-out technophilia brings a resurgence of synaesthetic and psychedelic overtures. Artists as diverse as Carsten Hōller, Janet Cardiff, Christian Marclay and Ernesto Neto have re-examined vision's slip into sound and tactility, even taste and smell. Assume vivid astro focus (the alias of a New York-based artist from Brazil) overtly samples from the psychedelic Summer of Love. But perhaps one of the keenest takes is Wolfgang Tillmans'. His Lights (Body) of 2000-02 taps into the mechanical sweat and tears of the dance floor. A four-channel DVD projection of manically pulsating club lights consists of close-ups taken at peak times during Saturday nights. Thumping to the never-resolved hook of a stripped down Air or Pet Shop Boys track, the synched sound and visuals give bodies the unmistakable urge to dance. All one can see surrounding the lights, however, are mists of sweat, dry ice and dust — the detritus of so many overwrought club kids. Lights (Body) suggests that our empathic identification with those unseen dancers is less a salubrious, individuated synaesthesia than one always routed back into repetition and frustration.
But lest we stray too far into the land of glowsticks, it's useful to come back to Le Corbusier through the prism of Len Lye. Lye's photograms of the architect, bear witness to the immediacy of sensation both artists hoped to achieve. Directly registering light without recourse to lens or filter, the 1947 photogram fixes Le Corbusier's profile as an obdurately literal imprint. Yet the image is not so much a portrait as it is a death mask. The silhouette is formed from the pattern of another material and its shadows, converting Le Corbusier's figure into a ground. It is an absence that foretells the ultimate emptiness of any sensation, the void that necessarily accompanies an indexical trace ("this was here"). Like Le Corbusier, Lye attempted to work through such hollowing out of the subject —in the immediate aftermath of the War — by recuperating individual perception and its contingencies. This push-pull of fullness and disintegration, as we've seen, haunts all following turns to synaesthesia.
Often citing the texts of Le Corbusier himself, standard narratives of modernity diagnose the epoch by its alienation.6 It was precisely the anomic unfeeling of modernism that gave it both its strength (critical distance) and its sickness (spectacle). But far from falling into desuetude, the dream of a unified and heightened sensorium lies beneath much of modern art and architecture's history. The Philips and Pepsi Pavilions, Vortex, USCO's World—all mark a post-war return of this, repressed. It was precisely the plenitude, even excess, of synaesthesia that opened the possibility of moving beyond technological rationality or rerouting and overflowing its circuits from within. In a postmodern society of control, anarchy of the senses seemed the only political option.
1. Kristian Romare, 'Le Corbusier's Elektroniska Skapelse,' Byggmāsteren, no. 8, (1958), 175, translated and cited in Marc Treib, Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varése, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 223.
2. Le Corbusier, 'Notre Travail,' Le Poème Electronique, (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1958), 24-25.
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 234-235. In the same passage, Merleau-Ponty continued, "The unity of the senses...cannot be understood in terms of their subsumption under a primary consciousness, but of their never-ending integration into one knowing organism... The senses translate each other without any need of an interpreter, and are mutually comprehensible without the intervention of any idea."
4. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,' Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, (New York: Continuum, 2001), 124.
5. It was this specialisation of labor and of senses that Dick Higgins referred to in coining the opposing term "intermedia". See Higgins, 'Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia,' Something Else Newsletter 1:1 (1966).
6. The rediscovery of the first Frankfurt School in 1970s-90s art historical and architectural discourse brought investigations of modern alienation and urbanism to the fore. As Anthony Vidler put it, "The first translation of Walter Benjamin's 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century' in Perspecta 12 introduced another form of critical history to the study of architecture in the metropolis... In the late '70s and early '80s, Carl Schorske's interdisciplinary studies of Viennese fin-de-siècle culture, David Frisby's recuperation of sociological thought from Georg Simmel to Siegfried Kracauer... all worked to construct a discursive framework for the critical interpretation of architecture very different from that of the previous decades." Vidler, 'Review of Rethinking Architecture and The Anaesthetics of Architecture, Neal Leach,' Harvard Design Magazine 11, (Summer 2000): 2.
Michelle Kuo is a doctoral candidate in history of art and architecture at Harvard University where she is writing a dissertation on Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
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