edited by Cornelia Lund, Holger Lund – Audio.Visual: On Visual and Related Media

Cornelia Lund

Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt, ISBN 978-3897902930, Germany, 2009, English
Cornelia and Holger Lund established and run the Fluctuating Images gallery in Stuttgart since 2004, and in 2009 they relocated to Berlin. Their activity was centered on connecting the local audiovisual artist community (with a special care for the VJ scene) with the international one through works and performances. Their activity was not only based on practice, but aimed to facilitate a debate around the whole scene. So this book is a natural outcome of their first five years activity, exploded in 320 pages, with an enrapturing graphic design to frame the sections the book is divided into. The first is meant to host academic writings on visual music, giving historical and theoretical context through the analysis and a contemporary contextualization of artists like Mary Ellen Bute, Nicolas Schöffer or Malcom Le Grice. The second introduces the reader to current visual music related practices, audiovisual production and a couple of detailed accounts on individual works. Investigating the differences and overlappings between visual music, live cinema, audiovisual works and live vjing is achieved involving musicologists, festival directors, artists, VJs, and software developer, all on the same level. The resulting scenario is rich and contradicting, showing how, there’s even a lack of standards in the used terminology. But the authors succeeded in their primary goal: provide an open forum, more than compiling a unifying theory, and the historical and recent documents on the accompanying DVD are just ideally complementing this seminal publication.