Muvi. An international project on sinesthesia and visual music

Abstract

The paper presents the international MuVi project – video and moving image on synesthesia and visual music – started in 2007 thanks to the collaboration between the Artecittà Foundation, the University of Granada and the Politecnico di Milano. MuVi is an exhibition, and editorial, project that was created in conjunction with the organization of the II International Synaesthesia Conference: Science & Art (Granada, 2007) with the aim of giving perceptible, extensive (and synaesthetic) feedback to the theoretical contents addressed in the conference. MuVi – acronym for Musica Visiva (“Visual Music”) – has collected video projects with a call for kinetics works, an invitation to artists, musicians, designers, performers, academic authors, professors and students of universities, academies and conservatories to submit any kind of digital “moving image”, only visual or audio and interactive kinetic projects. Alongside synaesthesia, the central theme of the project is visual music, understood in a lata meaning, as any sort of kinetic audio or video representation that springs from music. The relations between visual and auditory, that we found in the collected works, show a great variety of combinations: they are the result of synesthetic perceptions (visual as mental image suggested by music); the result of research on the analogies between visual and musical languages (rhythm, tone, texture, colour, etc.); they can be expressed by abstract or figurative languages not necessarily supported by a narrative plot.