Alejandro Mosso

Compositional strategies with light and sound in installation art: A practice-led inquiry

In this thesis, I focus on two types of perception: auditory and visual perception. More precisely, I highlight the possible connections and relationships between them from an artistic perspective. Physical, perceptual or merely metaphorical connections between auditory and visual perception offer, in my opinion, a rich field for artistic expression and aesthetic experience.

The main motivation behind this thesis is to investigate to what extent and under what conditions it is possible to apply sound knowledge and techniques to light. Ultimately with the intention to broaden my field of artistic expression. Given that sound and light are both wave based phenomena, the analogy seems unavoidable.

The term inquiry is used and understood here as a way of analysing and hopefully organising the potential compositional strategies that could be derived from this analogy between sound and light, and their possible combinations. This inquiry is by no means exhaustive, and is mainly intended as a personal set of artistic gestures and ideas that could help me develop my light and sound installation artworks further in the future.

The driving force behind these pages, has been the development and conceptualisation of the piece NECERTA PERCEPTO, which was on show at Galerie Weisser Elefant in Berlin between May 23 and June 27, 2020. This sound and light installation work could be understood as one of many possible iterations and room adaptations of the ideas developed in this thesis.