Visual Music

Visual music is the translation of sound into moving image, characterised by abstract form. Yet despite its seemingly apolitical nature, this medium has repeatedly flourished within radical countercultural contexts, from state censorship during the rise of European fascism in the early twentieth century, to the hallucinogenic happenings of the 1960s, and the VJ culture of the illegal rave scenes of the 1990s. Visual Music seeks to resolve the paradox of why a movement defined by its rejection of semantic depiction attracted such political suppression and countercultural energy throughout the twentieth century.