From Clavilux to Ufabulum

Abstract

This essay establishes a parallelism between the ‘Clavilux’, a silent colour-organ from Thomas Wilfred in the —beginning of the 20th century, and ‘Ufabulum’, an audiovisual live performance from the artist Squarepusher in the year 2012. It presents an overview of the analogies and synergies between sound and image in the recent history of music and visual arts, and connects both artists with almost one hundred years of audiovisual instruments, techniques and sound-image analogies, that despite the technical and creative evolutions, maintain the same concepts and dreams over time in the quest for high-sensory experiences and synaesthetic states.

Keywords

• Visual music
• Audiovisual
• Lumia
• Sound-image analogies
• Colour organs
• Synaesthesia