Audiovisual spaces: spatiality, experience and potentiality in audiovisual composition

Echoing the spatial turns across the humanities, this chapter applies post-Bergsonian conceptions of space via Deleuze & Guttari, Massumi and Massey, to explore how a spatial conception might provide novel perspectives to conceive and understand the audiovisual. Spatial concepts embrace subjectivity, multiplicity, movement, haptics and tactility, and afford readings of audiovisual practice that frame sound and image associations, not in abstract conceptual terms – synchronisation, difference or contrast – but in terms of embodied experience, movement and potentiality. Critiqued via practice research, this chapter brings together spatial ideas with established concepts from electroacoustic music and audiovisual composition, to build a novel framework for representing the audiovisual. One which has the potential to be applied to a wide range of sound & image media, from experimental audiovisual film, to sound design and narrative film soundtracks. The primacy of temporal sync is challenged, established concepts of gesture and texture reframed in light of the spatial and potentiality and anticipation positioned as terminologies to superseded established notions of tension and resolution. Through spatiality we have the potential to dissolve the binarism between sound and image and access an understanding of audiovisual affect, which underpins both audience experience and composition of sound and image works