This thesis describes the way in which sound is taken up and subsequently suppressed within the visual arts. The idealisation and development of sound as a plastic material is able to be traced within the modernist trajectory, which, reflecting a set of cultural practices and having developed its own specific terminologies, comes to regard any material, or anything conceived of as material, as appropriate and adequate to the expression of its distinctive and guiding concepts and metaphors. These concepts and metaphors are discussed as already having at their bases strongly visualist biases, the genealogies of which are traced within traditional or formal philosophies. Here, the marginalising tendency of ocularcentrism is exposed, but the very nature and contingency of marginalisation is found to work for the sound artist (where the perpetuation of the mythologised 'outsider' figure is desired) but against sound which is positioned in a purely differential and negative relation. In this epistemological and ontological reduction, sound becomes simply a visual metaphor or metonymic contraction which forecloses the possibility of producing other ways of articulating its experience or of producing any markedly alternative 'readings'. Rather than simply attempting to reverse the hierarchisation of the visual over the aural, or of prefacing sound within a range of artistic practices (each which would keep the negative tradition going) sound's ambiguous relation to the binarism of presence/absence, system and margin, is, however oddly, elaborated. The strategy which attempts to suspend sound primarily within and under the mark of the concept is interrogated and its limits exposed. The sound artist, the 'margin surfer' is revealed as a perhaps deeply conservative figure who may in the end desire the suppression of sound, and who, actually rejecting any destabilising and threatening notion of 'radical alterity' anxiously clings to the 'marginalised' modernist pretence. It is the main contention of this thesis that the marginalisation of sound obscures the more pressing question of its ambiguous relation to notions of sameness and difference, and that its conceptualisation suppresses the question of the ethical. That the ethical question should (and always does) take 'precedence' over purely epistemological and ontological considerations, and that more genuinely open attitudes should be assumed with respect to sound studies are forwarded in this thesis / Master of Arts (Hons)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential contrariety between the concepts of art and music, and in the case of its existence what social factors can be seen as its root causes. Specifically, the concepts of artistic quality and musical quality are in this attempt defined respectively using the Swedish cultural policy objectives and Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, ultimately to be compared in the form of an ideal type analysis. The conclusion reached in the study is that there is a certain conflict between the concepts of art and music, primarily in their relation to individualism and complexity, and that this can be related to the dominance of vision as a means of gaining access to the world – the so-called ocularcentrism – in Western culture, as well as commercial ideas such as marketing and ownership. A model is constructed out of the ideal types musical quality and artistic quality, which is intended for practical use in connection to assessment of the quality of an artwork for potential government funding.

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O diálogo entre a visualidade, a história da arte e os meios tecnológicos norteia este estudo. Para tanto, observamos alguns dispositivos maquínicos e sua aplicação na produção e divulgação de imagens. Desde os tempos da Renascença, a representação visual do espaço vem recebendo um impacto direto das tecnologias de geração e reprodução de imagem no contexto da arte e da comunicação. Na pintura, em uma fase inicial, o registro ótico deu-se por meio da perspectiva central, instrumento gráfico eficaz que deu corpo ao conceito de espaço analógico. A partir daí, dissertamos sobre as mutações dos modelos de visão, os dispositivos que, no campo da técnica e da ciência, contribuíram para novas formas de representação visual e espacial. Na época contemporânea, a tecnologia digital associada às telecomunicações propiciou à arte e às mídias uma nova forma visual chamada intervisualidade, caracterizada pela capacidade de ultrapassar as mídias individuais e agregar diversos formatos em uma única visão. / The dialogue between visuality, art history and technological media guides this study. To conduct the investigation, we have observed some mechanical and electronic devices and their application in the production and dissemination of images. Since Renaissance times, the visual representation of space has receivied a directly impact by image generation processes and reproduction technology, in the context of art and communication. In painting, at an early stage, optical representation took place through central perspective, an effective graphic tool that gave substance to the concept of analogic space. From that point on, we talk about the evolution of possible models of vision, devices in the field of technology and science, which have contributed to new forms of visual and spatial representations. At contemporary times, digital technology associated with telecommunications provided, both to art and media, a new visual format called intervisuality, characterized by its potential to transcend individual media aggregating diverse media into an unique vision.

O diálogo entre a visualidade, a história da arte e os meios tecnológicos norteia este estudo. Para tanto, observamos alguns dispositivos maquínicos e sua aplicação na produção e divulgação de imagens. Desde os tempos da Renascença, a representação visual do espaço vem recebendo um impacto direto das tecnologias de geração e reprodução de imagem no contexto da arte e da comunicação. Na pintura, em uma fase inicial, o registro ótico deu-se por meio da perspectiva central, instrumento gráfico eficaz que deu corpo ao conceito de espaço analógico. A partir daí, dissertamos sobre as mutações dos modelos de visão, os dispositivos que, no campo da técnica e da ciência, contribuíram para novas formas de representação visual e espacial. Na época contemporânea, a tecnologia digital associada às telecomunicações propiciou à arte e às mídias uma nova forma visual chamada intervisualidade, caracterizada pela capacidade de ultrapassar as mídias individuais e agregar diversos formatos em uma única visão. / The dialogue between visuality, art history and technological media guides this study. To conduct the investigation, we have observed some mechanical and electronic devices and their application in the production and dissemination of images. Since Renaissance times, the visual representation of space has receivied a directly impact by image generation processes and reproduction technology, in the context of art and communication. In painting, at an early stage, optical representation took place through central perspective, an effective graphic tool that gave substance to the concept of analogic space. From that point on, we talk about the evolution of possible models of vision, devices in the field of technology and science, which have contributed to new forms of visual and spatial representations. At contemporary times, digital technology associated with telecommunications provided, both to art and media, a new visual format called intervisuality, characterized by its potential to transcend individual media aggregating diverse media into an unique vision.

In the early 20thcentury, a “crisis of ocularcentrism” arose in philosophy, replacing the Cartesian epistemological notion of a disembodied mind inspecting the object-world from the outside with an ontological and phenomenological approach to vision and being, embedding humans corporeally in a world exceeding their perceptual horizon (Jay 94). In response, modernist artists abandoned realist and naturalist techniques, rejecting mimetic representation, and experimented with new artistic forms, trying to account for the new complexity of life.  In this context, Virginia Woolf wrote her novel The Waves (1931), “an abstract mystical eyeless book” (DIII 203). Despite countless studies on The Waves and vision, its “eyelessness” has never been thoroughly examined before. Since Woolf considered vision and being to be inherently embodied and communal and longed for capturing moments of being, this thesis proposes to unlock Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late corporeal phenomenology. Alongside his concepts of the flesh and chiasm, this thesis claims that eyeless writing is Woolf’s method to go beyond vision in order to reveal the inherent corporeal interconnectedness of all beings in a hidden, visually imperceptible pattern—the eyeless flesh of the world—by creating a narrative that is eyeless in several ways. It is at once eye- and I-less due to lacking a single focalising point and denoting an anonymous visibility enveloping all beings. Rather than being structured by a narrative eye/I, it is governed by the characters’ bodies and their chiasmatic relations with the world. On this basis, emphasising the carnal adherence of all human and non-human beings, their eyeless kinship thus comes to light, creating a nonanthropocentric conception of Being-in-and-of-the-world. In this sense, The Waves uncovers that since the Wesen (essence) of Being lies in the common, visually imperceptible flesh, it can only be reached eyelessly, via the body.