by Justin Hoffmann & Sandra Naumann

This is like an art history reading filled with artists and projects/works. I personally found myself knowing more about the art perspective than the music one while reading. 

As interactive media (arts) students, it’s essential yet complicated to think why we work in different disciplines of art and technology. Why do we learn coding as well as communications lab? Because you identify interests through explorations, and they are useful. Because you somehow have to integrate things under this major (okay off the point). But we have to recognize the fact that this realm has freedom established for expression, and the point of combining media and arts is for better expression and communication. 

I think the practical and economic perspective stands out. You learn something more than music or visual art and at the worst case, you can use the technical skills to do unrelated work. However, more disciplines have increasingly emphasized artistic/musical aesthetics. In other words, art or music itself has been involved interdisciplinarily, driving people to cater to it accordingly. 

Part of the possibility of integrating different arts is based on human’s sensory synaesthesia. I like the idea of using abstract musical terms such as “composition, symphony, improvisation, or rhythm” in painting. Because of the abstraction, they are almost self-explanatory when put into other contexts. And yes this further makes fine art disengaged from the means and disassociated from the object. This kind of pulling-away is further strengthened when thinking about interdisciplinarity. “The point was not to link different arts with one another but to find an appropriate means of expression for a particular idea, to test concepts in another field, or simply to extend one’s own radius of effect.” So art forms or materials are just media to convey concepts and ideas. That could also answer why integrative and experimental systems have been established in fine arts. 

The article frequently reminds me of the concept “Zeitgeist,” a German word basically meaning spirits of the time. Our analysis of art-history, musicology, cultural sociology, economic or psychological conditions all ultimately fall on Zeitgeist in art and music, such as the interest in universalism, synesthesia and the resulting trend toward interdisciplinary activity. Interdisciplinary trends and Zeitgeist always exist and change. Maybe in the future we simply don’t see musicians and visual artists as separated.