First published in
Cornelia Lund, Holger Lund (eds.). Audio.Visual—On Visual Music and Related Media. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2009, pp. 170–178.
Quote as
Cornelia Lund.
“Button-Pushing, Egg-Frying, and Other Performative Acts,” in: Cornelia Lund, Holger Lund (eds.). Lund Audiovisual Writings, 2017, http://www.lundaudiovisualwritings.org/button-pushing
Abstract
Visual music seems to act as a trigger for performance, and this not only in the club context where it provides an audiovisual environment for the dance performances of the clientele. The combination of visual music with performative components can take extremely diverse forms, with the extent of the performative aspect varying substantially, from the minimal performative act of screening a film to visual music live performances where both, image and sound, are played live. This essay proposes to investigate visual music as a live performative act, focusing on its relation to dance performance, from the early days of visual music in the 1920s up to the 2000s.
