T4 WK 6: Amplifying Emotion and Materiality with Audio
- Mar 17
- 5 min read
Sound is a powerful part of video and moving image work because it can shape how an audience feels before they fully understand what they are seeing. In video pieces, sound can create emotion through rhythm, volume, silence, distortion, repetition, and contrast. A slow, low sound may create tension, heaviness, or grief, while sharp sounds can suggest anxiety, interruption, or physical discomfort. Silence can also be emotional, because it can make the viewer more aware of absence, isolation, or waiting.
Sound can also enhance the sense of materiality in a video work. Materiality refers to the physical qualities of materials, such as weight, texture, pressure, surface, and resistance. For example, the sound of cracking, scraping, dripping, static, breathing, footsteps, or grinding can make the viewer feel the physical presence of concrete, resin, skin, fabric, water, or machinery. Sound can make an image feel heavier, more fragile, more uncomfortable, or more alive. It can also distort materiality by making something appear less stable or less real. A soft image paired with harsh sound can create unease, while a solid material paired with echo, static, or muffled audio can make it feel uncertain or dreamlike.
Sound can strongly enhance the surreal or dreamlike qualities of film. When sound does not match the image exactly, the viewer may feel that they are entering a psychological or emotional space rather than a realistic one. Echoes, loops, slowed breathing, fragmented voices, reversed sounds, low drones, or distorted environmental noise can create a sense of memory, disorientation, or altered perception. In this way, sound does not simply support the video. It becomes part of the artwork's meaning.
In Susan Rothenberg: Emotions, Rothenberg speaks about how painting can transform personal feeling into an emotional experience for the viewer. Filmed at her home and studio in New Mexico, the video focuses on how she works from memory, particularly through the loss of her dog. Rather than painting the memory in a direct or sentimental way, Rothenberg describes how the act of painting helps her recover the feeling of that memory.
The video shows that emotion in art can come from the process of making, not just from the subject matter. Rothenberg's work is personal, but it is not closed off to the viewer. Through the movement of paint, the handling of form, and the emotional weight behind the image, the painting becomes a shared moment of feeling.
In Judy Pfaff | Contemporary Art from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection, the video focuses on Pfaff's layered mixed-media work Quartet 5 (2018), included in the Jewish Museum exhibition After "The Wild". The work combines digital image on MDF, wire, aluminium discs, acrylic, melted plastic, paper lantern, and framed works on paper. This mixture of materials shows Pfaff's interest in building artworks that sit between painting, sculpture, collage, and installation.
The video presents Pfaff as an artist who does not treat the artwork as a flat surface. Instead, she expands the image into space. Quartet 5 appears busy, physical, and constructed, with different materials competing for attention. This creates a sense of movement, energy, and visual overload. The work asks the viewer to look slowly, because meaning is not found in one central image but through the relationship between many parts.
Navigating Homesickness through Sculpture (Do Ho Suh) examines how Do Ho Suh uses sculpture to explore home, memory, movement, and identity. The video follows Suh between Seoul and New York and shows him installing work at the Seattle Art Museum. Art21 presents his practice as shaped by the experience of living between places, with themes of homesickness, public and private space, military conflict, conformity, difference, and architecture forming the basis of the segment.
Suh's work treats architecture as something that can be remembered, carried, and reconstructed. Rather than presenting home as fixed, he turns it into a sculptural form connected to displacement and personal history. His practice questions how buildings shape the body and how memory continues after leaving a place.
The video also shows how Suh's materials challenge the expected weight and permanence of architecture. By translating lived spaces into sculptural works, he shifts architecture from structure into memory. This makes the idea of home unstable, but also portable. The video presents homesickness not only as emotion, but as a spatial condition shaped by migration, family, history, and the body's relationship to place.
Figure 5. Katy Hessel, 'Jo Applin on Louise Bourgeois', 2020, The Great Women Artists Podcast, podcast.
Jo Applin on Louise Bourgeois is an episode of The Great Women Artists Podcast in which Katy Hessel interviews art historian Dr Jo Applin about the life, work, and legacy of Louise Bourgeois. The episode discusses how Bourgeois transformed memory, fear, sexuality, family history, and psychological tension into physical artworks. Applin and Hessel describe the emotional force behind Bourgeois's practice, allowing the listener to imagine the weight, texture, enclosure, and bodily presence of the work.
Hearing Bourgeois's work discussed through voice, rhythm, emphasis, and description makes the listener experience the artworks through language and sound before seeing them. The podcast shows that emotion in art can be carried not only through image or object, but also through narration, memory, and voice.
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss visual artist known for video, sound, installation, colour, and immersive environments. Born in 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland, she has been a key figure in spatial video art since the mid-1980s. Her practice often transforms video from something watched on a screen into something experienced through the whole body. Louisiana Channel notes that she has challenged the conventions of video technology.
Meet the trailblazing visual artist Pipilotti Rist introduces Rist's approach to video as an expanded, sensory form. The video focuses on her interest in freeing images from the limits of the screen and placing them into space. Her works use projection, sound, scale, colour, and architecture to create environments that viewers move through rather than simply observe.
The video presents Rist as an artist who works with the body, perception, emotion, and dreamlike imagery. Her installations often combine moving images and audio to create an experience that feels physical and psychological. The video shows how Rist shifts video art away from passive viewing and toward immersion, where sound and image shape how the viewer feels, moves, and perceives.
References:
Art21 2024, Navigating Homesickness through Sculpture (Do Ho Suh), online video, YouTube, viewed 17 March 2026, <https://youtu.be/hfKZCsNEe9Q?si=-Ixv6Cz2tyge624w>. (Figure 4)
Art21 2010, Susan Rothenberg: Emotions | Art21 “Extended Play”, online video, YouTube, viewed 17 March 2026, <https://youtu.be/PPOkhiIWHHg?si=0IHBe5O5aO1r-NIp>. (Figure 2)
Hauser & Wirth 2026, Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth, viewed 17 March 2026, <https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2801-pipilotti-rist>. (Figure 1) Hessel, K 2020, ‘Jo Applin on Louise Bourgeois’, The Great Women Artists Podcast, podcast, 21 April, viewed 17 March 2026, <https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/jo-applin-on-louise-bourgeois/id1480259187?i=1000472265574>. (Figure 5)
Louisiana Channel 2025, Meet the trailblazing visual artist Pipilotti Rist | From the Archive, online video, YouTube, viewed 17 March 2025, <https://youtu.be/cfEBFcCxS6s?si=c-hcpEfhH3HBEQQ0>. (Figure 6)
The Jewish Museum 2023, Judy Pfaff | Contemporary Art from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection, online video, YouTube, viewed 17 March 2026, <https://youtu.be/Du-YEHwnoeo?si=qK_DUCEUXupM12Cy>. (Figure 3)
