"The game can be won only by losing."
— Surrealist Exquisite Corpse
This multi-week assignment explores the intersection of color and sound through playful experimentation and collaborative constraints inspired by Surrealist games, Fluxus scores, and early abstract animation. Working with another person's audio forces you into unexpected territory—much like Surrealist exquisite corpse drawings or Fluxus event scores that prioritize chance, collaboration, and relinquishing control. You will create an abstract animation that makes sound visible through color, treating both as raw materials for perceptual play rather than vehicles for narrative or representation.
This assignment draws from experimental art movements that used games, scores, and collaborative constraints to generate unexpected work:
Create an original sound composition and contribute it to the class collaborative sound library. This audio becomes part of a shared pool that all students will draw from.
Once uploaded, you MAY NOT use your own audio in your final animation. You must work with sound created by your classmates.
Purpose: This creates a collaborative sound library where you must work with unfamiliar audio, forcing you to listen differently and respond to sonic material you didn't create—much like how Cruz-Diez's installation forces viewers to experience color in unfamiliar, destabilizing ways.
Select audio from the class library and complete your Research & Development documentation, articulating your conceptual approach and formal strategies.
In the R&D document, Question #6 should specifically address: Why did you choose this piece of audio? What are your intentions for working with it? How will you apply it to the overall animation?
Think about: What qualities does the sound have? What does it make you feel or see? How might you translate its texture, rhythm, density, or emotional quality into color and form?
Purpose: The R&D document helps you articulate your conceptual framework before diving into production. By explaining your audio choice and intentions, you're building a clear roadmap for your creative process—making the invisible (sound) visible (color) through deliberate formal strategies.
Map the structure of your animation by creating an animatic or storyboard that shows how color will transform in response to sound over time. Treat this as a visual score—a set of instructions for how perception will unfold.
Conceptual Focus: Think about creating a "situation" or "event" rather than a story. Your animation should prioritize perceptual experience, synesthetic translation, and formal play over narrative or representation.
Create your final animation—a perceptual experiment that makes sound visible through color, treating both as active materials of perception rather than representation.
You are strongly encouraged to let your animation escape the confines of the screen! Consider:
If you choose this expanded route: Submit documentation (photos/video) of your animated interventions in space alongside or instead of a traditional video file.
Abstract art simplifies, distorts, or reduces recognizable subjects from the visible world. Objects, figures, or forms may be discernible but are transformed beyond specific identification—you might sense the presence of a body, a landscape, or an object, but it's fragmented, reconfigured, or reduced to essential gestures and relationships.
Think: Picasso's treatment of the human body—you can recognize it as a figure, but not as a specific person. The body becomes a collection of shapes, planes, and relationships rather than a portrait. Similarly, Kandinsky's landscapes dissolve into color fields while retaining suggestions of spatial depth and horizon.
For this project: If you choose abstraction, forms may be discernible (something round might suggest a sun, something vertical might suggest a figure) but never specific or identifiable. The emphasis is on formal relationships—shape, color, gesture, rhythm—rather than representation of particular things.
Non-objective art has no reference to the visible world whatsoever. It deals purely with formal elements: color, shape, line, texture, composition, movement, rhythm. There is no subject being abstracted—the work exists entirely on its own terms as an exploration of visual perception and relationships.
Think: Rothko's color fields, Mondrian's grids, or the purely chromatic experiments of color field painters. The work is about the experience of seeing itself—how colors interact, how forms relate, how perception unfolds over time.
For this project: Non-objective work is purely perceptual and formal—color and form exist as phenomena to be experienced, not as representations of anything external. Your animation becomes a temporal score of color, rhythm, and visual relationships.
Realism anchors us in narrative, recognition, and representation—it asks us to identify what we're seeing. This assignment asks you to prioritize sensation over recognition, to make work that "acts on the human being with the same intensity as cold, heat, and sound."
By restricting your visual vocabulary to abstraction and non-objectivity, you're forced to think about color and time as your primary expressive materials—just as Cruz-Diez did.
Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers another—hearing colors, seeing sounds, tasting shapes. While most people don't experience synesthesia, this assignment asks you to construct it artificially: to build a system where sound generates color, where audio becomes chromatically visible.
Think about:
Artists & Movements to Explore: