What happens with the traditionally quiet, comfortably distanced activity of looking at art when sound or disturbing noise cannot be ignored as a part of it? In this presentation I want to discuss how sound and noise in visual art can be understood as a means to obstruct the onlookers’ ability to keep a distance, by intensifying the reality level. In the framed environment of art museums as well as outside, artists can use sound in order to obstruct the border between art and the enclosing reality. This can be experienced both as seductive and frightening, for example if there are no visible imprints of the artist at all. Thus sound and noise can destabilize our notions of what an art experience is, and thus destabilize the relations between artist, artwork, physical context and “onlooker”.

In the history of western visual art, artists’ ambition to blur the difference between art as artefacts and reality has been a recurrent aim in religious as well as in secular contexts. Recurrently, new methods and techniques have been developed in order to create visual illusions of reality, thus concealing or discussing art as something artificial. Thus, sound and noise in visual art can be understood as a part of this ongoing project of exploring, depicting and experiencing illusions and reality. Artists naturally realize the possibilities of modern audio visual technology, but are “onlookers” also willing to let go of their comfortably distanced approach in order to enter the unreliable experience of audio-visual art?