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beat of the music and adapt to the style of the pieces. Conversely in fine art the visual aspect is to the fore—the person who did the sound for a media artwork is usually only in the credits. In the same way, the way music and fine art exploit their output commercially is still entirely disparate: for music, mass sales are important, whether of concert tickets or records. But fine art earns money by being exclusive, by selling small numbers of original works at a high price.
But since the 1980s, more and more artists have been working with images and sound to an equal extent. The pioneers include Laurie, at the latest since her «United States, Part 1-4» Multimedia Performances (1983). She uses live electronics for her performances with great complexity and invents new visual musical instruments, for example the video violin and the audiotape violin. In this way she constructs a bridge from high to popular culture, appears in museums and even got into the hit parade with her song «Oh Superman» in 1982.
A growing number of artists have been difficult to
subsume within the classical genres since the mid 1990s. While the art scene has been discovering club culture crossover and has sometimes used it quite superficially as a new source of inspiration, a generation of artists who have grown up with computers have been working on the more profound planes of image-sound combination. So here in conclusion are some examples of this. They also show different strategies for combining the evaluation systems of art and music.
Granular Synthesis has existed since 1991, its members are Ulf Langheinrich and Kurt Hentschläger, both originally fine artists (see text by Langheinrich). There is no division of roles in their collaboration, they are both equally responsible for sound and image. Their technically very elaborate live performances are intensive, indeed overwhelming, both visually and acoustically. Pieces like «Modell 5» (1994–1996) or «Pole» (1998–2000) are staged in different site-specific versions. The name is the programme: the original images and sounds are not themselves manipulated, but