Visible Sounds, Auditory Images, Haptic Broadcasting: A Para-Tele-Visual Imaginary in German Modernism

This essay examines the avant-garde televisual experiments of the ‘G Group’ in relation to the sociotechnical imagination of experimental television in German modernism. Inspired by the physiology of synaesthesia and the possibilities of the ‘electric eye’, or photocell, avant-garde artists working in multiple media experimented with frequencies outside the perceptible spectrum in their attempts to convert light into sound and vice versa. By shifting attention from ‘visual music’ to ‘optical media,’ this essay contributes to avant-garde studies, modernism studies, and media archaeology, especially recent scholarship connecting the pre- and post-history of national television broadcasting. The ‘para-tele-visual’ here complements senses of television as distant vision with that of haptic broadcasting and the creation of visible sounds and auditory images.