Around The Empire State. Urban Image As Visual And Musical Form

This essay would like to investigate the complex changes occurred in urban landscape and contemporary media, in according to new perceptive and cognitive, experiential and aesthetic forms emerged in the current audiovisual system analyzed from the sound dimension. Much has been written about how much the introduction of electronic and digital technologies in the system of contemporary media and visual arts has revolutionized the way we think and create moving images, but too little has been said on the relations that the evolution of contemporary cinema and visual arts have had with the parallel transformations of electronic and digital music from the late 70s to today. In particular, the introduction of electronic technologies in audio and video processing establishes a deep connection between sound, image and space, which announces a new aesthetic sensibility in relation to audiovisual products. The researches in the field of avant-garde and underground cinema or video and contemporary art insert to bring in the spaces of the contemporary city original plastic, rhythmic and musical configurations. The paper will focus on three experimental works – Empire (1964) by Andy Warhol, Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan (1981) by Brian Eno, Empire II (2007) by Amos Poe – different for technology and emblematic of distinct historical and epistemological ways of dealing with the architectonic features and sounds but with the same iconographic motif in common: the presence of the Empire State Building.