Listening and Watching - soundart films

Recently went to a performance of 'soundart films' - Carte Blanche - by Ros Bandt and Brigid Burke at Dante's Gallery in Fitzroy.  Cross-media / Intermedia / Hybrid work is probably the area I am most interested in as a composer so I was keen to go along to this performance and see some new work.  Ros Bandt and Brigid Burke are both well established and highly original artists in their own right so I was particularly keen to see what this collaboration had produced.  They presented six works ranging from live instrumental improvisations responding to visual images / video to sound and image works where the relationships and interconnections between media were much more complex and dialectical. 'From the Train' and 'Stargazer Remix' were perhaps the two works that I found most interesting.  These brought together sounds of images and images of sounds, resulting in works where meaning and association are layered and often ambiguous.  The relationship between sound and image seems to be most engaging when the connections are not obvious or one dimensional but rather blur the boundaries between the visual and sonic.  Nicholas Cook discusses this relationship in his fantastic book Analysing Musical Multimedia  where he talks about the possible 'emergent meaning' that is produced when sound and image are combined.  The soundart films by Bandt and Burke certainly explored these possibilities.