"One often thinks that using 2 different things like visual and sound lead to 2 different conclusions - to a different content - but in in my case it is all one"
About this Quote
Alva Noto is pushing back on a stubborn cultural assumption: that sight and sound belong to separate departments of meaning. We are trained to treat the visual as “about” representation and the sonic as “about” mood, as if each medium arrives with its own moral. His phrasing is deliberately plain, almost technical, but the subtext is radical: if you split the senses, you also split the artwork into message versus atmosphere, concept versus feeling. He refuses the division.
The interesting turn is the pivot from “one often thinks” to “in my case.” It’s a quiet flex, not a manifesto. Noto isn’t arguing that everyone must experience art synesthetically; he’s describing a practice where form is content. In his world, a waveform isn’t just heard, it’s seen; a grid isn’t just graphic design, it’s rhythm with edges. That collapse of categories mirrors the aesthetics of his work: minimal, data-like, precise to the point of austerity, yet emotionally charged through repetition and micro-variation. You don’t “decode” it so much as inhabit it.
Context matters: Noto comes out of late-20th-century electronic music and media art, where software makes audio and image the same raw material - numbers. Once sound and visuals are both streams of data, “two different conclusions” starts to look like a superstition left over from older tools. His claim isn’t mystical unity; it’s a statement about authorship in the digital era, where coherence isn’t achieved by adding disciplines together, but by designing a single system that can be perceived multiple ways.
The interesting turn is the pivot from “one often thinks” to “in my case.” It’s a quiet flex, not a manifesto. Noto isn’t arguing that everyone must experience art synesthetically; he’s describing a practice where form is content. In his world, a waveform isn’t just heard, it’s seen; a grid isn’t just graphic design, it’s rhythm with edges. That collapse of categories mirrors the aesthetics of his work: minimal, data-like, precise to the point of austerity, yet emotionally charged through repetition and micro-variation. You don’t “decode” it so much as inhabit it.
Context matters: Noto comes out of late-20th-century electronic music and media art, where software makes audio and image the same raw material - numbers. Once sound and visuals are both streams of data, “two different conclusions” starts to look like a superstition left over from older tools. His claim isn’t mystical unity; it’s a statement about authorship in the digital era, where coherence isn’t achieved by adding disciplines together, but by designing a single system that can be perceived multiple ways.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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