The Poly-expressive Symphony. Futurism and the Moving Image

An avant-garde movement that explored many different aesthetic fields, Futurism focused on cinema because of a concern with the social construction of technology; but cinema also offered the opportunity to make new connections among the senses and to look for correspondences and complementarities within the realm of sensory perception. The following chapter analyzes the interest of the Futurist avant-garde in cinema as a mixed medium. The perceived correspondence between sense modalities is defined as synaesthesia, a word that actually addresses a neurological condition describing an unusual and strong sensory correspondence: a stimulus that is usually perceived by one sense is simultaneously experienced by another; for example the sensation of smelling colours or hearing scents. This very peculiar condition of perception describes not just a brain disorder, but rather a complex paradigm of sensory fusion that appears in both mixed media and experimental art. Many artists of the historical avant-garde used the concept of synaesthesia to cross borders, to redefine the transcendental categories of time and space.