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One of the most important questions relating art practices in the media art scope resides in the reflection about an aesthetic and a discourse which, apparently lost all spontaneity, seems to float in a minimalist semantic ocean.

The “web effect” has transformed and redefined the relation between experience and technique, irreversibly transforming the material foundations of physical existence in time and space. The theoretical approach to the ciberculture phenomenon splits in two opposed perspectives.

The question on the dynamics of the underlying structure of the media processes has been subject to wide debate in the circuit of communication studies. This problematic has been, however, relegated to a sphere of specialized theoretical reflection. To a great extent, this does not conclude the movement to an empirical applicability and recognition of accessible situations to a less specialized analysis, which demands a tangible explanation for the media phenomena and the way it works on the apprehension structures of daily reality.

The play 4′33′’, by John Cage (1952), a canonical moment of the vanguard post 2nd World War, it’s a place left opened, where the silence overlaps to silence, just like in the all-white paintings of Rauschenberg, white overlaps to white, forming, as he used to say, fields of focus where dust, light and shadows may settle. These are two crucial masterpieces for the later development of the neo-vanguards. But, they also make moments that, in several aspects, advocate the development of current artistic pratices, that we common call or refer to as media art.

It is common to admit that there are two opposing film genres – the fictional genre, which claims its ground to be the imagination, and the documental genre, which claims its ground to be reason. However, isn’t this a narrow presumption? To assume an opposition may lead to the idea that one genre repells the other and, consequently, to the acceptance of an unyielding barrier between them both. In order to accept an ultimate distinction, one would have to at least determine an inescapable difference, or draw a line between them which, by refraining, or inhibiting, the mixture of those bodies, would allow their aprehension through an opposition. Fiction and documentary would thus differ in their relationship with reality. While the fictional genre would see reality as a start and derive from its data, the documental genre would see it as an end in itself and attempt to reflect it. Still, it seems unfair to confine fiction to a counterfeit derivation of reality and to subordinate documentary to its faithful reflection; after all, there are faithful derivations and counterfeit reflections. Reality is not single, it is multiple. There is not one truth, but several truths.

This essay concerns the historical developments and the conceptual predecessors of a particular development in artistic creation and design, one that involves the creation of audiovisual experiences and the exploration of the fusion between the two modalities and the corresponding media. It proposes an identification of a convergence between aural and visual modalities and audio and visual media. By outlining the concurrence between visual arts and music to the digital unification of audiovisual media, significant developments are revealed concerning the exploration of a perceptive equivalency, established by analogy or conversion between sound and image, as precursors of an audiovisual aesthetics involved with intermedia explorations.

In the present mediated and globalized context, where we are used to processing a greater and, above all, a wider diversity of information, the Design practice becomes as richer as it mirrors the interconnection of dualities (traditional - contemporary, local - global, individual - collective) which constitute culture.

This hybrid and creolized design, brings brighter results that are inspired by the mixture of the several forces that cross each other in the culture where it is created, be it it’s history or the power of the computational medium connected world wide.