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.
