Abstraction in live AV defeats the audience's conditioned expectation to read images as narrative

Audiences trained on cinema automatically interpret audiovisual content as narrative or representational — faces imply story, movement implies causation, sound implies source. Non-melodic music and abstract imagery both disrupt this conditioning, creating a space where the audience must engage differently: through resonance, pattern recognition, and imagination rather than story comprehension. Abstraction in live cinema is not merely aesthetic preference — it is a functional tool that defeats a cognitive default. The risk is alienation: too much disembodiment from realism triggers unease that pulls the audience back to awareness of their physical space rather than immersion in the work.

Examples

Early abstract cinema (Oskar Fischinger, Viking Eggeling) used simple geometric forms with musical rhythm specifically to defeat the expectation of a story. In a contemporary context, generative visuals from GLSL shaders paired with textural drone music occupy the same space.

Assessment

Explain why a purely abstract visual (no recognizable objects) paired with a melodic vocal song might feel more coherent than the same visual with drone music. Then describe what ‘alienation’ means in Schacher’s framework and what produces it.