In this presentation, I survey works organizing the visual field in terms of or in relation to music, as media undergo transitions in both technological form and mass cultural acceptance. These “graphical scores” – fine art, technical documents, the film reel, videotape, or hard drive, and electronic interfaces -- map musical figures in the visual field. As diagrams imparting musical sense to visual meaning, the graphical score relates to critical notions of the cinematic image as “hieroglyph”; the graphical score indicates temporality in addition to spatialized visuality, though, and so suggests a “temporal hieroglyph.”

As such, the “graphical score” has functioned as meta-critical theory and praxis for interaction: 1. between media (audiovisuality); 2. between artist and work; and 3. between audience and work (interactivity). Wildly diverse works, such as Bunuel's L'Age D'Or, Fischinger's visual music, artist video, hybrid film-digital media such as Run, Lola, Run, or digital games such as Frequency, which might once have been understood in terms of a progression of avant-gardes splintering into contemporaneous postmodern factions vying for gallery space, dance floor, or commercial marketspace, instead exhibit audiences’ changing understandings of shifts in the technocultural imagination. So the graphical score as temporal hieroglyphic suggests an alternative – one having critical and historical dimensions -- to the naïve proposition of “convergent,” “informatic,” or “new” media.

How, then, have graphical scores organized visual meaning in relation to musical sense? When the overdetermination of interactions between sound and vision, artist and work, and audience and work are framed as a problem of musicality and visuality, this overlaying of different registers of expression is resolved as mediatic gesture. Historically, attempting to resolve programmed musicality and visuality in terms of one another never produces a simple correspondence between one medium and another ("synaesthesia"). Rather, posing the problem of audiovisuality in this way presses a more visceral expression of bodies in relation to spectacle, that is, the corporeal in relation to the mediatic. The result is that artists and theorists produce two distinct formulations of what gesture means in programmed media, whether cinematic or digital. First, early practitioners of the biomechanical arts tend to hold gesture as immanent or latent to the work; later, post-cybernetic practitioners handle gesture as information. The temporal diagram thus charts globalizing media, from the biomechanics of the early 20th century’s thermodynamic materiality to the cyborganics of contemporary virtual materialism.