«A MATTER OF...» is the title of this year’s sound:frame festival. Placing the practice of posing questions and calling things into question front and center, it focuses on reflection processes within the development of audiovisual formats, the audiovisual artwork and its reception, and on the term “audiovisual art” itself.

A matter of perspective, a matter of process, a matter of reflection, a matter of content, a matter of... this may be expanded at will. The question itself remains. Important key words such as “perspective,” “(self-)reflection,” “development,” “rethinking,” “placing,” or “going beyond yourself” are an array of terms that have shaped the sound:frame tradition for the past two years: bringing up festival-specific questions and thus making the festival itself the topic of discussion. After two years of formal, social, and organizational self-reflection, the art form itself, the creative process, and the artwork once again take center stage.

Looking at the development of audiovisual tendencies within the past years, it has become clear that audiovisual art must finally establish itself as a general term. Countless movements have come up and have been developed, so that the discourse now requires a significantly larger number of definitions and categories than it did ten or even five years ago. The superordinate term, audiovisual art, has become necessary to distinguish the global development of this contemporary art form from such categories as media art. After all, audiovisual art has developed into an equally broad and general term as the term media art.

If it was still possible in the beginning to point at the international phenomenon of visualizations – closely entwined with the development of electronic music – on the basis of a small circle of visual artists, 2014 is witnessing an incomprehensibly large number of artists, signatures, and movements in this field. By now, critics are able to distinguish between various schools, categories and genres in the realm of audiovisual expression – on both national and international levels. The context in which we perceive audiovisual art has expanded as well. It has moved from its performative origins toward the museum. sound:frame advocates the inclusion of this young art form in the current art discourse.

How can we pinpoint audiovisual art in all its facets? How do we define audiovisual formats? Where does it intersect with media art, film, and design, and how, in turn, does it distinguish itself? sound:frame sheds light on the processes that drive these considerations.