It seems quite odd for a sound art festival to focus on cinema. The ‘cinematic experience’ is not a (literal) flat out departure from the sonic realm however: the topic was explored far beyond the screen, from the wires and electrodes of the recorder/projector to the nervous system and sensory complexities of the human body, which of course include the experience of hearing. The Sonic Acts conference offered a chance to reflect on new challenges in the field of science and technology, and to exchange ideas.In order to grasp the wide definition of cinema the conference consisted of both historical and scientific research and artist presentations. I missed two of the presentations (Jacobs and Rekveld), but will give a summary of most of the event. The conference started with the historical research (also referred to as media archeology) of critic Erkii Huhtamo. This lecture has been thoroughly described elsewhere on this site, so I will only mention that another speaker at the conference, media art critic and theorist Timothy Druckrey, asked Huhtamo after his presentation why he had not mentioned the phantasmagoria at all. The phantasmagoria was a popular ‘multimedia’ show at the end of the 18^th and the beginning of the 19^th century that was mostly used to mimic or represent occult experiences. Huhtamo’s reply was that he simply limited himself for time and discursive reasons, but that he actually also wondered which influenced which the most: the phantasmagoria or the diorama. Druckrey’s question seemed relevant however, as the phantasmagoria with its strong emphatic and sensory experience seems to connect to the Sonic Acts exhibition and performance program more then the diorama does.Druckrey himself presented a long series of rare movie clips, all dealing with the history of digital media. What he tried to do was escape “the frenzy of the visual”, the tendency to give most importance to visual media in art criticism and cultural discourses. In order to illustrate his thoughts Druckrey started by showing two very amusing video interview clips, one of philosopher Slavoj Zizek criticizing The Matrix and the the other of Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician and constructivist, describing the limits of science. Unfortunately Druckrey went on to present only film clips, whereas it would have been very interesting to hear more of his own criticism of the emphasis on the visual in cultural discourses. He did show some nice films on the history of computing though, like a talk of Grace Hopper, who wrote the first software (?) and the background of the ‘Leo’ computer in the British pastry industry. The conclusion of this sequence of film clips seems to be that Druckrey situates the crux in media theory and cultural development in the unstable complexities of new media, their processes and connections to various disciplines, instead of in the popular dwelling on visual media bombardments. He ended his presentation with a long quote by Serge Daney, of which I only copy a part here: “if the visual prevents us from seeing (because it prefers us that we decode, decrypt, in short ‘read’), the image always challenges us to edit it with another, with ‘the other’. Because in the image - there is always something at stake, something incomplete.”Two other theorists were to follow the third day. In a well-filled conference room for a Sunday morning session Arjen Mulder gave his view of what he called ‘filmic space’, a space he also called an “absolute space”. Mulder’s view seemed a little contradictory, as he emphasized that the experience of the filmic he tried to describe was “extra-medial”, yet at the same time he described it to be hidden in visual details or experiences that were simply difficult to pinpoint. Mulder tried to put his finger on what Barthes had also tried to call the “punctum” in a photograph: a specific, yet unpredictable detail that gives the image its emotional or psychological value. Arjen Mulder was the only one at the conference to bluntly state that the visual simply is the dominant form of media, and the most important one in his point of view. Mulder could not imagine the filmic could also be found in sound.Douglas Kahn, a well-known sound art theorist and critic, closed the conference with a rather academic lecture on ‘live cinema’, a concept that changed from live music accompaniment of silent movies to sound and visuals generated live in a performance setting. He gave a rather vague description of what live cinema should be like in his point of view, whereby he criticized the practices currently being described as ‘live cinema’, which are mostly like DJ/VJ set ups. Kahn is looking for exactly this kind of one (wo)man show, in which one person clearly controls the flow of events in a live performance setting, but he dislikes what he has seen so far. This dislike causes him to denounce the existence of contemporary live cinema. It seems a bit strange to say something does not exist simply because what is presented is not up to your taste though. In a rather elaborate way Kahn tried to tell us what exactly he was looking for in live cinema instead.For Kahn, the bottleneck for ‘live cinema’ was the aspect of postproduction in film. A thing he eluded to a few times was Eisenstein’s view of cinema as ‘inner speech’. At the beginning of his lecture Douglas Kahn showed part of a movie by Abigail Child, called ‘Mutiny’. He quoted her having said to perceive filmmaking as “choreographing”, as “dancing from frame to frame”. Kahn mentioned how music has changed from the composition of a recording to performing a recording. He quoted Artaud on performance as “an affect of athletics”. The whole of live cinema seems to revolve around one this for Kahn: the physical performance of composing/editing pre-recorded film fragments with sound samples in real time in front of an audience. It was a pity that he was not able to clarify how exactly this should look or feel. What was clear however is that Kahn is not a fan of live generated digital visuals in ‘live cinema’. What contemporary ‘live cinema’ and Douglas Kahn’s ideal in ‘live cinema’ seem to have in common though is a strong relationship to sound performance and an “embodiment of control”.  Josephine Bosma