H I S T O R I C A L P E R S P E C T I V E

A Symphony of Sensations in the A B S T R A C T

Spectator: Le Corbusier’s Poème This essay seeks to historicize

the technological production of

électronique and the Historicization artistic virtual space, which is

often misconstrued as having
originated with contemporary

of New Media Arts new media art production. The

author critically investigates Le
Corbusier’s Poème électronique,
a 1958 automated multimedia
performance commissioned by
the Philips Corporation for its
Katie Mondloch pavilion at the World’s Fair in
Belgium, as a paradigmatic
example of much earlier at-
tempts to create a spatialized,

C
ontemporary artists working with new media
(such as net art, virtual reality, interactive installation, digital
video, etc.) have enjoyed unprecedented levels of support
when compared to those of previous art media. Whether in
the quantity of grants awarded or in the number of places se-
cured in prestigious contemporary museum exhibitions, the
economic and institutional encouragement of artists working
with new media technologies has been as conspicuous as the
critical attention devoted to assessing this condition has been
inadequate. Indeed, this sweeping popularity belies wide-
spread misunderstanding of the historical and cultural con-
text of the artworks’ formation.
Recent critical art-historical formulations regarding arts
made with new media technologies tend to fall into three over-
lapping camps: the Ž rst locates new media art in the “techno-
logical” arts of the past, such as video art, Ž lm or photography;
the second emphasizes commonalities with the collaborative
and multimedia art practices of the late 1950s–1960s, such as
those inspired by John Cage’s experiments at Black Mountain
College; and the third downplays the artistic precedents, stress-
ing instead new media art’s connection to the advent of per-
sonal computing and digital technologies. Taken individually,
any one of these three models is inadequate. This essay will pro-
pose a hybrid approach to providing a historical and cultural
context for arts made with new media technologies, one that
historicizes virtual artistic experiences produced for the spec-
tator by means of a technological spectacle.
Within the discourse of new media arts, the concept of virtu-
ality, an imagined or simulated immersive space that does not
exist in reality, is often written about as a phenomenon speciŽc
to computer-reliant technologies. Nevertheless, the complete
immersion of the observer into virtual surroundings has a rich
(art) history ranging from Baroque chapels to Wagnerian
gesamtkunstwerks to 1960s experiments in expanded cinema. How
might one begin to open up a space for a more meaningful his-
toricization of the virtual and immersive experiences engendered
by certain artworks made with new media technologies?
While a multitude of historical precedents could potentially
be invoked, it is important to recognize the fundamental dis-
continuities between the observing subjects in each case. New
media artworks and Baroque chapels may both presuppose an
Katie Mondloch (art historian, critic), Department of Art History, University of California
at Los Angeles, 100 Dodd Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417, U.S.A. E-mail: , mondloch@
humnet.ucla.edu. .
virtual experience in the specta-
tor. The author argues that the
highly disciplined spectatorship
conditions of the Poème élec-
immersive, virtual engagement on tronique have many suggestive
the part of the spectator, yet the parallels with those of contem-
porary artistic production in new
17th-century subject of an emerging
media, thus offering a theoreti-
modernity and the decentered sub- cal and historical foundation for
ject of postmodernity remain dis- art-historical discourse regard-
tinct in their differing relationships ing the proliferation of immer-
to the body and to forms of institu- sive multimedia artworks in
contemporary practice.
tional and discursive control. More
relevant historical examples for
thinking about contemporary new
media arts may be found in the automated multimedia archi-
tectural experiments of the mid-20th century, which envisioned
a spectator that we are familiar with today—a postindustrial sub-
ject routinely immersed in highly designed and carefully con-
trolled technological manifestations of virtual space.
Le Corbusier’s 1958 automated multimedia performance
event commissioned by the Philips Corporation for its pavilion
at the World’s Fair in Belgium, the Poème électronique, preŽ gured
the “virtuality” of certain computer-reliant works made with new
media. The Poème électronique ’s immersive environment strove
to create a sense-overloaded observer who would experience a
spatialized virtual event. Both the corporate sponsor and Le
Corbusier intricately controlled the spatialization of the ob-
server’s visual and aural experience toward this end. Anticipat-
ing a tendency in contemporary new media artistic production
that has thus far been unaccounted for in historicizations of the
same, the Poème électronique utilized phenomenological effects
and the production of virtual space to control the spectator.
While I do not want to suggest that Le Corbusier’s Poème élec-
tronique served as a direct in uence on subsequent artists work-
ing with new media technologies, my concern here is to
demonstrate how the Poème électronique—an immersive multi-
media technological environment orchestrated by a master-
ful author—has many suggestive parallels with contemporary
new media art practice. In investigating the Poème électronique,
we not only recover an interesting multimedia event of the
mid-20th century, we also gain a better understanding of our
current moment.
THE PHILIPS CORPORATION , THE PHILIPS
PAVILION AND THE POÈME ÉLECTRONIQUE
How did the Philips Corporation directors conceive of the
pavilion, and what sort of observer did they hope to fashion?
L.C. Kalff, the corporation’s cultural liaison, approached Le

© 2004 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 57–61, 2004 57

Corbusier in late 1956 to design the
Dutch Ž rm’s “spatial-color-light-music
production . . . using the most advanced
technical means” (i.e. Philips’s equip-
ment) for the 1958 World’s Fair in Bel-
gium [1]. The nearly 70-year-old
architect accepted with resolve: “I will not
make a façade for Philips, but an elec-
tronic poem. Everything will happen in-
side: sound, light, color, rhythm. Perhaps
a scaffolding will be the pavilion’s only
exterior aspect” [2]. Although Le Cor-
busier agreed to the commission, he
 atly refused the Philips Corporation’s
choices for his collaborators in the pro-
duction; the architect was resolute about
his personal choice of Edgard Varèse as
composer and equally determined to
oversee the entire visual spectacle of the
Poème électronique himself [3]. The Philips
Pavilion building, then, was subservient
to Le Corbusier’s real concern—the
Poème électronique.
The multimedia Poème électronique
featured both visual and aural facets
[4]. The visual components were Ž lm,
colored lighting, light projections of
stenciled geometric shapes and three-
dimensional forms. The Ž lm presented
images selected by Le Corbusier and
montaged by Ž lmmaker Philippe Agos-
tini to illustrate human civilization’s
progress. Colored lighting effects (am-
biances) were utilized to manipulate the
atmosphere and mood in the pavilion.
Projection devices called tri-trous were de-
signed to superimpose simple stenciled
shapes onto the black-and-white Ž lm [5].
Finally, two 3D forms (volumes) hung in-
side the Pavilion and were bathed with
ultraviolet light at precise moments dur-
ing the performance.
The aural component of the multime-
dia work was a site-speciŽc composition
by Edgard Varèse, also titled Poème élec-
tronique. Varèse worked at the Philips labs
in Eindhoven to produce the composi-
tion’s montage of unmodiŽ ed sounds:
machine noises, distorted organ music,
bells, percussion, pure electronic sounds,
human chant and selections from the
composer’s Étude pour espace [6]. The hy-
brid, multitrack work was recorded on
tape and emanated from a series of
“sound routes” from several hundred
speakers attached to the Philips Pavilion’s
curved walls. Working as both assistant ar-
chitect and secondary composer, Iannis
Xenakis was charged with the entrance
and exit music. Xenakis created an orig-
inal piece of musique concrète intended to
exploit the pavilion’s hyperbolic parabo-
loid architecture [7] and gave his 2-
minute score the title Concrète P.H. (an
abbreviation of paraboloïde hyperbolique).
58 Mondloch, A Symphony of Sensations
For the pavilion’s visitors at the 1958
World’s Fair, the spectacle unexpectedly
appeared as a virtual space surrounded
by changing images, colors and sounds.
The performance repeated automatically
every 8 minutes. Xenakis rather poeti-
cally described what awaited the public
in the Poème électronique spectacle:
During the eight minutes of the perfor-
mance, all of these innumerable means
and effects make the public shift from
uncertainty to sudden understanding
and transport them into a world where
the strength of the imagination can no
longer foresee the sequence of light and
sound waves [8].
Ushered into a strange “avant-garde”
pavilion reminiscent of a stomach and
immediately left in the dark until the
multimedia presentation began, the ob-
servers of the Poème électronique were un-
able to satisfactorily orient themselves in
real space. Put simply, the Poème électron-
ique was designed to create an immersive
multimedia environment and a highly
controlled experience of virtuality in all
of its spectators.
Visitors to the Philips Pavilion (about
one million over the course of the 1958
World’s Fair) were given the following
brochure to read while they waited in
line:
The Electronic Poem will be repeated
thousands of times. That is why the
equipment has been automated to such
an extent that the fallible human factor
has been virtually eliminated. This syn-
thesis between humanity and inventive-
ness has resulted from a co-operation
between artists and technicians which
has lasted for months, and with which
Philips aspires to take a prominent share
in this great manifestation of Modern
Man [9].
Clearly, that the Poème électronique was
almost entirely automated (thanks to
Philips’s equipment) was considered a
coup, as was the company’s association
with such a progressive and “Modern”
gesture.
While the Philips Corporation’s en-
thusiasm may seem predictable to us
today in light of the current corporate
and institutional interest in supporting
new media initiatives, it is important to
remember that elements of this com-
mission were atypical in 1958. For in-
stance, Philips intended from the outset
to exclude its products from the pavil-
ion, going against the established tradi-
tion of corporate pavilions until that
time [10]. This was an astute move on
Philips’s part and reveals that the cor-
poration, and especially its cultural liai-
son Kalff, readily understood that the
cultural prestige generated by an avant-
garde pavilion under the direction of Le
Corbusier could outweigh the potential
gain of having their products fore-
grounded in a mundane way. In a fash-
ion, Kalff and Philips credited the fair’s
visitors with more intelligence and dis-
cernment than did the designers of the
blatantly ideological and didactic Cold
War agendas represented in the U.S. and
U.S.S.R. pavilions also on display in Brus-
sels. PreŽ guring the numerous instances
of corporate support for new media art
and artists—for example, Intel’s spon-
sorship of 010101: Art in Technological
Times, a 2001 exhibition at the San Fran-
cisco Museum of Modern Art, or the
backing of multinational corporations
for the annual international Ars Elec-
tronica competition—Kalff envisioned
an observer able to make the leap
from Philips products on display to
Philips products in the service of artistic
ends.
The manner in which Le Corbusier
and the Poème électronique functioned as
cultural capital is borne out in the legacy
of the Pavilion’s authorship. Philips in-
sisted on crediting Le Corbusier with the
entire project, even in spite of obvious
evidence to the contrary. For Philips, it
simply would not do to have a less mas-
terful signature on this expensive and
symbolic commission than that of “M. Le
Corbusier.” This is certainly not to imply
that the artists and architects involved
were not equally convinced of the valid-
ity of this undertaking. They too fully
recognized what Philips stood to gain
from “avant-garde art,” especially as Ž l-
tered through the genius of an innova-
tive “master.” Xenakis lectured Kalff and
the Philips board of directors:
Your pavilion must attract attention by
some avant-garde “strangeness” and you
must create a scandal . . . If on the site of
this demonstration you will have a good
little “Demonstration,” fuddy-duddy, like
those you can see in the trade shows of
Paris (High Fidelity; Lighting, etc.) the
impact will be reduced to that of a ball
of cotton. The highly artistic novelty,
which you categorize as abstract, is a
characteristic of those works that endure.
For a long time after the end of the ex-
position there will be talk of your Pavil-
ion as a bold stroke in the imagination
of the public [11].
For his part, Le Corbusier warned the
Philips board of directors that they would
look like reactionary fools if they dared
to question the artistic integrity of either
Varèse or himself, and the architect was
not shy to recite an impressive list of his
previous triumphs whenever the Philips
board grew impatient with what they ini-
tially considered to be the overly adven-
turous artistic ambitions of the Poème élec-
tronique.
Philips took a risk by not foreground-
ing their products in an obvious way and
by dealing with the myriad difŽ culties as-
sociated with the Le Corbusier commis-
sion (the board was especially displeased
with Varèse’s decidedly challenging
score, which the architect essentially
blackmailed them into accepting by
threatening to quit if Varèse’s music was
not included). However, the corporation
was always mindful of the gains. Their
pavilion’s observer would leave Brussels
slightly confused in the wake of their
“new” virtual experience, yet sufŽ ciently
impressed by the company’s association
with Le Corbusier and with forward-
looking experimental technologies. Need-
less to say, Philips’s products and re-
sources—from recording electronics to
lighting technologies to their own labs
and engineers—enabled the entire pre-
sentation to take place, and the audience
was imagined to be mindful of this fact.
Patronage obviously plays a key role in
multimedia spectacles of this scale; such
projects require resources that can gen-
erally only be Ž nanced by large corpora-
tions, governmental agencies or military
institutions. Indeed, this requirement is
perhaps more apparent in the case of
contemporary art made with new media
technologies, where much experimenta-
tion in new media is so costly that subsi-
dized or partnership arrangements are
common and new patrons have arisen in
the form of cultural institutions, univer-
sities and the entertainment industry. It
would be naïve to think that such pro-
ductions would not re ect the interests
of these patrons, even in situations in
which it appears exceptionally clear that
the principal “vision” for the project is
the artist’s [12]. In the case of the Poème
électronique, Le Corbusier’s authoritative
plan for the phenomenal effects that
would generate a virtual experience for
the spectator corresponded to the Philips
Corporation’s ambition to sponsor an
“avant-garde” experience and to proŽ t
from the publicity it guaranteed.
LE CORBUSIER AND THE
POÈME ÉLECTRONIQUE
What were the components of the Poème
électronique put forward by Le Corbusier
and what sort of perceptual experience
did he wish to provoke in his spectator?
Le Corbusier conceived of the Poème élec-
tronique as an entirely new kind of spec-
tacle and intended for the building to be
reminiscent of the human stomach, a
combination of the organic and the geo-
metric [13]. The architect’s concern to
exactly direct the observer’s experience
was unmistakable; he described the
Philips Pavilion as “a stomach assimilat-
ing 500 listener-spectators, and evacuat-
ing them automatically at the end of the
performance” [14]. Ever since the proj-
ect’s conception, he had planned for
each round of approximately 500 visitors
to stand for 8 minutes in order to expe-
rience the presumably multidirectional
presentation from all points. Taking into
account the vast audience he intended to
reach with this spectacle, Le Corbusier
claimed that the Poème électronique would
communicate “a long cry of a rediscov-
ered community, the sense of drama, pas-
sion and faith, present in the collective
soul” [15]. Architectural historian and
theorist Anthony Vidler suggests that be-
hind the material aspects of Le Cor-
busier’s structures there is always a
primary or virtual structure to which the
observer is supposed to respond [16].
For Vidler, Le Corbusier is a behaviorist
in that he uses abstraction to generate re-
sponses. The Philips Pavilion building
and Poème électronique are two such ex-
amples of phenomenal art and architec-
ture. Clearly the Poème électronique’s
8-minute experience of virtuality—recall
that I deŽ ne virtual space as an imagined
or simulated immersive environment
that does not exist in reality—was ex-
pected to move the audience both liter-
ally and, perhaps more important,
emotionally.
Le Corbusier supervised the Poème élec-
tronique’s Ž lm, colored lighting, light pro-
jections of stenciled geometric shapes,
and 3D forms. He created a list of images
(documents) for the prospective Ž lm that
was then “translated” by his faithful col-
laborator Jean Petit into a workable list
for Ž lmmaker Agostini to implement as
a Ž lmic montage [17]. The architect de-
vised a graphic matrix that listed precisely
at what point the various ambiances, Ž lm
segments and tri-trous projections should
occur on a timeline divided into seconds.
The Poème électronique’s Ž lmic narrative
comprised seven approximately 1-minute
sections distinguished by a short period
of darkness between each one. The Ž lm
and the constituent photographs were
conceived of in seven sequences labeled
(in order): “genesis,” “matter and spirit,”
“from darkness to dawn,” “manmade
gods,” “how time molds civilization,”
“harmony,” and “to all mankind” [18].
Interestingly, the images selected by Le
Corbusier were nearly all static, 2D pho-
tographs taken from sources such as the
Musée de l’Homme, Musée Pedagogique
and the American Library [19].
Photography and architecture scholar
Daniel Naegele offers a plausible expla-
nation for Le Corbusier’s utilization of
still photography in composing the Poème
électronique’s Ž lm, reasoning that the
medium’s privileged relationship with re-
ality worked even better than painting to
realize the architect’s philosophy, namely
Purism and its “space of contradiction”
[20]. Initiated by Le Corbusier and
Amédée Ozenfant around 1918, Purism
sought to create, in the founders’ own
words, “a symphony of sensations in the
spectator” [21]. The painters would se-
lect the emotion they desired to evoke
and then pursue the forms capable of
transmitting the given emotion; thus
Purist paintings were Ž lled with visual
contradictions in order to more fully
transmit emotion through “resonance.”
The “Purist potential” of photographs
could indeed explain the architect’s un-
erring dedication to selecting the “right”
still photographic image for each frame
of the Poème électronique’s Ž lm. Le Cor-
busier’s preference for Agostini’s mon-
tage approach can also be interpreted as
offering yet another productive space of
contradiction to “move” the spectator
[22]. What is important to highlight is
that the architect was highly conscious of
what sort of observing experience he
would produce with this multimedia per-
formance.
The creative use of juxtaposition in
non-narrative Ž lm did not of course orig-
inate with Agostini or Le Corbusier—Fer-
nand Léger created his Ballet Mécanique
35 years earlier, and Man Ray had worked
with uncanny juxtapositions in his early
Ž lms. Similar experimentation can also
be found in Maurice Lemaître’s 1951 Let-
trist Ž lm Le Žlm est déjà commencé? Le Cor-
busier’s contribution was to take this
technique further in the Poème électronique,
augmenting and synchronizing the Ž lm
with other media, with all the attendant
possibilities for psychological and physi-
ological effects in the observer that res-
onate in today’s experimentation in arts
made with new media technologies. Janet
Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s 2001
Paradise Institute, a multimedia environ-
ment created for the Canadian pavilion
at the Venice Biennale, offers a particu-
larly compelling comparison [23]. The
Paradise Institute’s material form was a
miniature 17-seat movie theater; visitors
were ushered in every 10 minutes and im-
mersed in a cinematic experience en-
hanced by stereo headphones whose
ambient sounds convincingly situated the
spectator in virtual surroundings as he or
she watched the digital video in complete
darkness. As with the Poème électronique,
Mondloch, A Symphony of Sensations 59
the extremely popular Paradise Institute
delighted its audience with an unfamiliar
virtual experience even while maintain-
ing tight perceptual control of its ob-
servers. Both artworks required intricate
planning of technological manifestations
so as to direct the observer’s experience
according to the artist’s intention.
To return now to the visual spectacle
of the Poème électronique, Le Corbusier
worked extensively with color for this
project. The architect was conŽ dent in
his belief not only that color affected the
viewer both psychologically and physio-
logically, but, once again, that he could
provoke those effects. Color projections
functioned in two ways in the Poème élec-
tronique. Each section of images was ac-
companied by gradually changing colors,
and the audience was additionally im-
mersed in colored lighting (ambiances).
The lighting for the Poème électronique was
calculated to have a major impact on the
viewer’s overall spatial experience. Le
Corbusier’s strategic use of lighting
(along with other visual forms) can be re-
lated to his interest in what he called “in-
effable space.” According to the
architect, a profoundly moving “phe-
nomenon of concordance” takes place
for the sensitive observer when the “ac-
tion of the work” and the “reaction of the
setting” are artfully aligned. In a suc-
cessful work, “a boundless depth opens
up, effaces the walls, drives away contin-
gent presences, accomplishes the miracle of
ineffable space” [24]. Le Corbusier hoped
that the virtual experience for the spec-
tator of the Poème électronique would be
profoundly emotive in this way. Both the
Ž lm and colored lighting effects were at-
mospheric pieces devised to impact the
spectator’s senses directly.
Integrated with the color effects and
the Ž lm were Le Corbusier’s very explicit
plans concerning the 3D forms (volumes)
that were to hang in the peaks of the
pavilion. Intended as allegories and sug-
gestive of the organic and geometric
principles implied in the pavilion’s stom-
ach inspiration, Le Corbusier anticipated
including a female mannequin (“na-
ture”) and a mathematical Ž gure (“hu-
man consciousness”) that he planned to
design personally. Clearly not inconse-
quential for the Poème électronique pro-
duction as a whole, the 3D forms were lit
with ultraviolet light during Ž lm se-
quence 4, “manmade gods” [25]. Be-
cause the 3D forms were the only “real”
things in the pavilion, the spectator’s at-
tempt to discern the “reality” of the forms
was instrumental for challenging the
spectator’s perception. Illuminated by ul-
traviolet light, the 3D forms entered the
same virtual space as the projected im-
60 Mondloch, A Symphony of Sensations
ages, necessarily disrupting the specta-
tor’s normal viewing experience. Then,
as now, the variance between what is real
and what is virtual was occluded in a tech-
nological milieu.
The projected images transformed as
they moved across the pavilion’s curved,
asymmetrical interior and, together with
the music and other visual effects, they cre-
ated a virtual space within the darkened
pavilion. As theorized by Beatriz Colom-
ina in relationship to the Eameses’ Glimpses
of the U.S.A., a multiscreen Ž lm designed
for projection inside a Buckminster Fuller
geodesic dome at the 1959 American ex-
hibition in Moscow, such multimedia ar-
chitectural works deŽ ne a space within a
space [26]. Colomina goes on to reason
that, although the Eameses’ Ž lm breaks
with a linear and perspectival view of the
world, it does so within the logic of an al-
ready existing mode of perception. She
notes how television, space programs and
military operations had fashioned a new
observer capable of understanding new
spatial systems prior to the Eameses’ mul-
timedia Ž lm. While Colomina is correct to
point out that the perceptual tools were al-
ready in place to experience late-1950s
projects such as Glimpses of the U.S.A. and
the Poème électronique, it is important to note
how the discourse surrounding these early
experiments tended to suggest their ab-
solute novelty.
Proving that both client and artist were
convinced of the newness of the specta-
tor’s phenomenological engagement
when immersed in the Philips Pavilion
structure and Poème électronique perfor-
mance (or at least that they were deter-
mined to publicize it as something new),
Philips introduced the Poème électronique
with an announcement in French, En-
glish and Dutch to the effect that a new
art form was about to be initiated, one
that would change the way the audience
experienced sounds and images (al-
though it would have been more accu-
rate to focus on the viewer’s altered
relationship to space). Consistent with
Colomina’s compelling theorization of
architecture as mass media, I would sug-
gest that the experience of virtuality in
both projects was deliberately sought
after for its “avant-garde strangeness,” its
publicity potential, and for the control of
the spectator’s experience that it allowed.
After the corporation’s introduction-
cum-augury that preceded every perfor-
mance, the Philips pavilion was darkened
until the 8-minute cycle of automated vi-
sual imagery was activated along with
Varèse’s electronic score. The previously
described sounds traveled around “sound
routes” provided by the hundreds of
speakers on the pavilion’s curved interior
walls, so that the spectators heard sounds
slowly turn and collide on all sides.
Varèse’s interest in the spatialization of
music led him to compose for traditional
instruments in combination with sirens
that, in Varèse’s opinion at least, provided
“beautiful” parabolic and hyperbolic
curves (which Varèse called “glissandi”).
For Le Corbusier’s purposes, Varèse’s
music was key in achieving the experience
of virtuality for the spectator as he sought
to stimulate the pavilion’s visitors with un-
familiar sensory impressions.
“A SYMPHONY
OF SENSATIONS”
The entire Poème électronique was strictly
controlled by its 8-minute duration (not
including the transitional entrance and
exit music and the introductory an-
nouncements). Le Corbusier (i.e. his stu-
dio) produced elaborate diagrams
detailing when and where the visual ele-
ments would overlap and in precisely
what colored lighting conditions. Even
the plan of the 2-minute interlude be-
tween presentations was meticulously
considered. Quite different, then,
from his artistic contemporaries’ non-
hierarchical collaborations in multime-
dia events self-consciously distinct from
the “spectacle,” Le Corbusier’s 1958
Poème électronique should not be unthink-
ingly elided with the experimental artis-
tic practices of its period.
There was a general resurgence of in-
terest in multimedia works in the arts
world at the time when the Poème électron-
ique was conceived and produced, and
these works are frequently cited as prece-
dents in attempts to historicize new media
arts. All nearly contemporaneous with the
Poème électronique, the Independent Group
orchestrated a series of multimedia exhi-
bitions between 1956 and 1957; Allan
Kaprow initiated the Happenings that
 ourished from 1958 to 1962; Robert
Rauschenberg developed a series of re-
sponsive environments in the late 1960s;
and Fluxus artists experimented in per-
formance, Ž lm and an array of mixed
media, their activity peaking from about
1962 to 1964. However, unlike the Poème
électronique, these artistic events were for
the most part non-hierarchical and col-
laborative, and both Happenings and
Fluxus were in uenced by John Cage’s
comprehensive use of chance operations
to dissolve the barriers between art and life
[27]. Cage organized a “concerted action”
event at Black Mountain College in 1952
that involved different art forms occurring
simultaneously and sometimes succes-
sively, according to chance; while the event
may be superŽcially similar to the Poème
électronique in the use of overlapping media,
it was fundamentally different in terms of
authorial intent and perceptual control.
In comparison to late 1950s and early
1960s artistic experimentation with mul-
timedia, Le Corbusier’s Poème électronique
was more controlling, more reliant on a
single “genius” author, more concerned
with upholding the status quo (after all,
this was a corporate pavilion for a world’s
exhibition) and more invested in the cre-
ation of virtuality by way of a technolog-
ical spectacle. The whole volume of the
Poème électronique’s performance space was
Ž lled with sounds and images requiring
(demanding) the observer’s rapt atten-
tion. Unlike the multimedia experimen-
tation occurring simultaneously and
soon thereafter in the art world, Le Cor-
busier wrote his “symphony of sensa-
tions” to be directed by a maestro and to
produce precise, predetermined effects
in the observer. To this end, the highly
controlled 1958 Poème électronique mas-
terminded by Le Corbusier seems a more
Ž tting prototype for current immersive
technological artistic environments than
the more frequently suggested prece-
dents of the 1960s experimental, largely
non-hierarchical art and media practices.
In considering the consequence of
generating collective experiences of “vir-
tuality” in the reception of new media
arts, and especially given present-day
claims to new media “interactivity,” it is
informative to note that although the
Poème électronique offered an original spa-
tial and acoustic experience, its underly-
ing message was far from subversive, as it
was directly in line with Philips’s corpo-
rate agenda and Le Corbusier’s own con-
trolling view of the observer. Carefully
scripted “symphonies of sensations” con-
tinue to be produced for the spectator in
our current historical moment. The chal-
lenge that remains for both critics and
artists is to examine the social, cultural
and political ramiŽ cations of the virtual
experiences generated by such projects
and to develop a historiography for new
media that does not occlude such issues.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors and reviewers at
Leonardo for their assistance in completing this essay.
Wim de Wit, director of Special Collections at the
Getty, and Cristin O’Keefe at ARS were also ex-
tremely helpful. I am grateful to Tony Vidler for his
insights regarding an early version of this argument
and to Jenn Marshall for her advice and encourage-
ment. A research mentorship grant from UCLA
sponsored the research for this project; I am grate-
ful to Miwon Kwon for her assistance in securing the
grant and for her steadfast support.
References and Notes
1. M. Treib, Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips
Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1996) p. 2. I am indebted to
the careful archival research carried out by Treib; his
book is the best and most detailed account of both
the Poème électronique and the Philips Pavilion.
2. Le Corbusier and J. Petit, Le Poème électronique
(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1958) p. 23.
3. The Philips Corporation sought (but failed) to
have Le Corbusier collaborate with British composer
Benjamin Britten and Russian-born French sculptor
Ossip Zadkine. Treib [1] p. 11.
4. Diligent attempts were made by this author to se-
cure permissions for publishing the many illustrations
originally accompanying this essay. While permissions
were readily granted for printed reproductions, the
rights for reproducing the images on-line (as re-
quired by Leonardo) were denied. The author would
like to point out that she considers the argument in-
complete without illustrations and hopes that future
decisions regarding copyright permissions for schol-
arly publications will be made in a more just manner.
5. Le Corbusier explained his innovative technique:
“A Ž lm strip each frame of which is entirely opaque
except for three holes (‘trois-trous’) in which the col-
ors or Ž gures are introduced.” Philips Technical Re-
view report; cited in Treib [1] p. 154.
6. In the area of avant-garde music theory, John Cage
was likewise devoted to incorporating all sounds pre-
viously considered noise into music around this time.
See J. Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage
(Middleton, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961).
7. The pavilion was composed of complex geomet-
ric forms; a hyperbolic paraboloid is a 3D surface
that has parabolic and hyperbolic cross-sections. The
multimedia spectacle exploited this architecture:
The sound experiments required curved walls, and
the projected images were designed to transform as
they moved across the curved walls.
8. P. Grossi, “È morto Edgard Varèse,” Casabella 302
(February 1966) p. 69 (my translation).
9. Treib [1] p. 261, note 42.
10. Although most accounts of the Philips Pavilion
(including Le Corbusier’s) afŽ rm that there were no
Philips products on display in the pavilion, it is note-
worthy that an exhibition catalog, Synthèse des Arts: As-
pekte des Spätwerks 1945–1965, quotes Kalff proposing
in 1956: “At the end of each presentation . . . a more
or less abstract monument shall become visible in the
rear part of the cupola that visualizes symbolically the
family-tree of Philips with the Žrm’s products.” My em-
phasis. Bart Lootsma, “Poème électronique: Le Cor-
busier, Xenakis, Varèse,” in Synthèse des Arts: Aspekte
des Spätwerks, 1945–1965 (Berlin: Ernst, 1986) p. 113.
One noteworthy precedent of an architect em-
ploying rather than displaying commercial products
in a corporate exhibition pavilion is Mies van der
Rohe’s 1927 experiments with glass for the German
mirror-glass factories at the Stuttgart Werkbund ex-
hibition.
11. Xenakis to Kalff, 17 December 1957, Foundation
Le Corbusier archive; cited in Treib [1] p. 192.
12. Le Corbusier portrayed his own architectural
works in the Poème électronique’s “history of mankind”
Ž lm sequence. The projects for Paris, skyscrapers for
Algiers, housing blocks at Nantes and Marseilles and
High Court at Chandigarh were all featured. While
conceivable as indirect publicity for Philips, merely
by virtue of the latter being associated with the mod-
ern master, the master without doubt publicized him-
self; in the last segment of the Ž lm the audience
learns that architecture is humanity’s hope for sal-
vation and Le Corbusier’s latest projects and urban
planning ideas are quite literally foregrounded.
13. Allen Weiss and Charlotte Skene-Catling note
that the conceit of the human stomach was probably
an unintended Rabelaisian element concerning the
 ow of people who would experience the multime-
dia invention. Any 23 (1998) pp. 10–11.
14. Le Corbusier, Creation Is a Patient Search, James
Palmer, trans. (New York: Praeger, 1960) p. 186; cited
in D. Naegele, “Le Corbusier and the Space of Pho-
tography,” History of Photography 22, No. 2 (summer
1998) p. 135.
15. Le Corbusier and Petit [2] p. 18.
16. Anthony Vidler, lecture on Le Corbusier, De-
partment of Architecture, University of California at
Los Angeles, Winter 2001.
17. Petit was also responsible for the text version of
the project, Le Poème Électronique, Le Corbusier (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1958). Petit had previously
worked with Le Corbusier in writing for Editions de
Minuit about his chapel at Ronchamp and monastery
at La Tourette.
18. The Poème électronique Ž lm is currently housed at
the Philips archives in Eindhoven, the Netherlands;
unfortunately, the Ž lm was not available to this author.
19. I mean “taken” quite literally; remarkably sug-
gestive of our own time, copyright issues, including
high fees and permissions not properly acquired,
would plague the Philips Corporation even after the
Pavilion was destroyed.
20. Naegele [14] p. 127. In this regard, Naegele iden-
tiŽ es the photo mural of the Pavillon Suisse as a turn-
ing point for Le Corbusier’s architecture.
21. Le Corbusier and A. Ozenfant, “Purism,” in R.
Herbert, ed., Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Es-
says (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964)
p. 67; originally “Le Purisme,” L’Esprit Nouveau 4
(January 1921) pp. 369–386. Le Corbusier and Ozen-
fant collaborated on the publication After Cubism that
established the basis for the Purist philosophy. See
also N. Rosenblatt, “Empathy and Anaesthesia: On
the Origins of a French Machine Aesthetic,” Grey
Room 2 (winter 2001) pp. 78–97 for a critical assess-
ment of the Purists’ ambition to be in command of
the senses of the observer.
22. Architectural instances of representational jux-
taposition in the spatialized Poème électronique per-
formance are related to the multitude of Le
Corbusier’s books and articles that used photogra-
phy to form illustrative and affective texts. Le Cor-
busier had been perfecting the art of photographic
juxtapositions ever since his 1923 publication Vers un
architecture (Towards a New Architecture, English trans-
lation by Frederick Etchells [New York: Dover Pub-
lications, 1986]); this book presented the reader with
a new pictorial language by compelling the reader
to “see” the text working in concert with the painstak-
ingly selected and arranged images. SigniŽcant for
Le Corbusier’s later work, this arrangement en-
couraged a visceral response to visual perception.
23. It is interesting to note that Le Corbusier’s Poème
électronique predates the late-1960s multimedia ex-
perimentation in art and Ž lm. For an account of late-
1960s experimental Ž lm, see D. James, Allegories of
Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989)
ch. 4, especially pp. 133–137. For an account that syn-
thesized contemporaneous developments in both
Ž lm and art, see G. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema
(London: Studio Vista, 1970).
24. Le Corbusier, “Ineffable Space,” in Le Corbusier,
New World of Space (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock,
1948) p. 8.
25. Treib [1] p. 126.
26. Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The
Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room 2
(winter 2001) p. 11.
27. Exceptions include certain carefully scripted yet
ostensibly participatory Happenings, such as Allan
Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959). Whereas
Kaprow shared Cage’s dedication to nonlinear ef-
fects and overlapping visual and aural elements, his
1959 event expected audience members to interact
in precise ways according to the artist’s vision.
Manuscript received 18 October 2002.
Katie Mondloch is a doctoral candidate in art
history at the University of California at Los
Angeles, where she is writing a dissertation on
screen-reliant media installation art from the
mid-1960s to the present.
Mondloch, A Symphony of Sensations 61