AIR Lab Listen Up! Session #5: The Emotional Life of a Painting

In the fifth instalment of AIR Lab’s Listen Up! Sessions, AIR Lab welcomes visual artist Julien Deiss and sound artist Tao Højgaard for an afternoon of deep listening, artist talks, and live performance. The session centres on inspiration, creativity, artistic method, and the generative potential of collaboration across art forms.

Julien Deiss reflects on artistic process from the perspective of painting, focusing on intuition, material engagement, and the role of other art forms in the development of visual practice. Tao Højgaard continues from the perspective of sound, considering how music can enter cross-aesthetic work not as accompaniment, but as an active and structuring presence. Together, their presentations open onto the question of what becomes possible when artistic media do not merely coexist, but begin to transform one another through shared methods and technological integration.

At the centre of the session is The Emotional Life of a Painting, a collaborative work by Deiss and Højgaard developed through the shared compositional logic of ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement). In this way, ikebana becomes a common framework for artistic collaboration across painting and sound. By integrating embedded sound into analogue painting, the work brings image, listening, time, and technological mediation into a single aesthetic structure. The result is a painting with an inner sonic life: a hidden sound world that continues to unfold even when unheard, and which live performance makes temporarily audible.

For AIR Lab, the event offers a compelling perspective on how artistic practice can open new ways of thinking about relation, perception, and interaction across sound, image, materiality, and technological mediation.