Paul Sharits

While I was studying painting in the early 1960s ... I was also making films ... I stopped painting in the middle 1960s but became more and more engaged with film, attempting to isolate and essentialize aspects of its representationalism. I had also become most intrigued with the differences between reading and listening, or, more inclusively, the larger discontinuities between seeing and hearing; film, sound film, appeared to be the most natural medium for testing what thresholds of relatedness might exist between these perceptual modes. In making films, I have always been more interested in speech patterns, music and temporal pulses in nature than in the visual arts for exemplary models of composition (perhaps because I had studied music as a child, and had internalized musical forms of structuring)....
My early "flicker films"-wherein clusters of differentiated single frames of solid color can appear to almost blend or, each frame insisting upon its discreteness, can appear to aggressively vibrate-are filled with attempts to allow vision to function in ways usually particular to hearing.

Paul Sharits, Hearing : Seeing, Film Culture 65-66, 1978