Optophon
Country
Germany
Language
German
Year
1922
Source form
Dadaist media-theoretical text, optophonetic manifesto, technical-media proposal, and patent-related apparatus design.
Source-world
Raoul Hausmann’s Optophone belongs to the Berlin Dada and post-Dada universe of optophonetics. Its main source-world is Weimar-era avant-garde media experimentation, where sound poetry, poster poetry, typography, photomontage, photography, radio, sound film, early television, electrical media, photoelectric cells, and synaesthesia were brought together as parts of a new theory of perception. Hausmann’s optophonetic writings begin in the early 1920s, especially with “Optophonetik,” first published in the multilingual avant-garde journal Veshch–Objet–Gegenstand in 1922. The machine is conceived as an apparatus for transforming visible forms into sound and sound into visible forms, rather than as a conventional musical instrument or decorative color organ.
Construction
The Optophone is an imagined and partially technically specified synaesthetic apparatus composed of optical, electrical, acoustic, and control elements. In Hausmann’s ideal version, it includes a keyboard similar to that of a calculating machine, a cylinder divided into fields, printed or coded line patterns, a quartz plate, a glass prism, a neon lamp, a photoelectric or selenium cell, an amplifier, and a loudspeaker. These components form a conversion chain between optical difference and acoustic output: visible forms are treated as patterns of light that can be detected, converted into electrical signals, amplified, and heard.
The related Hausmann/Broido patent material shows a more explicitly calculative version of this photoelectric logic. The British patent diagram for the 1936 calculating apparatus includes rotating cylinders, coded slots, a light source, and a photocell. This apparatus should not simply be equated with the Optophone itself, but it belongs to the same technical imagination: coded optical differences are read by photoelectric means and translated into another operational form.
No original working Optophone by Hausmann is known. The machine exists through writings, sketches, patent-related diagrams, later descriptions, and modern reconstructions, especially those by Peter Keene. Jeu de Paume describes Keene’s reconstruction as a later realization of an instrument imagined and devised by Hausmann.
Operation
The Optophone operates by converting visual patterns into sound and, in principle, sound into visible forms. In the visual-to-sound direction, light passes through or across graphic structures, coded surfaces, line patterns, prisms, plates, or cylinders. Variations in light intensity are detected by a selenium or photoelectric cell and transformed into electrical signals. These signals are then amplified and emitted through a loudspeaker as sound. The machine therefore treats image, light, and graphic form as potentially audible structures.
In the sound-to-image direction, sound is imagined as capable of producing or modulating visual phenomena. A voice, phoneme, tone, or noise can be converted into electrical variation and then into changing luminous forms. This makes the Optophone a machine of transduction rather than representation: it does not simply illustrate sound with images or accompany images with music, but attempts to move between sensory modes by technical conversion.
The operator uses the apparatus as an artist-engineer, performer, or perceptual experimenter. The machine may be played, adjusted, observed, and listened to. Its output is not a stable message but an audiovisual event in which sound, light, line, rhythm, and intensity are translated into one another.
Modes
Light, image, line pattern, typography, sound, voice, phoneme, number, electrical signal, projection, gesture, performance, bodily perception.
Interface / user position
The user is positioned as an optophonetic operator: part performer, part technician, part experimental subject. The interface is not only the keyboard, cylinder, lamp, photocell, and loudspeaker, but also the human sensorium itself. The machine asks the user and audience to perceive across the usual separation of eye and ear. It turns perception into an experimental field and treats the body as a modifiable interface.
Epistemic promise
The Optophone promises a new knowledge of relations between the senses. It suggests that sound and image are not separate domains but convertible forms of vibration, rhythm, intensity, and energy. Its epistemic promise is not universal documentation, prediction, or memory, but perceptual reorganization: learning to hear visible forms and see acoustic forms. It imagines technical media as instruments for expanding the limits of human perception.
Political / social stakes
The Optophone belongs to Dada’s broader attack on inherited aesthetic, linguistic, and perceptual habits. It challenges the passive separation of reading, seeing, hearing, and speaking, and proposes a technologically intensified form of perception. In this sense, the machine has a social and political dimension: it treats sensory re-education as part of cultural transformation.
At the same time, the Optophone exposes the ambiguity of the avant-garde machine. It is anti-bourgeois and experimental, but also bound to technical systems, patents, scientific language, and prosthetic fantasies. It promises liberation from fixed sensory habits while also depending on apparatus, control, and technical mediation. Borck reads Hausmann’s optophonetic project as a form of visionary prosthetics: not merely a practical aid, but a device for transforming the human relation to perception itself.
References
Blom, Ina. “The Touch through Time: Raoul Hausmann, Nam June Paik and the Transmission Technologies of the Avant-Garde.” Leonardo 34, no. 3 (2001): 209–215. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1576937
Borck, Cornelius. “Sound Work and Visionary Prosthetics: Artistic Experiments in Raoul Hausmann.” Papers of Surrealism 4 (Winter 2005): 1–25. https://www.mediaarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Cornelius_Borck.pdf
Broido, Daniel, and Raoul Hausmann. “Improvements in and Relating to Calculating Apparatus.” British Patent 446,338, accepted April 27, 1936. https://www.rechnerlexikon.de/artikel/Patent%3AGB446338
Donguy, Jacques. “Machine Head: Raoul Hausmann and the Optophone.” Leonardo 34, no. 3 (2001): 217–220. https://doi.org/10.1162/002409401750286967
Hausmann, Raoul. “Optophonetik.” Veshch–Objet–Gegenstand, nos. 1–3 (May 1922): 13–14. Reprinted in Texte bis 1933, vol. 2, edited by Michael Erlhoff, 51–57. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1982.
Niebisch, Arndt. “Ether Machines: Raoul Hausmann’s Optophonetic Media.” Communications. Media. Design 9, no. 3 (2024): 173–187. https://doi.org/10.17323/cmd.2024.22640
