This practice-based research project explores, defines and demonstrates the state of spatio-temporal suspension, or suspended experience, where abstract characteristics of sound and light in music and imagery coalesce to afford audience and performer the experience of liminal or “between” aesthetic zones, in turn providing a gateway into imaginative worlds. Informed by the author’s background in the performance and composition of forms of experimental popular music as well as graphic design and photography, the investigation utilises a combination of creative research methods and research-led analysis within a phenomenological framework to interrogate the physiological and neurological basis for this state. In order to better understand and define this concept, relevant creative exemplars including music and music videos, experimental films and site-specific installations are examined. The analysis draws upon a range of relevant philosophies and theories of perception relating to time and space, including phenomenology, liminality, the Japanese concept of Ma and heterotopia. Perceptual and psychological theories, including affect as felt experience and its role in aesthetics are considered, as well as embodied cognition in aesthetics and ecological approaches to perception. These theories and concepts consider humans as integral parts of a dynamic ecosystem of individual and shared information and perception, providing insight into the perceptual basis of suspension and why it is often encountered as a cross-modal experience. Through the analysis of creative works and the author’s self-observation and journaling of the audiovisual exploration of suspension in performance and practice, the research identifies compositional features that are prevalent in works that facilitate and enhance the potential for suspended experience. These features are explored and realised through creative works that examine how suspension is imparted through an audiovisual composition, how it is experienced by the practitioner through the recording process and as an improvised performance, and how the works are received and experienced by others, via examination of responses to specially designed reception tests. The findings are expressed in the conception and realisation of two major bodies of work: an audiovisual suite, Suspension Studies (2020), comprised of musical and visual studies of suspension as an immobile work; and a site-specific performance work, States of Suspension (2018), which affords audiences and performers an active aesthetic experience of suspension in situ. The enquiry contributes to the understanding of a relatively unexplored phenomenon in music and visual arts and intends to encourage further discourse and investigation into this topic
