Sound and vision

It hits you like a punch in the face. As you inch your way down the stairs into the basement gallery, the increasingly dim lighting barely enough to illuminate the warning to allow eyes time to adjust, it's the ears that bear the full force of the assault. Turn the corner to the final flight of steps and there it is: a vast screen directly in front of you, a wall of sound rising up to meet the eyes.

This is "Spectacle: The Music Video Exhibition", billed as "a groundbreaking and sensory exploration of the music video as a contemporary art form", at the Melbourne-based Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). For sensory read "LOUD".

"It is big, it is loud, it is very confronting," says ACMI curator Amita Kirpalani who, with colleague Fiona Trigg, worked on the show's Australian content, in collaboration with its Los Angeles-based curators, Jonathan Wells and Meg Grey Wells of Flux, a global creative collective. Flux put together this touring exhibition which takes in the art, history, influence and future of the music video.

"We hope that that is what draws people in," Kirpalani says of the emphatic style and design. But she concedes: "I think the noise will definitely put people off. Jonathan and Meg's vision is that that is part of it - the marriage of sound and vision. Meg hopes that people feel really disoriented."

The exhibition, which includes more than 300 music videos - about 15 hours of content, Kirpalani estimates - as well as original props, photographs and recreated sets, is billed as the most comprehensive survey of music videos ever staged. It comes to Melbourne after seasons in Cincinnati, Sao Paulo and New York, and the organisers hope to continue to tour it, including to Asia, with local curators adding to the mix in each country.

The exhibition is organised thematically, with the second theme, "In the Beginning", devoted to the history of the form, while the other nine sections draw on music videos across the decades.