From Goth to Robots: Music Imageries, between Fiction and Reality.

The article raises some preliminary questions about constructing a text, conceived as the result of drawing on memories and images of the world and importing and translating those images into texts. From this point of view, texts that embody an imagery represent an in- between point placed between fiction and reality. Thus, the idea of imagery suggests the possibility of a shared set of virtualities of imagination, as if imagination itself could be a linguistic system with a combination of limited assets. The concept of imagery is also useful in observing the way through which an imagery is being built. A good example is musical imagery, thinking of musical cultures as a true independent trans- textual semiotics, not just made up of sounds but also composed of imageries. The article considers the case of Gothic genre and its visual style, where imagery appears to be constructed by analogy and reworking, across adjacent contexts and pre-existing sources. Moreover, the article focuses on the electronic band Kraftwerk, which has intentionally worked on visual and cultural stereotypes. In the works of this band, sounds and images became both core components of their identity: a mythical building of an artificial and robotic imagery of sound, as an emblematic result of a visual withdrawal coming from visual arts and films.