Rimbaud lives on. Not in his original guise as 19th-century French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, but as Robin Rimbaud, aka "Scanner," the 21st-century experimental British sound artist whose ambient work is so circa now that it mimics the cinematic pulse of our contemporary tubes (both the underground and cathode-ray varieties).

Still, there's much of the erstwhile poet's spirit in the University of Hawai'i Art Gallery's new show, "What Sound Does a Color Make?," organized by Independent Curators International, New York. Its contemporary and "vintage" video art straddles aural and visual modes — just the sort of sensory intermingling that obsessed the elder Rimbaud.

SWALLOWING THE RED PILL

What Arthur Rimbaud and other early fans of "synesthesia" (when stimulation of one sense induces a sensation in another) sought was raw, multisensory perception that, taken as a whole, would be equivalent to swallowing the red pill in the movie, "The Matrix." Synesthesia was about sinking beneath thought, into a primal state: a heady neural stew untethered by the mind's critical apparatus. So when Rimbaud construed silence as visibly "surging," or spoke of the sun's "purple perfumes," he was trying to get past making sense of sense.

Today's revived interest in synesthesia attests, maybe, not so much to a collective burning hunger to understand the nature of reality but to a post-Romantic culture happily drowning in sensory input and yet desiring release from it. If you're listening to the Ramones wail, "I wanna be sedated" on your iPod as you wait for the lights to change from red to green, you get the gist.

That self-pod, Apple's brilliant marketing metaphor for urban life, translates well to this show. Leaving behind an overgrown, humid campus to enter a womblike gallery, its multiple mini-pod room installations reverberating with light and sound, one wonders if a better question for the show's title might be: Does technology embrace us as we do it?

The answer seems to be yes, and no.

CHOREOGRAPHED SOUND

The subject here is not really color, but pulsating, mutating, inundating light — and its physical correspondences to sound. Scanner's collaborative piece with D-Fuse, a London-based artists' collective, is among the show's most comfortable — and so accessible — works. "Light Turned Down" pairs a single-channel video projection of streetlights, distorted and reprocessed in fast-mo, with Scanner's ravelike soundtrack.

Created first as a video, which then inspired the aural groove, "Light Turned Down" subverts the usual mode of music video production; here, sounds are choreographed tightly to images' movements, not the other way around. The vibe is a little like driving slick city streets by night, with windows and stereo turned up, way up — only more precisely simulated and so, if trance is the object, "better."

While some works, like Scanner's, mesmerize, others disrupt. For that reason, epileptics should avoid this show. Seriously. Those with iron neurons, enter at will.

Particularly disruptive is "LUX," an intense installation by Vienna-based duo Granular-Synthesis. Abstract electronic color fields and thumping soundscape meld into one, unified cacophony. Also in this category is Scott Arford's "Static Room," unfortunately configured here not as a discrete space, but as a monitor-lined walkway; what could have been overwhelming static-surround is instead only idly obnoxious.

Too bad it, and Thom Kubli's "Monochrome Transporter," aren't more successful; both speak to the erosive presence of visual and auditory noise in contemporary life. Like "LUX," Kubli's Rothko-esque blue screen morphs in time with its aural counterpart. But the changes — described as "metabolic" — are barely perceptible, making it more neural game than hypnotic environment: Can we figure it out? Viewers were spending a lot of time trying.

The pre-digital videos, such as Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut's late-1960s "Beatles Electroniques," shown for context, appear relatively primitive and quaint. But naivete is their strong suit: There's warmth and quirky personality behind their queries into the human-machine relationship — qualities much of the contemporary work lacks.

An exception is Jim Campbell's 2003 clever, humanistic "Self-Portrait of Paul," which transforms sonic artist Paul DeMarinis' voice via light-emitting diodes (high tones are bright, low are dark) to illuminate his digitally stored portrait. The image is a little different each time: A microphone blends the prerecorded voice track with room sounds it picks up, so viewers' movements — and metaphorically, perceptions — partly determine how he's seen.

CACOPHONY HAPPENS

Campbell's work is also disruptive, though unintentionally: Its harmonics bleat into every nearby installation room. Soundproofing is needed here.

It would be easy to draw simplistic old-/new-school lines between these artists. But granddaddy Paik's 1960s description of "idea" in his art as simply "a way or key to something new" seems consistent with what's happening now: If the artists intend to provoke us to think deeply about perception and reality, it's not really clear. Their cross-modal sensory overload seems more a dressed-up version of messy, numbing, alienating contemporary life. Maybe that's partly the point. Maybe it's also a problem.

What is clear is that many of the assembled artists would like us to stop, briefly, making sense of sense. Leave that to the abstruse wall text.