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GARY JAMES JOYNES / CLINKER
FREQUENCY PAINTING : 12 TONES
2011
Edition of 2
12 x 48" x 48" Aluminum Mounted Chromogenic Prints with Custom Sonar Proximity Sensor Body Mapping + Room Pulsing Pure Tone Sound Generators + Self-Powered Speaker Systems
The series “Frequency Painting” by artist Gary James Joynes, also known through his recording moniker Clinker, is an evocation of synaesthetic minimalism.
Through his career in music Clinker/Gary has explored the use of electrons to create sound pieces built from pure tones, harmonics, drones, bleeps and overtones. He has built a unique analog synthesizer and a wide repertoire of intensely individual and unreproduceable sounds. Via experiments in Live Cinema, performing improvisational realtime video plus audio pieces Gary has also developed a minimalist visual vocabulary that has led to his current experiments in synaesthesia and the documentation of private performances.
Gary has imagined a world where sound is form and can be embodied within visible as well as audible wavelengths. Using his analog electronic wonder to generate both simple tones and the swept and pulsed sound signals of his musical compositions, Gary created a machine with which he could manifest the visual identity of his sounds. With the support of the Banff Centre of the Arts he has spent months experimenting to find the resonant frequencies visible in his new body of work.
Tonal energy, featured in cultures the world over has been used to promote healing, balance, meditation, prayer, comfort and peace. Similarly, sand painting, mandalas and non-object based imagery has represented the unknowable, the universal, the infinite. Cultural memory in the global community contains similar pure forms to the images in the Frequency Painting series and 12 Tones: Buddhist walking meditation gardens, the abstract patterns that form the decorative world of the Muslim faith, stained glass shadows and illuminated manuscripts in the western world. Are these inventions of human creativity or the physical manifestation of sound in our worlds? Perhaps Gregorian chants, Buddhist meditation vocalization and the call to prayer trigger an innate and synaesthetic connection leading to the visual content of our disparate cultures. Similarly, Inuit throat singing and the sound of the instruments of the original Australian people could be seen as the sonic counterpoint to sand snow and ice designs created by physical forces in a frigid north and brutally barren outback.
The Frequency Painting series by Gary James Joynes offers us a link to these pure aesthetic truths explored over hundreds of millennia using technology based in the recent analog age, and documented with the best the digital age has to offer. The exhibition provides an opportunity to be both confused and enlightened.
The images presented in “Frequency Painting” are the culmination of hours of bombardment by finely tuned and intensely high volume sound waves. Tones driven through a custom designed machine to capture the resonant frequencies that would give form and pattern to particulate matter set in motion on a steel plate. A modern mandala created through near anachronistic technology, each image is the visible form of the sound that created it.
In 12 Tones, the first manifestation of the Frequency Painting series, we are introduced to sound and vision conjoined through the unique sculptural multimedia units of the exhibition. As the viewer is drawn into the jarring near symmetry of the monochromatic photographic abstraction, an intimate relationship between image and viewer is created. The beauty of the abstract appearing form pulls the observer in and holds them as the serpiginous shape is revisioned as a truly hyperrealistic image. The audible nature of the installation is dependant on the presence of its’ viewers – as we move through the installation we become the force that changes both volume and character of sounds coming from the individual pieces and the instrument as a whole.
To confront a piece at close quarters will enfold the viewer in a visual and auditory storm mimicking that of the artist’s experience in performing with his machines and that of the synaesthete, both blessed and cursed by the comingling of senses. With each change in volume the sounds conflict and interfere with each other, creating a moving and everchanging soundtrack of binaural beating and phase shifts. Even small changes in the listener’s position in any dimension bring an entirely changed sonic world. Participants experience a composition played by the installation in concert with the other viewers moving through the space changing volumes and impeding sound waves. Location, height, head position, and shared experience all matter in a world where no two participants will hear exactly the same composition.
Synaesthesia; a sensation produced in one sensory modality through stimulation of another modality
Mandala: a schematized representation of the cosmos, chiefly characterized by a concentric configuration of geometric shapes, each of which contains an image of a deity or an attribute of a deity. a symbol representing the effort to reunify the self.ESSAY BY DR. DAVID CANDLER
SPECIAL CREDIT AND THANK YOU to SCOTT SMALLWOOD
(Custom electronics design and software programming)_________________________________________________________________________________________
ARTIST STATEMENT
Clinker | Gary James Joynes
FREQUENCY PAINTINGIt has been well over 200 years since the German physicist/musician Ernst Chladni used a violin bow to vibrate plates covered with sand and in so doing discovered what were named after him as the "Chladni Sound Figures". This work was followed in the `60´s by the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny who expanded Chladni´s approach by using fluids, eventually defining the science of Cymatics. A few notable artists have since used Cymatic sound in their practice by exploring the use of fluids, magnetism and gaseous media. My new work is fueled by my discovery that the exploration of the original Chladni sand patterns has typically been isolated to, and adopted by, university Physics labs merely to study waveform phenomena. I have been deeply moved by the sacred geometry I see in the creation of these sublime figures. Their simple beauty mirrors other ageless forms seen in walking meditation paths, Tibetan mandalas, and figures of the Chinese I Ching. I hoped to further explore this organic minimalism through my practice of live cinema and ambient improvisation.
In the Fall/Winter of 2009 I was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts conducting research to expand my work as a Live Cinema and New Media artist. The Banff New Media Institute residency enabled me to experiment with tools and ideas that will drive my artistic practice for many years. Isolated in the bunker of the New Media Lab I started with the origins of Cymatic sound, and through documenting my performance created a bank of visual images of the phenomenon of sound. The analog frequencies became a brush I could use to animate sound with the most simple of media – sand.
Frequency Painting is a body of work that looks deep into the visualization of sound by looking at the sculptural potentials of resonant frequencies. Using a custom designed Analog Modular Synthesizer and several hand-built "wave-driver" speaker instruments, I manipulate audio frequencies to push their signature wave shapes into fine particulate sand. Producing the quality of images displayed in this body of work has taken nearly a year of work and an endurance of mind and body that I could never have imagined. In order to produce the energy necessary to force granular particles into these wonderful patterns I have had to consistently push my sound equipment to deafening levels of close to 120dB, for hours at a time. The sheer violence and cacophony required to create these images is hidden behind their still serenity. Many a wave driver speaker coil has been melted and sacrificed through this process - may they rest in pieces. Creating these works has required an almost meditative balance between the intensity of sound and the delicate movement and patience needed to sweep frequencies and finesse the images I present here. This is truly order from chaos...
Gary James Joynes | August, 2010
All Photography on this page by Cameron Ambrose
Frequency Painting: 12 Tones World Premiere @ Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture Gallery | January 14, 2011
ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT © 2011
