MFA Graduating Exhibition: Gary Wasyliw: Relativity

Gary Wasyliw: Relativity
MFA Graduating Exhibition
Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance
University of Regina

November 3 to 14, 2017

My work examines philosophies of perception through associations between art and science. I am interested in the basis of human observation and ways in which our relative position to views of the world reflect on our understandings of those things. I explore this through the intersection of sound art and expanded cinema.

Relativity is an installation that forms an interdisciplinary synchresis of cinema and sound through play with indeterminate patterns and abstractions. Avant-garde composer Michel Chion understands synchresis as “the spontaneous and irresistible mental fusion, completely free of any logic, that happens between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time.” I am interested in the quantum states of light pixels and digital sound as an aesthetic model for the binary phenomena found at the basis of our perceptions of the natural realm. In looking at the world, we focus our observation on the continuous, analog states of substances that manifest from these building blocks of quantum elements. In each case, this observation will be interpreted relative to the personal situation of the viewer, whom I thus invite to engage and respond with personal associations to the abstracted aural and visual synchretic moments generated by the work./i>

The imagery for this piece is from drone video studies, altered through visual editing software. The sound is processed through granular synthesis with its root tone centered on a harmonic of the electromagnetic frequency of hydrogen, the most plentiful and basic binary building block in universe. The shifting abstractions of the recorded imagery suggest new perceptions as they proceed through time.