Joyce Hinterding: An Invisible Matter

If you hang around contemporary art circles then Joyce Hinterding is probably the best-known artist you have never heard of. That is because Hinterding is the female half of one of Australia’s most inspired art duos. Alongside David Haines, also a successful artist in his own right, the two experimental collaborators continue to produce some of the more interesting and ingenious works that are situated at the ever-shifting fault line between digital media and contemporary art practice.

Hinterding’s and Haines’ work – in particular their spectacular virtual environments – are often praised for pushing that line in a way which opens up new conceptual fissures, questioning the relational possibilities of spaces, objects, and sounds, as well as the way we experience these. In particular, the viewer experience is optimised through visual and aural immersion as a means of broadening our phenomenological understanding of what reality might be. The Outlands, a work that realised the potential of this theoretical project, was widely acclaimed and won the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s acquisitive Anne Landa New Media Award in 2011.

Hinterding’s solo practice however, is not merely a motivation for such complex collaborations. Her importance as a solo practitioner is undeniable and evidenced by having recently inspired Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts – a new book by Douglas Khan, an eminent scholar in the area of experimental arts and currently a research professor at the National Institute of Experimental Arts at University of New South Wales.

Douglas Khan is just one of a number of fans of Hinterding’s practice in the field of experimental media which is framed by the artist’s substantial knowledge of and continued fascination with the interplay between objects and energies. What is at the core of Hinterding’s practice is her abiding interest in material science, alchemy, electronics, and physical dynamics.

Her forthcoming solo exhibition Simple Forces at Breenspace involves Hinterding making visible the elemental forces that are invisible in everyday life. The works in this show, Soundwaves: Induction Drawings exemplify Hinterding’s investigations into atmospheric activity and its potential as art. Abstract forms are realised onto glass using liquid graphite that responds to electronic circuitry and waveforms. As Patrice Sharkey noted about Hinterding’s deep fascination with noise in an essay addressing the artist’s exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art, paradoxically it is noise that we can’t hear. But what makes Hinterding’s work so alluring is precisely in its capacity to reveal the otherwise meaningless white noise of everyday existence, “the vast amounts of incidental and ambient noise whirr and hum in the sonic surrounds of our daily lives”, instead inventing a specific material science of sound which captures atmospheric phenomena.