Contemporary life is proliferated with audio-visual media. The amalgamation of sounds and images are relatively new in the overall history of human expression and serves as a signifier of our technological advances and continual transition into a digitised world over the last fifty years. Our consumption of audio-visual and multimedia material has become everyday experiences and now represent tools that we consider to be essential in business, cultural expression and entertainment. It is within this context that conceptual contemporary painter Corné Eksteen explores the incorporation of sound into his paintings.

Eksteen removes the linear time-based characteristic of sound in his visualisation approach and creates figurative audio-visual compositions or soundscapes, by focussing on the vibrational nature of sound. This vibrational attribute of both sound and light, often represented graphically as sinusoidal waves constitutes the foundation from which he visually interprets his subject matter. The subject is thus celebrated for both its physical appearance and its incorporated audio properties.

Completed works are scanned into a neural network, utilising several algorithms and AI platforms to interpret the waveforms and colour values within the work. Isolated sinusoidal waveforms inside the images are reverse engineered into an audio file, rooted in a sound bank consisting of over a thousand sound samples captured by the artist. Each work is exhibited with a QR code from which the accompanying AI interpreted soundtrack can be accessed via personal handheld devices.

soundWorks is a re-assessment of visual representations of the world, utilizing several artistic traditions such as portraiture and still life. The work explores the unseen nature of the physical world where all matter vibrates at some frequency and as such, could generate sound.