CYMATIC

CYMATIC is a collaboration with photographer Erika Weitz that translates acoustic phenomena into dual form — once in code, once in chemistry. A custom generative algorithm simulates the Chladni resonance patterns produced by five notes of the C major pentatonic scale (C, D, E, G, A), casting those patterns as light projections onto a wet collodion plate, where Weitz captures them through one of the oldest photographic processes in existence. Each of the five resulting works is a unique physical object — a moment in which transient vibration takes tangible, permanent form on metal.

The project follows in the footsteps of early light abstraction: Ben Laposky's oscillons of the 1950s, Berenice Abbott's interference patterns at MIT — work that demonstrated photography could simultaneously serve scientific inquiry and abstract artistic expression. CYMATIC inhabits the same territory: the Chladni patterns it renders are not invented but revealed, already latent in the physics of the pentatonic scale, one of music's most ancient and universal structures. That the same underlying harmonic relationships surface across cultures and centuries — and now across code and collodion — is part of what the work is examining.

The collaboration required both artists to learn to think through the other's medium. What resolved cleanly in the algorithm didn't always survive the wet plate; the chemistry demanded its own negotiation. The project frames this friction as generative rather than incidental — each medium offering a different resolution of the same phenomenon, neither complete on its own. Science has always operated this way: building models that abstract complex realities into forms our senses can hold. CYMATIC is another such translation, one that leaves both source and copy visible.