Les creating Arduino C++ coded kinetic components at NYC Resistor, Brooklyn. 

Below an artist rendering of Nomadic BioForm for Zero1, Art & Technology (2019) 

The Inside Out Studio: Practice and the Micro-Museum

I am a US ZERO1 new media artist that explores the kinetic rhythms of cities. Exploring the museum as a living space, he has created laboratories and nomadic micro-museums in Mongolia, Brazil, Singapore, and China. With the focus on open-ended process he excavates local languages gestures, and objects that represent community identities. 

At MMCA, I will produce a new body of work called "NomadCodex" using simple C++ coded kinetic robots and micro-LCD installed in temporary modules installed in architectural spaces in a neighborhood. NomadCodex also will create objects interwoven into living collages, assemblages, tapestries and initiate a “body-portable museum" that explores both craft and new media local identities and "semiotic-camouflage" that explores topographical environments that evidence Korean identities. 

This “museum-within-a-museum” is in part inspired by Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, where investigations of memory are investigations of territories. Museums create complex and fascinating phenomenological experiences. Creating re-territorialized spaces within the museum explores the proximities between the artist and the museum and the public (Enwezor, 2012). 

The MMCA residency comes at an important juncture in my career. In 2017 I completed my post-doctoral research on studios in museums in 2017 and am presently a scholar of visual cultures at Columbia University. I am contributing author of “The Artist-centric model in Museums” in Looking to New Institutional Models: China’s Cultural Landscape by Mid-Century, Ching, N and Tanner, L, (eds), Long Museum, Shanghai (Long Museum, Shanghai, 2019) that explores artist-centric installations and museums-within-museums and “FormLAB: Interfacing Technology with Site” (2019) ISEA International Symposium of Electronic Art, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea.

Aspects that Interest me about MMCA

My studio based research explores the history of the museum (world fairs, world expositions, visual cultures, institutional critique). MMCA draws culturally-diverse audiences and supports and has hosted an international community of artists, many of whom I have met and all of whom are dedicated explorers of visual culture. To this I seek to contribute.

Background on my Practice

Inspired by the Happenings in the 1960s as well as the Surrealist Cadavre Exquis games of André Breton in the 1920s. FormLAB explores both inner spaces between artists (what William Burroughs called the Third Mind) but also outer spaces in the form of institutional critique and cultural intervention. FormLAB created a Cadavre Exquis assembly line (2010); an artist-shaman ritualized art-making performance (2012); artist-musician performances in Mongolia (2014) and a basketball game on the Great Wall, China (2017). 

Selected Bibliography of Research on the Nomadic Museum

Bataille, G (1985) Formless. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota

Becker, C (2002) Surpassing the spectacle: Global transformations and the changing politics of art. New York: Rowman & Littlefield

Bishop, C (2004). Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics: October 2004, p. 52).

Blanchot, M (1986) The Writing of the Disaster. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press

Bourriaud, N (2007) The Radicant. New York, Lukas & Sternberg

Breton, A (1948) Le Cadavre Exquis: Son Exaltation. Paris, La Dragonne, October 7–30, Paris, Galerie Nina Dausset.

Craig-Martin, M (2015) On Being an Artist. London, Arts Books Publishing, Ltd.

Crowley, P & Hegarty, P, (2005) Formless: Ways In and Out of Form, Bern, Peter Lang AG.

Deleuze, G (2006) Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. David Lapoujade (ed), Semiotexte, MIT Press.Cambridge, MA

Enwezor, O and Bouteloup, M [et al.] (2012) Intense Proximity: an Anthology of the Near and the Far. Paris, Artlys: Centre National des Arts Plastiques.

Ezard, J (2002) “Mystic's 350-year-old treatise to be published,” The Guardian Online, October 15, 2002. Accessed May 30, 2018, http://www.guardian.co.uk/.

Foster, H (1996) The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Foucault, M (1988) Diacritics. Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University Press 

Joynes, et al, (2018) Going Beyond: Art as Adventure (Cambridge Scholars, UK

Joynes, L (2017) Intercultural Collaboration in the Arts: Shamanism, Ritual in Brazil.  [post-doctoral thesis] School of Communications and Arts (ECA), University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Joynes, L , (2016) FormLAB in Anywhere v.1. Lowry, S and Douglas, S (Eds.), New York: Parsons Fine Arts, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design; Project Anywhere; and School of Creative Industries.

Joynes, L and Vu, T (2015) Draw: Artists from China and the US at Beijing’s Inside Out Art Museum [catalogue] LeRoy Neiman Foundation, New York.

Joynes, L, (2014) in Art and Research at the Outermost Limits of Site Specificity. Lowry, S, and Douglas, S eds 2014), University of Newcastle, Australia

Joynes, L and Basu, S, (2012) The Invisible and the Transvisible in contemporary Art, Singapore. Journal for Visual Culture, University of California, Irvine 

Lacan, J (1981) The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, A (1975) Tristes Tropiques, translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman. New York, Penguin Books).

Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Connivances of Desire with the Figural. In: McKeon, R., ed. Driftworks. New York, Semiotext(e) Inc., pp. 57-68.

Mahon, A (1987) “Displaying the Body: Surrealism’s Geography of A Pleasure," Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, (London, V&A Publications.

Mauss, M (1979) Sociology and Psychology, London, Routledge.

Muir, P (2014) Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect; Sculpture, Space, and the Cultural Value of Urban Imagery. Burlington, VT, Ashgate, Publishing Co.

Oldenburg, C (1967) Store Days: Documents from the Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962): Selected by Claes Oldenburg and Emmett Williams, (New York, NY, Something Else Press, Inc.

Smithson, R, (1996) in Flam, J., (ed.) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Sontag, S (1997) On Photography. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Taussig, M (2008) Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Selected Images from Museums of Memory and Nomadic Museums in China, Korea, France, Brazil, Mongolia