#marquiss

      ‘It’s not hard to consider cinema expanding into a deafening pale abstraction controlled by computers.’[1]

  ‘The ultimate filmgoer would be a captive of sloth. Sitting constantly in a movie house, among the flickering shadows, his perception would take on a kind of sluggishness. He would be the hermit dwelling among the elsewheres, forgoing the salvation of reality. Films would follow films, until the action of each one would drown in a vast reservoir of pure perception. He would not be able to distinguish between good or bad films, all would be swallowed up into an endless blur. He would not be watching films, but rather experiencing blurs of many shades. Between blurs he might even fall asleep, but that wouldn’t matter. Sound tracks would hum through the torpor. Words would drop through this languor like so many lead weights.’[2]

  At first, I see only a black rectangle interrupted by heavy strokes of text. Then, orders and washed-out ochre. Straight in. Pale golden lines connect the upper edge of the re­­­ctangle to the bottom, shivering and shaking from side to side in endlessly shifting patterns.[3] I step into the luminous screen. I hear orders: proceed in a straight line. This simple geometry is thwarted by verticals on a y-axis at right angles to the horizontal x-axis that I attempt to traverse. I’m wading through a marsh, thick with rushes and reeds. The intersecting lines I push through are lateral shoots connected to a continuous stem – a rhizome[4] – growing underground, perpendicular to the force of gravity. Any point of the rhizome can and must be connected to any other[5]. I push through for minutes on end, and hear more orders, until open space advances towards me through the density. Clearing. Keep it[6] low. Don’t want too much sky. Don’t want too many big, flat, untextured spaces.

  I keep it low. I am underground, inside a cave[7] [8] [9] where people compete for prizes. I see an armour-plated alien disembark a hover-car. I hear an Australian accent emanating from a fleshy, pink orifice beneath a helmet and beady black eyes. I hear heavy breathing. I see a military man, a soldier. He guides the alien on foot through the labyrinthine cave and asks it questions. In the middle distance, I see more soldiers. They fire their weapons then vanish instantly, teleporting elsewhere. Spaces are woven together ever more tightly by more and more lines of transport and communication. You can transform any part of the world into any other part of the world; you can bend one point in space to connect to another.

  High above me I see an aperture and the flat, untextured sky shining through. I climb the cave wall, through a beam of light, towards its source. Looking back, I see projections where the beam of light meets the ground[10]: I see flickering black and white figures, converging on nothing and dispersing beyond the edges of the rectangular illumination, into nothing.[11] I see a rubber plant[12] revolving with organisms swarming, photosynthesizing perhaps. Bodies swarm across the plant’s leaves like mitochondria in a cell, propelling it around and around, and dispersing beyond the margins of each leaf. Repeating. I see figures flickering, converging on nothing and dispersing into nothing. I see a rubber plant revolving, bodies swarming across its leaves. Repeating[13]. Revolving. Abscission.

  I see the bare branches of deciduous trees depicted in carbon and ash; the residue of sticks and branches, burnt and compressed to varying densities, traced across rectangles of pressed cellulose pulp, derived from deciduous trees; I see a sylvan setting. I see fractal canopies – lines splitting into lines splitting into lines – pulmonary systems drawn by hand and then rendered (again) in the grains of animal gelatin[14]; I see celluloid film.[15]

Incision.

  Black and white figures flicker again. Swarm again. I’m not sure if they’re the same figures as before. Another soldier, not the same one as before.

  “What I’m doing is creating an environment – creating an environment whereby people feel involved. To what extent do I allow this to be totally spontaneous, maybe chaotic, and to what degree do I exercise control?”[16]

  An ultramarine sky fills my field of vision as I reach the aperture and step out onto the ledge. I hear music to my left and then all around. As the melody descends, a mountain range rises up in front of me. Flat, untextured space fractures into unknowably complicated roughness[17] – convoluted and peculiar. I throw myself over the edge into the void and am swept high above the landscape on thermal columns. I find myself in free flight[18], scanning the valleys and mountainsides like a bird searching for food[19]. What I feel is not quite déjà vu, but there’s something oddly familiar about how the land looks from here: geometry mimicking geology, mathematics mimicking millennia of glacial erosion and tectonic plate movement. ‘Somewhere at the bottom of my memory are the sunken remains of all the films I have ever seen, good and bad they swarm together forming cinematic mirages.’[20] I see the ledge. I see a shark[21]. I see a teapot[22]. I see blurs of many shades.

  Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules repeated without end, says Benoit Mandelbrot.[23] ‘What seems to be without order, often turns out to be highly ordered. By isolating the most unstable thing, we can arrive at some kind of coherence, at least for a while.’[24] So I fly straight towards the snow-capped mountains, isolate a single snowflake and dive into it. 

  *

  I open my eyes.

I see a human face for what feels like the first time in a long time: A female face, close up. 

I am in room 2D-506 of the building where the future I now inhabit was invented.[25]

She plays contrapuntal melodies, manipulating patterns of sound with machines built for the manipulation of patterns of information. She generates real-time output operations on voltage controlled equipment. She patiently answers questions asked by a voice behind me. Interrupted. The same question repeated.[26]

  Her face is framed by two sets of parallel lines. I become aware of the edges.

I become aware that the voices I hear are in fact in front of me. 

I realize I am motionless, mute and impassive.

I see 360 degrees of darkness surrounding a luminous rectangle.

A bell rings.

The rectangle turns black.

“Hello.”

      [1] Robert Smithson, A Cinematic Atopia, Artforum, September 1971.

[2] ibid

[3] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of SWAMP, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, 1969, 16mm Film, 6 mins.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari transposed this terminology in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia Project (1972-1980) to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. 

[5] In a procrastinatory reverie, I imagined this entire text typeset in one continuous line, printed on a long scroll. Notes (like this one) to the body text and other pieces of ancillary information would be printed perpendicular to the length of the scroll, directly above the word or phrase that they annotate. Zoomed out, the entire document would resemble a cross-section diagram of a reed bed.

[6] It = the camera. Jean-Luc Godard famously said: “A camera filming itself in a mirror would be the ultimate movie.” Smithson’s ultimate filmgoer (see 2) is a response of sorts to this quotation.

[7] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of This Spartan Life: Episode 4 (Interview with McKenzie Wark).

[8] Towards the end of A Cinematic Atopia – the essay which this text ‘inhabits’ like an endoparasite or a Xenomorph facehugger from the Alien films – Smithson describes an unrealized work: he plans to build a cinema inside a cave. The only film shown inside the cave would be one documenting the cinema’s construction. He describes a shot from the film: the camera moving slowly from inside the tunnel, towards a pinpoint of light emanating from the cave’s entrance.

[9] I’m not going to reveal the extent of my ignorance of classical Greek philosophy by attempting to summarize Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I invite readers who are up on The Republic to *insert own footnote* here, or...

[10] …here.

[11] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of Gummibaum, Thomas Bayrle and Daniel Kohl, 1993/4, 16mm Film, 5mins 30sec

[12] Gummibaum is the German word for rubber plant, grown around the world for ornamental purposes. Despite a diversity of trivia relating to its cultivation and uses (in parts of India people guide the roots of the plant over chasms to form living bridges for example, or more obviously, the fact that its leaves contain a poisonous, white latex, previously used to manufacture rubber), its symbolic significance in this context (i.e. 12) seems uncertain. My best guess is that the rubber plant’s global ubiquity is what’s important here. It evokes banal, non-places – offices and institutional environments, the same the world over.

[13] Imagine visual krautrock.

[14] An aside: Before researching this text I’d never really considered the fact that motion picture film contains gelatin. Due to my personal beliefs relating to animal welfare, this revelation prompted soul-searching and Google searching. I was relieved to discover that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) ‘does not actively campaign against watching movies or taking photographs for pleasure’.

[15] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of The Role Of A Lifetime, Deimantas Narkevicius, 2003, Various formats transferred to video, 16mins

[16] In addition to this short paragraph culled from the interview with filmmaker Peter Watkins that is the focus of The Role Of A Lifetime, I wanted to include the quotation: “We as human beings try and be complicated in our memories and our feelings, but not in the pictures we see and sounds we hear. We put images and sounds together, but we never discuss what it means to do this (…) What effect is this having on society? On history? On our personal feelings? What effect is this having on the way we think about time, space, structure and process?” More words dropping through the languor like lead weights. Words that I cannot synthesize.

[17] Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) argued that the opposite of regularity is ‘roughness’, rather than ‘irregularity’. Mandelbrot created the first-ever theory of roughness, advancing ‘fractals’ as a way of explaining and describing non-smooth, ‘rough’ objects in the real world. A fractal is a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as mountainsides or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation. Fractals are also found in human activity, such as architecture and stock market prices. Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry.

[18] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of Vol Libre, Loren Carpenter, 1979-80, CG Animation produced to accompany a SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) lecture demonstrating how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. The world's first fractal movie, it uses 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms computed on a VAX-11/780.

[19] I originally wanted the bird in this simile to be a waxwing, as a kind of homage to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.  The structure of that particular novel (i.e. an enormous excess of ancillary information, relating to and vastly outweighing a comparatively formal, lyrical piece of writing that is ostensibly the ‘main event’) was in the back of my mind as I was planning this text. The sky in the first sentence of the paragraph would have been ‘azure’ rather than ‘ultramarine’: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, by the false azure in the window pane.” It turns out, however, that waxwings live in forests, subsisting on a diet of berries, insects and sap. The majestic, aerial views of panoramic mountain ranges simulated in Vol Libre would be totally outside of your typical waxwing’s ken.

[20] Robert Smithson, op cit

[21] When sharks and other ocean predators can’t find food, they abandon Brownian motion, the random motion seen in swirling gas molecules, for Lévy flight – a mix of long trajectories and short, random movements found in turbulent fluids.

[22] From Wikipedia: The Utah teapot is a 3D computer model, which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of fairly simple shape, which appears solid, cylindrical and partially convex. A teapot primitive is considered the equivalent of a "hello world" program, as a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as a basic geometry reference for scene and light setup. Many libraries will even have functions dedicated to drawing teapots. The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.

[23] Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals and the art of roughness, TED Talk

[24] Robert Smithson, op cit

[25] Bell laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey was the research and development arm of American telephone monopoly AT&T Corporation. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for research carried out at Bell Labs and work completed there is credited with, amongst other things, the development of the laser, the transistor, radio astronomy, programming languages, information theory, various computer operating systems and charge-coupled devices vital for digital imaging. Ostensibly, the purpose of the facility was to invent technology that the parent company could ultimately profit from, but by all accounts, in the 1960s and ‘70s much of what went on was closer to pure research. Bell Labs involved itself in the interface between cutting-edge technology and avant-garde art, engineers collaborating with a number of artists and musicians, including Laurie Spiegel.  

Duncan Marquiss is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. His current project considers relationships between innate searching behaviour and creativity – ideas that he will loosely present at Artists’ Moving Image Festival through an eclectic and engaging collection of films spanning artists film, documentary, interview and examples of early computer animation.

  Alexander Storey Gordon: You take a very different approach to the understanding of what a film screening can be for this year’s festival – perhaps it could best be described as a kind of film collage?

  Duncan Marquiss: When I started, I probably planned it to be much more of a collage, and I have a lot of very different kinds of film condensed into it. But as I went on, it seemed more and more problematic to cut up the films and put them together. There also seemed to be natural patterns occurring. I began looking at a lot of films which where interviews or conversations, and then also lots of films like the Thomas Bayrle and Daniel Kohl's film, Gummibaum, or Loren Carpenter’s Vol Libre; these kind of experiential little visual ‘things’ which are much more immersive. There are two different types of work that seemed to present themselves. I certainly felt uneasy about chopping up other people’s films to try and fit in my ‘essayistic overview’.

  ASG: It is a little bit like a lecture or an essay; there are titles that your films fall under. You have a fascinating series of headings in your notes like ‘Foraging’, ‘Attention traps’, ‘Play’, ‘Inherited behaviour’ and so on.

  DM: Those notes where kind of just mind vomit typed out.

  ASG: But that’s what I quite liked about them. It’s interesting to see those sort of ideas being plotted out.

  DM: Loose association.

  ASG: That was why I interpreted your programme as a collage. It is less about cutting films up, and more about bringing together different strands of reference and types of film.

  DM: Yes, I did think that maybe there would be a problem with showing works that I would call ‘artworks’ alongside more liminal film – films that ‘surf’ categories or those that are more like essay references. There is a lot in the programme that you wouldn’t normally consider part of the canon of art. But these categories are always up for grabs, so perhaps the issue of categories or separate histories isn’t such a problem. The programme most of all reflects my practice, that’s really where it comes from; these are the theories, ideas and subjects I’m interested in. But there are also works that have inspired me. That’s something I think is true of most artists when it comes down to constructing these sorts of things.

  ASG: I think it’s the best way; it always reads as being much more genuine and relatable, somehow. In your notes, you refer to the philosopher Marshall McLuhan and his theory of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media. When I started thinking about the programme, I wondered if you where consciously playing with this idea.

  DM: That’s interesting, I hadn’t really thought about that. It’s like what I was saying before, that there are almost these two modes of film that are going on in the programme, and yes, you could relate that to this idea of the hot and the cold. McLuhan’s definition of hot media is that it’s a lot more didactic; cool media invites the viewer to work it out themselves, or to complete the work in some sense.

  ASG: With all these different films going on inside your screenings, perhaps the audience has to be more creative and search for the meaning and/or connections between the films.

  DM: That’s another reason why I moved away from the idea of a collaged cut-up format, because I thought it would be more interesting to let the films breathe, and let the audience do a certain amount of mental legwork. While there are some pretty explicit links for me, I wanted there to be an opportunity for a totally different way of looking at the work.

  ASG: A central focus of the screenings revolves around two processes or areas of interest: ‘foraging’ and ‘stochastic process’. I’ve heard of ‘stochastic’ as a term in mathematics and economics, but not really outside those academic fields.

  DM: As I understand it, ‘stochastic’ is like John Cage and his chance operation; Cage would talk about it and say it’s not about things being random it’s more...

  ASG: Unstructured?

  DM: I think Cage was more interested in the idea of letting nature take its course, the idea that he was simply setting up parameters to let that happen. In the same way, I was looking at Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale, in which Snow had a special tripod built where the camera could revolve 360 degrees in any direction. The camera films wilderness moving in circles, round and through all these different degrees and angles. Snow’s film has something in common with Cage’s chance operation – the artist can’t control what the camera passes by, but he can set the parameters. In a similar way, I’m quite interested in artists that have some kind of material limits to the work. Like in Swamp by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, for example. I like how that film finds its end when the reel runs out. There’s even a bit where Holt and Smithson are talking about how much film is left, and he’s saying, ‘I think there’s 100ft Nancy’, and then it just stops.

  ASG: The issue of physicality there is really interesting. Maybe that’s something we lose in a digital format or computer algorithm, where there are potentially no material limits.

  DM: Yeah, definitely. This business of materiality is really important, but then it’s good to think about the materiality of the digital as well. I’ve been listening to a lot of interviews with Philip K Dick, where he was talking about how we think in digital units – he terms it as discrete semantic units. I find it really fascinating to think that perhaps even our consciousness, our cognition and/or our perception, also occur through discrete unit systems; that there is almost a sample rate to perception. I guess in a way that’s how digital technology works; it breaks things down into units and then presents it back to us in a way that seems seamless. Film works in the same way, and our perception perhaps works like this too. That’s my very crude understanding of it.

  ASG: It’s interesting to think about the connections between technology and human behaviour, how we experience, how we understand. You talk a lot in your work about the act of foraging, which we tend to think of as being a more primal human mode of activity. Foraging seems coded even more into our digital world. New technology, the Internet, etc, seems to allow us to reflect on how we interact more generally with our environment or each other.

  DM: Definitely, it’s as if these technologies allow us to think about how we behave, while we are behaving. There’s this sort of breadcrumb of our activity. But what I find really fascinating is that we are still using foraging when we go clothes shopping. Like TK Maxx...

  ASG: It is definitely the home of modern foraging.

  DM: You need to use the same skill sets, essentially. A lot of my interest in these ideas came out of this film I’m making with my dad. He’s a biologist, and he talked to me quite a lot about his field methods and how he finds certain things in the field that are often quite complex environments. If you’re going into TK Maxx and looking for some trainers, you set up some filters; you’re not looking for anything else, you’re looking for some trainers. It’s the same thing you would do if you were looking for mushrooms or berries. There is a bit in the Darrell Varga documentary, Hunters and Gatherers: A Film About Collectors, where one of the collectors describes how her experience of shopping in flea markets is the same as going mushroom picking; the things she wants look sharper or more vibrant. She quite succinctly sums up the filtering process as a built-in subconscious thing – you’re shutting out ‘irrelevant’ information all the time. I think its definitely happening in Google searching and Internet browsing. That’s the principle behind information foraging theory, which is the idea that you can make your website more efficient for users.

  ASG: More forager-friendly?

  DM: Yeah, setting up cues and making it clear how to get information. But I am always fascinated by these kinds of analogies, finding these things in apparently separate contexts and discovering that there’s some sort of pattern that links it. That’s a recurring process in my own work. It’s often about trying to spot analogies and patterns, and then seeing what happens when you layer them up and create a context for the work.

  ASG: When I was researching for this interview, I discovered we both have printmaking degrees, which is a rare thing these days. I was thinking just then, when you where talking about layering and also the way you approached putting together your screening, whether print process played a part in that at all?

  DM: Quite possibly. I think print is interesting because a lot of the techniques have this really weighted industrial history. There is also a long history of artists printmaking, but I’m very interested in the way that books work, and for so long that process happened through industrialized letterpress. It’s little things as well – like the word ‘cliché’ comes from the name for the clip that holds groups of letters for letterpress printing. I’m definitely still intrigued by the way that technologies can really determine what people do with them. I think that’s really present in digital technology now. There is a guy called Lev Manovich who talks a lot about how the interface defines how you use technology and also what you imagine the possibilities of that technology are. Photoshop filters, Final Cut Pro or whatever; there is almost some kind of rhetoric built up through these devices, certain figures of speech or compositional techniques. It’s also important to realise that there aren’t actually such huge differences between digital and analog technology.

  ASG: When I said foraging is seen as a primal or archaic process, I was trying to get to the idea that society uses new technology to try and overwrite old ideas, or try to disguise old ways of processing things.

  DM: That makes me think of another quote from McLuhan, where he brings up this idea that society asks new media to perform the role of old media. He argues that this misunderstands the possibilities of new technology to change both our sensibility and also the way we think. There’s also an interesting theorist called Ted Nelson, who talks about how so much of new technology mimics what already exists, like how a Microsoft Word document mimics a sheet of paper. Nelson’s alternative to this is Xanadu Space, where everything is in 3D documents and is hyperlinked. It’s kind of like a database that you can engage with spatially.

  ASG: That seems to tie in with processes of foraging a lot better in some ways, in that it creates an environment to explore. For me, computer algorithms or the Internet at the moment seem to be a lot more too do with memory; you’re creating an anecdotal cache or linking layers of information together.

  DM: Going back to what you were saying about printmaking, it’s interesting to see, for example, how many of the filters we use in Photoshop were modeled on things that you could do in the dark room, or an effect you would create through screen-printing. Or the way computer programmes recreate film grain. It’s like a form of weird nostalgia. We want information to look how things did, rather than imagine their other possibilities.

  ASG: The click sound on a digital camera is another one, there are these tactile or physical things that we won’t let go of... You talked earlier about foraging being a natural human impulse, but a capitalist framework would almost prefer us to not forage or set up filters, or rather, it requires this to be expanded exponentially, to make us look at or desire a whole environment. If you go into a shop, they don’t want you to just look at trainers – they want you to buy the whole tracksuit. I guess in one way, foraging filters could be a form of resistance.

  DM: I agree. But on the other hand, marketing involves pushing people’s buttons; they seem to have some insight into how people work on a basic level. I suppose what McLuhan is referring to when he’s saying that artists set up ‘attention traps’, is that they create effects to trap our attention – that’s his definition of art. But when he’s talking about that, he’s also including advertising. He talks about advertising being folk art.

  ASG: I guess it’s a form of capitalist folk art. I hope we can look back on it like that at some point. 

  DM: In that sense, he’s talking about how manipulative marketing is good at pushing our buttons. So perhaps cool media is a more humanitarian pushing of buttons, because it’s maybe allowing you to think about how you operate or experience.

  ASG: It gives a lot more respect to the viewer in some ways, it respects people’s innate intelligence. McLuhan talks about high definition film as being the hottest media, an experience that is just about the spectacle.

  DM: There’s nothing there, it’s almost too explicit. I don’t know if it’s true, but someone was talking to me about how there is some sort of HD technology that can record in a resolution that’s beyond what we can actually perceive.

  ASG: A film you can’t really watch.

  DM: Information beyond what your eye can see. Information theorists talk about how information devours attention; there’s no way you can take in all the stuff that’s being fired at you. You have to have filters. I was talking to a guy who does neuro-linguistic programming, which is a quite suggestive form of therapy that works by getting people to change their filters to prioritize different things. He was saying that not filtering was similar to being autistic, where there is an inability to shut out information. Though I do feel this is sort of dodgy territory to start going into, I would say that it seems that filtering is a really fundamental aspect of perception and cognition.

  ASG: Otherwise you can’t handle life, vision becomes too much if you can’t prioritize certain aspects of what you’re experiencing.

  DM: I suppose there is some primary or subconscious process that’s filtering out so much information all the time.

Larry Cuba is one of the most important artists currently working in the tradition known variously as abstract, absolute or concrete animation. This is the approach to cinema (film and video) as a purely visual experience, an art form related more to painting and music than to drama or photography. Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Norman McLaren and the Whitney brothers are among the diverse group of painters, sculptors, architects, filmmakers and video and computer artists who have made distinguished contributions to this field over the last 73 years.

Insofar as it is understood as the visual equivalent of musical composition, abstract animation necessarily has an underlying mathematical structure; and since the computer is the supreme instrument of mathematical description, it’s not surprising that computer artists have inherited the responsibility of advancing this tradition into new territory. Ironically, very few artists in the world today employ the digital computer exclusively to explore the possibilities of abstract animation as music’s visual counterpart. John Whitney, Sr. is the most famous, and rightly so: he was the first to carry the tradition into the digital domain, and his book Digital Harmony is among the most rigorous (if also controversial) theoretical treatments of the subject. But for me Cuba’s work is by far the more aesthetically satisfying. Indeed, if there is a Bach of abstract animation it is Larry Cuba.

Words like elegant, graceful, exhilarating or spectacular do not begin to articulate the evocative power of these sublime works characterized by cascading designs, startling shifts of perspective and the ineffable beauty of precise, mathematical structure. They are as close to music—-particularly the mathematically transcendent music of Bach—-as the moving-image arts will ever get.

Cuba has produced only four films in thirteen years. The best known are 3/78 (Objects and Transformations) (1978) and Two Space (1979). The imagery in both consists of white dots against a black field. In 3/78 sixteen “objects,” each consisting of a hundred points of light, perform a series of precisely choreographed rhythmic transformations against a haunting, minimal soundtrack of the shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute. Cuba described it as “an exercise in the visual perception of motion and musical structure.” In Two Space, patterns resembling the tiles of Islamic temples are generated by performing a set of symmetry operations (translations, rotations, reflections, etc.) upon a basic figure or “tile.” Twelve such patterns constructed from nine different animating figures are choreographed to produce illusions of figure-ground reversal and afterimages of color. This is set against 200 year old Javanese gamelan music. Both films have won numerous awards and have been exhibited at festivals around the world . Calculated Movements, Cuba’s first work in six years, premiered in July at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was also included in the film and video show of SIGGRAPH ‘85, the international computer graphics conference. It is a magnificent work, destined to join 3/78 and Two Space as a classic of abstract animation. It represents a formal departure from its predecessors. Whereas they were produced on expensive vector graphic equipment at institutional facilities, using a mainframe and minicomputer respectively, Calculated Movements was produced at Cuba’s studio in Santa Cruz on the Datamax UV-1 personal computer with Tom DeFanti’s Zgrass graphics language. This is a raster-graphic system that allowed Cuba to work for the first time with solid areas and “volumes” rather than just dots of light. The result, both in design and dynamism, is strongly reminiscent of the films of Oskar Fischinger.

Computer animation is neither film nor video—-those are simply media through which a computer’s output can be stored, distributed and displayed. Previously Cuba released his work only on film, but Calculated Movements is available on both film and video. We talked about the theory and practice of abstract animation, about the computer as an instrument of that practice, and about the production of Calculated Movements.

GENE: There’s a widespread belief that mathematics and intuition are somehow antithetical; yet the outstanding characteristic of your work is a graceful musicality that feels profoundly intuitive, even spiritual.

LARRY: I appreciate your saying that because that’s clearly my goal . Music does do that, and it has an underlying mathematical structure, although I think no one’s really clear on how or why it affects us the way it does, what the rules are. A lot of people are working on that and have theories about it. It seems my job is to see how we can do it graphically.

What I’m trying to do is, I think, very difficult. The creative process here appears to be so much different than from most art forms—-using mathematics to create pictures, trying to make them affect us the way music does. ’ How do I create these things? … ” I think it comes from paying attention to things that affect me. When I see visuals that elicit that response I think about why, where it came from, what is the quality? In a sense, this is what abstraction is about: what’s the essence without the details? I’m always searching for that. In computer graphics today there’s, this great push toward simulating reality, especially natural phenomena. Realistic simulations of plants, for example. Plants are beautiful, so naturally the simulations are beautiful. Plants, mountains, trees, the pattern water makes when it goes over a rock-these are evocative in the same way music is. But I want to know why. I don’t want to simply reproduce the pattern; I want to know what it is about the pattern that evokes that feeling. And what’s the relation between that pattern and its mathematical description?

Crown Marquiss - All Wood