Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena: #59 (Joost Rekveld, 2023) (Patreon)

Time has been kind to the pure abstraction sometimes called "visual music." In the world of experimental cinema, this is work that seemed to receive grudging respect for its importance, but was quietly regarded as a conceptual cul-de-sac that had run its course. Folks like Jordan Belson borrowed from Buddhist ideas, but in the generalized, woo-woo way that was so common in 1960s America. Others, like John Whitney or Nam June Paik, were seen as formal innovators whose projects mostly demonstrated the capacities of computer imagery or mathematically derived forms, but had little else to offer.

Of course, Paik was rehabilitated quite a while ago, and now, with Belgian filmmaker Joost Rekveld, we are asked to reconsider a purely abstract analog cinema, a collection of specially designed waveforms that explore what mathematical and computing schemas can produce. The digital cinema is just now catching up with these analog experiments, and the rediscovery of artists like Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton has helped give us a broader picture of this unique aesthetic. Work that had been dismissed as "funky screensavers" now speaks quite potently to our algorithmic, code-heavy age. How, artists and programmers now ask, can the analog reframe the closed-off, even authoritarian aspects of digital information?

Rekveld's film begins with a prologue that is somewhat reminiscent of Harun Farocki's films about technology and automation. In it, we see a drawing machine creating formula-derived wave images in real time, while on the soundtrack he hear first person narration drawn from the letters and writings of Ueda Yoshisuke, the Japanese academic who created various analog computers and, when he gave them seemingly erroneous tasks, discovered what happens when some values are set and others are stochastic. In other words, his abstract computing work produced the first "evidence," if you will, of what became Chaos Theory. 

In other words, these aleatory squiggles that often look like Cy Twombly paintings were actually the foundation for a new conceptualization of the known universe. In Yoshisuke's work, art actually led the way for science. In light of this, Rekveld asks us to look once again at these abstract visual productions, understanding how their avoidance of an authorial intent -- the computers are simply following the data they're given -- may offer a parallel track for digitally generated information and/or artificial intelligence. What if we asked computers to produce unexpected meanings, instead of demanding that the create material value?

Watching #59 was often like trying to teach myself a new language. Despite Rekveld's use of saturated colors and sprightly lines at various tempi, I found it easy to let this "music" fade into the background of my consciousness. I drfited away from the film, and had to remind myself to come back to it with my full attention. Granted, this has to do with my own aesthetic preferences. I am not immediately drawn to pure abstraction in cinema, and the work in that realm that has most moved me -- Lynn Marie Kirby's, or David Gatten's -- has been more obviously conceptual. But I think there's maybe more to it than that.

The evolution of technology, together with the increasing likelihood of the extinction of the human race, has led to a flourishing of post-humanist or materialist thought. Lots of films about rocks, fungi, unseen strata of vegetable and mineral existence. Deleuze's work has been underlying a lot of these ideas, with his assertion that forces, energies, and pulsions are the stuff of the our world, and not organic life per se. Given my history as a human being, with a psychological make-up and an orientation towards other human beings, it is a struggle to really look at a creative process that marginalizes artistic will. Rekveld's film, like it or not, looks a lot like the future, and we must redirect our eyes and minds in order to find our place within it.