Visual variations based on a kinetic sculpture of the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys.

The sculpture was part of Nieuwenhuys’s ​“New Babylon” project, a utopian design for the future wherein humans would live without material possessions in a constantly changing environment. Both Nieuwenhuys’s work and Hirsh’s film are direct descendents of Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator, both as experiments in light play and the rhetoric of a future-looking transcendence.

The title refers to the ​“Theory of Everything”, the holy grail of physics – a single law that would unify the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. It’s a quest in which every step forward also feels like a step backward: to know more is to understand less, a paradox that, for me, also characterizes artistic creation. As in physics, time and light are fundamental to film. Toward a fundamental theory of physics is a new step forward and backward in my investigation of these elements, and of film as a physical phenomenon. This experiment came about during my residency at Art Cinema OFFoff and was shot entirely on 16mm film with a second version of my Time-Slice camera – a modern reconstruction and reinterpretation of the original device built by Tim Macmillan in the early 1980s.

Drone soundtrack by the Ghent pianist Thijs Troch!

Using his unique time-slice camera technique, Tim Macmillan cuts a cross-section through the city’s day. In a quiet city square an old man clutches his chest and falls to the ground, and time stands still. We travel from the square, down streets, through buildings, catching glimpses of people and snatches of sound as they exist in that one instant.

Filmed at the eponymous national pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale in Venice, this four-minute short records architect Josef Hoffman’s unique indoor-outdoor floor plan via three flat, doorway-straddling cameras and a 25-foot tall arch able to capture a near 360-degree view of the space through the manual exposure of an equivalent length strip of 35mm film placed parallel to the structure’s curvature. The result is a sort of vertically suspended survey of the pavilion and its surroundings that takes in a wide swathe of the space’s blank walls, windowed ceilings, outdoor foliage, and variegated light sources, accomplished through what appears to the naked eye to be a series of continuous, upwardly curving camera tilts. (Jordan Cronk)

With Cavalcade, Johann Lurf made a direct intervention into physical space for the first time. The Austrian avant-garde filmmaker designed and constructed a 150cm-diameter water-wheel, with one face divided into various patterned circles of varying shapes and colour. It was then fixed in place in a stream; we observe the wheel in rest, motion and rest again from a single vantage-point, as it is illuminated by strobe-lights synchronised with 35mm cameras.

A pioneer of American avant-garde cinema, Ken Jacobs (1933) has been concerned with the exploration of stereoscopic phenomena since the mid 1960s. Still shots of a revolving door at New York City’s Church Street Station Post Office are edited together to create a sense of movement, redoubled by the piece’s three-dimensionality when viewed with the proper glasses. Revolving Door is one of a group of works that continue concerns found throughout Jacobs’ oeuvre. The rotating landscapes of earlier works and performances, in which the projector is used as a tool to create dimensionality and movement within and between still frames, here give way to a playful comment on stillness, movement, and depth.

In the tripartite, anaglyph found-footage film, Red Capriccio, Blake Williams conflates the aesthetics of 18^th- and 19^th-century capriccio paintings with the musical structures of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky’s capriccio compositions. Images of a Chevrolet Caprice police cruiser, a basement rave, and a Montreal freeway collide.

In 2008, images of cherry blossom, luminous fields bursting with colour and miscellaneous domestic ephemera are photographed from the screen of an obsolete televisual device. Nostalgia for a fading past merges with the promise of a new season – one day sweeping into the next – to tell an impressionistic story of cohesion, memory and companionship. A magical feast for the eyes, presented in 3D.