Guest: Joost Rekveld - #59 (Première)
’24
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena #59 © Joost Rekveld
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Over the years, artist, filmmaker and curator Joost Rekveld collected a large number of analog computers, oscillators and other devices that often turned out to be of military origin. He used them for Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena #59, an abstract science-fiction film, and at the same time his most narrative work to date.
Joost Rekveld is an artist and researcher who wonders what humans can learn from a dialogue with the machines they have constructed. In a form of media archeology he investigates modes of material engagement with devices from forgotten corners in the history of science and technology. The outcomes of these investigations often take the shape of abstract films that function like alien phenomenologies. In their sensuality they are an attempt to reach an intimate and embodied understanding of our technological world.
Prior to this Belgian premiere, the film has been shown in competition at Ann Arbor festival, Light Matter Film Festival in New York and Anthology Film Archives as part of Prismatic Ground, among other film festivals.
The film is the main artistic outcome of the PhD research project “Dialogues with Machines” that Rekveld is currently finishing at KASK and S:PAM in Ghent under the supervision of Edwin Carels and Christel Stalpaert.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Joost Rekveld about his work and the new film.
Joost Rekveld
Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena: #59
#59 is an abstract science-fiction film that takes the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits as its starting point. Our computing technology emerged during the Cold War as a byproduct of the development of atomic weapons and their associated planetary surveillance systems. In 1961, at what was perhaps the coldest point of this period, Edward Lorenz and Yoshisuke Ueda independently discovered deterministic chaos in their computers. In film #59, humans, aliens and electronic devices vacillate between these poles of a human fever dream of planetary control on the one hand, and lively machinic chaos on the other.
All images in the film were produced as analog electronic signals, in a re-enactment of antiquated ways of computing. These signals were generated using period equipment, including an analog computer from 1963, early sonar and radar oscillators, and bits from military flight simulators. This film is an attempt to liberate these technologies from their problematic origins.
Narrative elements derived from Cold War era science-fiction films set the tone, while references to radar and television scanning result in images that evoke very early computer graphics. These progressively unfold into organic calligraphies, in which the negative space between the patterns becomes one of the protagonists. Resemblances with manmade phenomena are gradually left behind, and the film evolves into a nonverbal meditation on material processes, human perception and the arrow of time.
Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena #59 © Joost Rekveld
Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena #59 © Joost Rekveld
Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena #59 © Joost Rekveld
Rekveld's studio during the making of #59: on the right, the EAI TR-48 electronic analog computer from 1963 that he restored; and more to the left, the new analog computer roughly equivalent to the TR-48 that he build himself.