Mock-up of Floating Point composition
Floating Point is an algorithmic video sprung from the tension within the moving image between its linear syntax and the nonlinear archive or database that it simultaneously embodies. Borrowing from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey the scene in which the HAL 9000 is de-activated, the piece re-presents – while re-framing – the 25 shots of the original sequence. The frame of the unfolding re-presentation widens to reveal the immediately adjacent shots in a grid system that tabulates the sequence’s 25 shots.
The diagrams below show the conceptual geometry that structures the video. The center, white portion of the numbered grid lays out the sequence path from the first shot to the twenty-fifth. The outer turquoise frame then schematizes a three-dimensional topology based on an idea of folding the white, ostensibly two-dimensional grid – in the manner of a conceptual origami – back onto itself into a three-dimensional shape in which the grid’s edges and corners meet. To the extent that these points of contact cannot be formed simultaneously, this topology embodies an «impossible geometry» – that is, a geometry that cannot be visually configured or imagined but only conceived.
[1] Diagram showing the sequence (white center) and conceptual geometry (turquoise periphery) of the Floating Point project.
[2] Three examples showing the relationship between the final work’s composition (widened frame) and the overall grid.
The resulting work is produced through computer programmation and when screened in its ideal form will run live as software performance. Floating Point is part of a larger practice of artistic «retraction» that is intended to re-inflect the impulse of expansion in «expanded cinema», «expanded painting», «expanded print», and the like. The completed piece will be included in a program of ten experimental films I curated, entitled «Retracted Cinema» (Cine retraído, retractado), which will screen at Xcèntric (Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona) in March 2020.
[3] Center screen presents the sequence from the original Kubrick film; the surrounding frames indicate immediately adjacent shots from the numbered grid; the soundtrack is audible for only the center screen.
Project: Peter Freund
Design/programming: Marc Angles + Arnau Giralt