Sunday, March 23, 2025 at 1:00 pm
#59 is an abstract animated science fiction film that looks at the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits during the Cold War. In the same period Edward Lorenz and Yoshisuke Ueda independently discovered deterministic chaos through their computing systems. Our computing technology is a side effect of the development of atomic weapons and their associated planetary surveillance systems. In film #59, humans, aliens and devices vacillate between these two poles of machinic chaos and planetary control.
In a re-enactment of ancestral ways of computing, the animations were made as analog electronic signals. These were generated using period equipment, including an analog computer from 1963, early sonar and radar oscillators, and bits from flight simulators. This film is an attempt to liberate these technologies from their military origins.
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.
Rekveld's films have been shown world-wide in a wide range of venues and he has a history of collaborative projects with composers, theatre groups and different kinds of laboratories. Since 1996 he has been teaching interdisciplinary art on the intersection with the exact sciences. He works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ghent University of the Arts and he is a guest teacher at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris.
