Project descriptions exercise

Project 1: A Bettleship Potemkin

A Battleship Potemkin is a generative algorithm-based film designed for web-browser platforms, that appropriates Sergei Eisenstein 1922 film The Battleship Potemkin. The shots in the original film are preserved, but their arrangement in sequential montage is randomly organized by the algorithm, creating a unique and endless film on each viewing.

Eisenstein’s film is taken from the digitalized version hosted in the Internet Archive organization. The original film was first dissected in order to isolate all individual clips. A programme that would randomly choose the order in which the clips are played was written in HTML5 and JavaScript languages.

Eisenstein is an acknowledged pioneer in the theory and practice of film montage. A Battleship Potemkin is a homage to his film, while at the same time it proposes to enquire on the linearity of time within film. This work relates to my interest in the impact of contemporary media on the creation of historical timelines.

Project 2: Chroma 16,777,216

This work is an algorithm-based film written for web-browsing platforms, and optimized for dual screen output. The work makes a systematic journey through the whole range of the 24-bit depth RGB colour wheel. Each colour is displayed for 5 miliseconds, thus taking almost 24 hours to map the whole chromatic range.

The concept for mapping the whole RGB colour gamut was born out of my interest in the history of monochrome painting, and the systematic works of artists like On Kawara and Roman Opalka. This work was conceived for the exhibition Cut and Paste: Investigating the Materiality of Information, held at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee.

The principal motivation behind this work is to meditate on the artificial colour systems that dominate our experience of the world through media technologies. I aim to provide a contrast between the atmospheric experience created by the work and the abstract language that makes this experience possible.

Project 3: Series Museé Binaire

Musée Binaire is conceived as an ongoing art history book series, where each book presents the image of an artwork in its digital manifestation through hexadecimal code. The series is inaugurated with four titles containing images from the history of monochrome painting.

The images presented are sourced from official institutions such as Tate Modern and MoMA. The source code of these images is ultimately composed of binary numbers, which can be easily represented in the hexadecimal system, where every pair of characters constitutes a bit of information.

The books are ultimately useless as vessels for the dissemination of cultural images. From this ironic stand, the series intend to resonate on pressing question regarding the coding and decoding of cultural information, processes of archiving and the impact of digital technologies in our attitude toward the art historical canon.