Joost Rekveld – #37 (2009)

#37
(35mm scope, 31 min, 2009)

“Andronicos says that in a certain place in Spain one finds small, scattered stones which are polygonal and grow spontaneously. Some of them are white, others are like wax and pregnant of smaller stones similar to themselves.
I kept one to verify this myself and it gave birth at my place, so the story is not a lie.”

‘Paradoxographus Palatinus’, anonymous, 3rd century.

Many pre-modern theories consider crystals as an intermediate form between the mineral, vegetative and animal kingdoms, an idea that acquires new resonances in the light of recent developments in the fields of artificial chemistry and artificial life. These new fields, with their hypothetical universes and ‘what-if’ scenarios, explore a kind of simulation that is far beyond the kind of photo-realistic simulations seen in many industrial computer animations. They have aspects in common with the way early abstract painters, filmmakers and light artists were developing a language to express hitherto unexpressable aspects of the universe through direct sensual experience.
Film #37 is part of an ongoing exploration of the propagation and diffraction of light through holes and grids. The inspiration for #37 came from the way crystallographers use X-ray to investigate the internal structure of crystals. This structure can be inferred from the interference patterns the X-ray waves produce after percolating through the symmetrical arrangement of molecules in the crystal. In 1984, X-ray diffraction made the discovery of so called ‘quasicrystals’ possible; the starting point of #37 were the computer simulations produced by scientists in order to understand such quasiperiodic structures.
During the making of this film, these ideas and tools led to the development of what could be called an ‘artificial physics’: a simulated universe with a variable number of dimensions, inhabited by particles that act on their neighbours and organize themselves into constellations with a varying level of symmetry. The images of the film are the simulated diffraction patterns produced by these constellations.

I’ve started the very first work on this film in 2000, and in the past years this project has been the nucleus around which my interests in geometry, tesselations, complexity, self-organization and artificial life have crystallized.

37.2009.1080p.BluRay.REMUX.AVC.DTS-HD.MA.5.1-NiDO.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	31mn 3s
Size:	5.89 GiB
Video
Codec:	h264
Resolution:	1920x1080
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	25.4 Mb/s
Audio
zxx 5.1ch DTS XLL @ 1 759 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/DFCF029F06FEF0C/37.2009.1080p.BluRay.REMUX.AVC.DTS-HD.MA.5.1-NiDO.mkv

Language(s):Dutch
Subtitles:None