2020, experimental short film, 20 minutes, Colour, Silent
Synopsis:
An experimental short film that is the product of a digital feedback system. Structural in essence, the film shows an image of the world folded back on itself.
Description:
For this structural short film, I created a feedback system through frequenting, sequencing, looping, and coding. The basis of such a system is that the past performance of the system is fed back into the system to modify its future performance. Pivotal to the process for Mountain-Field, Field-Mountain (MFFM) is the transformation of a digital video stream into a still-image sequence, idiosyncratic to celluloid film, and the extraction of frames in distinct intervals. The intervals chosen are corresponding to the sine wave Michael Snow used for his soundtrack of Wavelength. The wave begins at 50 cycles per second at its lowest and 12000 at its highest. For MFFM frames were dropped to new sequences beginning at a frequency of every 50th frame, distending to 12000.
The fact that circular arguments of feedback systems make reasoning based on cause and effect tricky, necessitating the analysis of the system as a whole, was inspiring to MFFM in its conception. Elisabeth Legge writes how the philosopher Marshall McLuhan adapts to feedback, a concept of system theory when he describes ‘’the end of linear models of history and time in an image of the world folded back on itself, in which nature finally becomes ‘artefactual’, cybernetic, a work of art.’’ (E. Legge, Wavelength, p29)
Credits:
Coding by Kieran O'Leary
Camera operation and post-production by Dean Kavanagh
Mountain-Field, Field-Mountain was developed under the Next Generation artists award by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
MFFM premiered at Fade to Black curated by Joe Walker and Grace Weir at the Library Project Dublin 2, 9-25 of September 2021.