Hector Rodriguez

Statement

Theorem 8 is a video work exploring the intersection of art and mathematics. It involves a custom software that decomposes every frame in a source film by projecting it onto a fixed database of frames from another movie. An approximate reconstruction of each source frame can then be obtained by an appropriate superposition of its projections onto the images in the database. The source film is Godard’s Alphaville and the database comprises 100 still images from the (never completed) film Witch’s Cradle, directed by Maya Deren in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp.

Films

New media art has a unique power to provide visual analogues of abstract mathematical concepts. The challenge for artists is to connect abstract ideas with visual methods, and so to construct aesthetic strategies that can only be realized by computational means. More specifically, the aim of Theorem 8 was to utilize notions arising in abstract algebra, such as orthogonal decomposition, as forms of cinematic expression.