Bridges 2026 Short Film Festival
Alex, Janani Suresh Ram
Filmmakers
Alex
McLean
Then Try This / Sheffield Pattern Club
Sheffield
Janani Suresh Ram
Artist-Independent Reasercher
Germany
Statement
Tiling Time - Synopsis: Tiling Time is a short film that explores the mathematical structure of rhythm in Bharatanatyam through the lens of combinatorics, cyclic time, and live coding. The dancer's body is positioned as a site of algorithmic execution, where traditional movement vocabulary becomes the medium for expressing discrete mathematical structures.
Films
Tiling Time
2 minutes 38 seconds
This work is a collaboration between the dancer, Janani Suresh Ram and a musician and live-coding artist, Alex McLean who co-created Strudel, the web-based live coding platform featured in the film. The film highlights the intersection of tradition and technology, where the dancer's rhythmic execution and the live-coder’s scripts function as parallel computational processes to tile a singular cycle of time. Within this framework, the dancer's body is positioned as a site of algorithmic execution, where traditional movement vocabulary becomes the medium for expressing discrete mathematical structures. Production and Performance: The film was shot at the Sheffield Pattern Club by the collaborators. The rhythmic patterns were integrated into the Strudel environment by Alex McLean. The film features the submitter as the dancer, while the taalas (rhythmic cycles) are performed by both collaborators. Through this interplay of embodied movement, rhythm, and computational representation, the film reveals the "tiling of time" as a modular, geometric, and deeply combinatorial process.
2026