Joost Rekveld: Light Matters

Mariska Graveland

Joost Rekveld returns to IFFR with a retrospective and three exceptional new works: a performance, an installation and a film, which once again span the divide between art and science, mankind and machine. Watching Joost Rekveld’s scintillating films sharpens your senses. He captures light straight to film without the intercession of lens or camera. You can ensconce yourself in the abstract images without losing yourself in illusion. Conversely, they underline the fact that you are viewing pure film. Rekveld allows film to be itself.

Joost Rekveld (1970) dissects light, allows it to trickle through tiny apertures and makes hypnotising moiré patterns dance before your eyes. He often builds his own machines, giving them pride of place, not furtively hiding them. For instance, in #11, Marey <-> Moiré he used a stroboscope and built an animation robot that helped him compose his images – an interplay between man and machine. #11 came about by chopping up a movement into segments, some with short and others with extremely long exposure times, which creates a stroboscopic ballet of planes, colours and lines that encourages a looser style of observation. He calls his films travel journals that record what he found whilst making them. Filmmaking is a game for which Rekveld designs the rules whilst playing. However complex and well thought-out the creation process, the result is always elegantly simple.

Darkest corners

Joost Rekveld has been making abstract films and light installations since 1991, originally conceiving them as visual music for the eye. He developed optical and mechanical set-ups in which he used computers as compositional machines for most of his animations – a perfect fusion of digital and analogue. To make these films, Rekveld often roots around in the darkest corners of science looking for forgotten or dead-end theories. He then brings these to light in glorious fashion by rendering them in a purely cinematic form during his experiments.

For example, Marey <->Moiré refers to the pioneering work of Étienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of chronophotography who studied the movement of humans, animals and objects. In #7, Rekveld used the theory posited by Aristotle, among others, that colours are the result of light and darkness colliding. Rekveld’s latest collaborative project Ursae Minoris, for double bass and live electronics, is based on the map of the Little Bear constellation. Scientist Cyriacus van Ancona (1391-1453/55) described how sailors in antiquity used the constellation to navigate. For this piece, the composer used transcriptions of star patterns on the basis of this map. Rekveld’s accompanying live video is based on the optical effects produced by the night sky. He developed software that simulates the atmosphere’s effects on starlight. Three of these interferences are particularly interesting: the twinkling of stars due to irregularities in the layers of air between us and them, the occurrence of halos and light pillars at low temperatures, and the colours that develop due to light refracting when stars appear on the horizon or during rain or mist. He reveals that even in the stable, mathematical world of astronomy there is space for coincidences in the atmosphere and human perception.

In Rekveld’s hands, mathematical principles are visualised and concretised, not abstract. A good example of this is his vertical #43, a mathematical model that indicates how nerve stimuli travel through tissue whereby he demonstrated similarities with the ways in which organisms grow. By visualising abstract theories he reveals them to be much closer to us than we think.

Eye movements

Other scientific inspirations include those in #43 and #43.6, the composition of which was influenced by the work of logician G. Spencer Brown, the author of Laws of Form (1969), a curious book about a new logic full of paradoxes.
The starting point for Rekveld’s most recent installation #61 was the optical phenomena generated by the eye as first studied by Czech scientist Jan Evangelista Purkinje. In 1823 he published a catalogue of 28 different, visual sensations of internal origin; these subjective phenomena are solely generated by the viewer’s eye. Rekveld’s interactive installation elaborates on this and uses our eye movements, which he views as a dialogue between the self and what we are looking at. He continues that dialogue in his latest film #67, a homage to Reminiscence and Telc (both 1974) by video art pioneers Steina and Woody Vasulka.

This is how Rekveld, who for a long time was also head of the ArtScience interfaculty in The Hague, bridges the divide between art and science, mankind and machine. IFFR’s presentation of Rekveld’s new performance, installation and film honours a passionate artist with an exceptional oeuvre which, after a lull, will once again receive the attention it deserves.

The compilation programmes The Motors of Invention and Light Matters will be introduced by Joost Rekveld on Friday 27 January and Saturday 28 January respectively at 14:00. Between the films, he will discuss topics that were important to him in different periods in his work.