SYZYGY (35mm)

Akbar Padamsee

12 min

'SYZYGY', a rare experimental film by the eminent Indian painter Akbar Padamsee, was created in 1969 through algorithmic processes. Funded by a government grant and produced under the auspices of Padamsee's Vision Exchange Workshop, this generative work features a visual motif of unwavering straight lines that autonomously generate abstract patterns, evocative of celestial configurations.

Drawing inspiration from the astronomical term for the alignment of celestial bodies, Syzygy manifests constellation-like patterns derived from over a thousand drawings of abstract lines and forms. Conceived as a "theory towards programming forms," the film presents a matrix of horizontal and vertical lines that merge into abstract combinations via a self-generating process.

Although the original negative was lost, Syzygy has been meticulously restored from the last surviving, heavily damaged 35mm positive print by filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia, in collaboration with Future East Film (Mumbai) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. This revival not only breathes new life into Padamsee's vision but also resurrects what may be the only trace of an Indian experimental film movement that was prematurely extinguished with the disappearance of this film. —Vanij Choksi

Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomenon #59

Joost Rekveld

79 min

Joost Rekveld’s Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59 departs from a key moment in the history of feedback—the more or less concurrent discovery of deterministic chaos by men on opposite sides of the globe—and moves obliquely toward another decisive step in our understanding of the interconnected systems of our planet: human space travel. The film begins with a long prologue comprising a series of tight close-ups on a mechanical plotter whose seemingly arbitrary movements eventually produce graceful, coherent forms, soundtracked by one of those men, the Japanese engineer Yoshisuke Ueda, reflecting on his discovery. Having set his conceptual terms, Rekveld moves into an hour-long passage of analog synthesis set to the sounds of classic sci-fi, as the relatively simple lines of the plotter explode into outrageous complication, seductive graphic tangles that float in and out of sync with shifting fields of color. Figure and ground constantly feed back into another within the frame, while the whole of the film induces its viewer into their own mental feedback, torquing our sense of time and scale at once toward the massive and the minimal. —Phil Coldiron


An abstract animated science-fiction film that takes the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits as its starting point. Our computing technology emerged during the Cold War as a byproduct of the development of atomic weapons and their associated planetary surveillance systems. In 1961, at what was perhaps the coldest point of this period, Edward Lorenz and Yoshisuke Ueda independently discovered deterministic chaos in their computers. In film #59, humans, aliens and electronic devices vacillate between these poles of a human fever dream of planetary control on the one hand, and lively machinic chaos on the other.

All images in the film were produced as analog electronic signals, in a re-enactment of antiquated ways of computing. These signals were generated using period equipment, including an analog computer from 1963, early sonar and radar oscillators, and bits from military flight simulators. This film is an attempt to liberate these technologies from their problematic origins.

Narrative elements derived from Cold War era science fiction films set the tone, while references to radar and television scanning result in images that evoke very early computer graphics. These progressively unfold into organic calligraphies, in which the negative space between the patterns becomes one of the protagonists. Resemblances with manmade phenomena are gradually left behind, and the film evolves into a nonverbal meditation on material processes, human perception and the arrow of time.”

—Joost Rekveld