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Joost Rekveld (b. 1970) is a Dutch artist and experimental filmmaker. Since 1991 he has been making abstract films and light installations. Rekveld has written that “The beginning of my filmmaking was guided by the idea that light moving in time could be composed in a similar way as sound is structured in a musical piece. But even though I studied in an environment that was saturated with electronic music, I had little idea of what composers actually did until I started taking lessons in electronic music composition by Gilius van Bergeijk. It was through these lessons that I started to see how I could compose moving images and where I developed a way to use notation not only to write compositions down, but as a tool to generate and extrapolate ideas.” Through his filmmaking process, Rekveld dissects light, allows it to trickle through tiny apertures and makes hypnotic patterns dance before the spectator’s eyes.

In his early days he worked intensively with the medium of film, experimenting with all aspects of the process from printing, to manipulating, to developing the images himself. In 1994 he was already using a computer to make an animation film by writing his own software; a practice he returned to later on in his career.”

His works display an intimate and embodied understanding of our technological world. They are deeply inspired by science and technology and the systematic dialogue between man and machine. By exploring the various spatial and sensorial aspects of light projection his works intrinsically relate to the early history of optics and perspective and, in many ways, can be understood as a type of visual music. His animated films are often mechanical compositions whereby the computer acts as a controller, orchestrating the precise movement of each optical element of the film-work or installation.

Rekveld frequently originates the ideas for his films in more obscure science and philosophical theories. To accomplish his experiments, he often builds his own machines, giving them pride of place in his creative process. He then brings these ideas to light by rendering them in a purely cinematic form, which he terms “travel journals” that record what he discovered while making them. For example, in #7, Rekveld used the theory posited by Aristotle and Goethe in that colors arise from the meeting of light and dark. In #11, MAREY <-> MOIRÉ, Rekveld’s investigation of Marey’s research into the movement of animals and humans led him to the concept of “scientific management”, in which work is made more efficient by dividing it into its smallest units and re-arranging them. He used a stroboscope and built an animation robot that helped him compose his images. #11 came about by segregating 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.

In #67, we witness a stroll through the electromagnetic worlds of machines and men, a world with a tonal coherence that humans rarely perceive. Drawing inspiration from the work of Steina and Woody Vasulka, Joost Rekveld created a modern analog equivalent of the original Rutt-Etra processor. Capturing the electromagnetic fluctuations omnipresent in an urban environment, emanating from power lines, electromotors, fluorescent lights and wireless communications, this world appears to oscillate, reflecting upon the 50 Hz frame rate of analog video. The result is similar to operating within an alien mode of perception, at once visceral in quite a human way, while also preserving something of its real-world referents in a manner that allows us to connect and participate in the image.

Rekveld was for a long period of time head of the ArtScience interfaculty in The Hague; in significant fashion, his experiments and experimental films bridge the divide between art and science, mankind and machine. The 117-page booklet (in English and Dutch) provides extensive in-depth accounts by the filmmaker himself about the creative and thought process that went into making each of the moving image works represented in this digital publication.. The booklet also includes an essay by Soimona Monizza of the Eye Museum (Amsterdam) about the digital restoration of his films, and of the challenges in preserving analog work in this format.

JOOST REKVELD - FILM AND MULTIMEDIA ARTIST, a short documentary about the artist’s working method and the preservation of his films.