JOOST REKVELD – 11 FILMS
Filmmaker JOOST REKVELD
"Since the early 1990s, visionary artist Joost Rekveld has been exploring the inner depths and outer reaches of optical expression at the nexus of technology and natural phenomena, producing a body of astonishing works of mesmerizing abstraction. Rekveld's film combine a remarkable ingenuity and facility with the image-making capabilities of various machines (many of his own design) with his radically inventive theories and approaches to form, motion, and perception. The result has been a startlingly diverse, ever-expanding body of work marked by formal rigor, breathtaking imagery, and a rich, expressive audiovisual poetry."
- LA Film Forum
#2
(NETHERLANDS, 1993)
16mm
12 minutes
Images and sound - Joost Rekveld
Made at Réalisé à Studio Eén, Arnhem and et Royal Conservatory in The Hague
Partially funded by a grant from Financé en partie par Stroom HCBK (The Hague La Haye)
The first concepts for #2 arose in the night train from Paris to The Hague, after having seen a screening of Jose Antonio Sistiaga’s epic hand-painted film Era Erera Baleibu Izik Subua Aruaren. In the weeks before that I had come to the conclusion that it would be good to make a film on celluloid before continuing the work on computer-generated images. This I had started a year or so before and it eventually became IFSFILM.
IFSFILM
(NETHERLANDS, 1991-94)
16mm
4 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
IFSFILM is the first film that I started to make, and the software behind it was also the first system I developed to generate and com- pose abstract images. The project was a response to the 3D com- puter animation that entered my field of vision around 1990. Being inspired by the avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century and immersing myself as much as possible in experimental cinema, I could not understand why one would wish to revert to a primitive version of renaissance perspective. As a reaction, instead of constructing objects out of platonic solids, I was contemplating how to make images starting from visual noise.
#3
(NETHERLANDS, 1994)
16mm
4 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
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.
VRFLM
(NETHERLANDS, 1994)
16mm
2 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
Commissioned by Sur une commande de Korzo Theatre, The Hague
The “Thunderclaps” were a series of concerts organized in the Korzo theatre in The Hague, inspired by an origin myth explained and demonstrated in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. According to this myth, culture started when humans were forced out of their caves by ear- splitting claps of thunder. The idea of the series in the Korzo was to have evenings of very diverse interdisciplinary programming, interrupted by specially commissioned audiovisual “Thunderclaps” made by young artists.
#5
(NETHERLANDS, 1994)
16mm
6 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
Film #5 was made relatively quickly in two or three very intense weeks of improvising, recording, printing and developing. All the originals and the optical prints were developed by hand and the film was put together using superimpositions and bi-packing in my crude optical printer. It was the graduation piece for my studies at the Interfaculty Image and Sound in The Hague. This meant that there was a strict deadline and led to the last two sections being made in a continuous working session of 72 hours without much sleep at all. The premiere was in June 1994 in the Gallery Maldoror in The Hague.
#7
(NETHERLANDS, 1996)
16mm
29 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
Film #7 IS is an elaboration of the idea that colors arise from the meeting of light and dark, an idea that was possibly first written down by Aristotle and at the center of the color theories of Goethe. In film #2 I had been inspired by the color changes of daylight over the course of the day, and in #3 and #5 this idea of a color progression condensed into a personal color-scheme consisting of deep blue-violet, deep green, red, bright blue and yellow, preferably in that order. After reading about many different theories of color, I realized that what I thought of as my own highly personal palette was in fact a rather traditional equal subdivision of the color-circle. The preparations for #7 started with the idea to use such divisions as a structural principle for a film with many colors.
DISK BONUS MATERIAL
#11, MAREY <-> MOIRÉ
(NETHERLANDS, 1999)
16mm
21 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
Sound - Edwin van der Heide - Production Gerard Holthuis, Filmstad Produkties B.V.
Funded by Avec le soutien de Dutch Film Fund
In terms of my artistic development, #11 is one of the most important films in my filmography. It was shown a lot and is still regularly screened almost twenty years after its premiere. It was the first time I worked on a film during a period of several years, allowing time for theoretical research, learning new practical skills that were necessary to realize the project, building tools, taking the time for a long period of practical exploration and experimentation, and allowing time for ideas to mature. It set a pattern of working on long-time research projects that are some-times pushed to the background by projects with shorter deadlines, but that shape my interests during a long time and feed directly into the other projects I do during that period. While I was working on #11, I made the installations#13,#17 and #19 that are direct spinoffs, based on var-ious concepts of scanning and exploring ideas that could not be incorporated into the film. This pattern of a long-term research project that results in many spinoffs in other media is some-thing that continues to this day.
#23.2 BOOK OF MIRRORS
(NETHERLANDS, 2002)
35mm
12 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
Music- Rozalie Hirs - Performed by Interpretation Asko Ensemble - Conductor
Funded by Avec le soutien de Dutch Film Fund
When I started to work on film #23, I was thinking about my projects as explorations of fundamental principles of the film medium. Previously I had most- ly been working with different types of scanning, interference and capture of movements, but through the writings of Stan Brakhage I became interested in the cultural significance of optics. In " Metaphors On Vision,” Brakhage writes how the optical system of film embodies traditional perspective and how intervening with this optical system is one way of achieving a more person al way of picturing. This made me realize that just as the mechanism of the motion picture camera shares a technological and conceptual ancestor with the assembly line and scientific management, the optical part of the camera shares its ancestry with perspective painting and other optical devices.
#37
(NETHERLANDS, 2009)
35mm cinemascope
31 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
Music- Yannis Kyriakides
Production - Gerard Holthuis-Filmstad Producties B.V
Financial Support - Avec le soutien de Dutch Filmfund and the et Interregeling
#37 Started with an image which I found on the internet when looking for something else. This image intrigued me so much that I wanted to know where it came from and how it was made. It took about ten years for that initial fascination to result in a film. The picture that I found turned out to be a simulation of the patterns that X-rays produce when they are scattered by a quasicrystal. Knowing this was still far from understanding what it meant or to how to produce such images myself.
#43.6
(NETHERLANDS, 2013)
Video
13 minutes
Images and sound - Joost Rekveld
Commissioned by Sonic Acts for the ‘Vertical Cinema’ project
#43 started with the question “What would happen if all the pixels in an image would behave like the four electronic neurons of Ashby.” I began experiments in software in which pixels were randomly connected to some of their neighbors and would adjust the strength of these connections in response to changes in brightness. I programmed some very crude neural networks, encountered problems getting them to do anything interesting and then realized that most neural networks that one reads about in scientific papers are very small compared to the number of pixels in a decent image. After a lot more trying and reading I stumbled onto a much more detailed description of how neurons behave: the FitzHugh-Nagumo model. This is a still very much simplified but slightly more realistic mathematical description of how neurons react to input and I began to apply it to pixels.
#67
(NETHERLANDS, 2017)
Video
17 minutes
Images and sound - Joost Rekveld
Commissioned bySur une commande de LIMA Amsterdam
Over the years I have done various experimental projects, both with students and as part of my own practice, to explore the ideas of the early 20th century theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Much of his work can be seen as an attempt to understand the inner logic of the sensory worlds of different animal species, while trying to stay out of the trap of presupposing our human bubble as somehow privileged. His ideas made me wonder whether we can construct new interactions with our environment by building devices that can act as new senses. My rather primitive experiments in sensory augmentation mostly took the form of wearable sensors that pickup things humans can not perceive, with various translations of their output. I made an installation called #47 that was inspired by these experiences, but this is still a strand in my work waiting to be carried further in other forms.
#43.4
(NETHERLANDS, 2012)
Video
1 minute
Images and Sound - Joost Rekveld
Commissioned by Sur une commande de Cinema Zuid and the One Minutes
#57
(NETHERLANDS, 2017)
Video
14 minutes
Images - Joost Rekveld
This work is part of the research project Dialogues with Machines funded by the Research Fund University College Ghent Ce travail fait partie de Dialogues avec des Machines un travail de recherche financé par le Fond de Recherche l’Université de Gand