Programmed by Sylvain Sailly and Sarah Todd 

 

“Calculated Movements” presents a broad range of short films and videos that trace the development of computer graphics within moving images. Presented parallel to “Continuum Model,” Sylvain Sailly’s solo exhibition at the Western Front, this program brings together advertising, historical film, internet art, and single channel video, offering an intuitive account of digital sensibilities and cinema. “Calculated Movements” takes Larry Cuba’s 1985 abstract animated video of the same name as a point of departure, positioning the of act calculation as an essential and elemental process inherent to the production of computer graphics. Here artists, filmmakers, and designers are implicated in the unrelenting needs of technology as innovators, technicians, and often reluctant and sceptical participants in the processes of industrial research and development. From Tony Conrad’s Cycles of 3s and 7s (1976), which he describes as “a story: about numbers, the kind machines should like to hear and tell, if they liked,” to Sara Ludy’s laptop-based online dérives in Rooms (2012), “Calculated Movements” is concerned with investigating the craft of digital image-making across industrial and independent modes of production in an effort to better understand the conditions of our contemporary digital environment.

 

Loie Fuller - Danse serpentine | Lumiere Brothers/France 1896. 3 mins. (excerpt) 


Cycles of 3s and 7s | Tony Conrad/USA 1976. 12 mins.


Vinyl Silk | Abel & Associates/USA 1976. 1 min.


Symphonie Diagonale | Viking Eggeling/Sweden 1924. 7 mins. 


Form Phases II | Robert Breer/USA 1953. 4 mins. 


Not Fiction | Elizabeth Vander Zaag/Canada 1975. 4 mins.


Calculated Movements | Larry Cuba/USA 1985. 6 mins.


1-2-3-4 | Steina Vasulka/USA 1974. 8 mins. 


Rooms | Sara Ludy/Canada 2012. 4 mins.


Le chant du styrène | Alain Resnais/France 1958. 13 mins. 


Mechanical Principles | Ralph Steiner/USA 1930. 5 mins. (excerpt) 


Digit Porn | Elizabeth Vander Zaag/Canada 1977. 2 mins. 


Green Giant | Abel & Associates/USA 1979. 1 mins. 


Spheres | Norman McLaren, René Jodoin/Canada 1969. 3 mins. 


MATRIX III | John Whitney/USA 1972. 11 mins.

 

Total running time: approx. 85 mins.

 

Sylvain Sailly is a French artist currently residing in Vancouver. He has been exhibiting his animations, drawings, and installations recently at Mains d'Œuvres, Paris; Today Art Museum, Beijing; the Jakarta Biennale XIII; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; and the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver. Sailly's practice poetically explores contemporary information systems through the intersection of technology and sculpture. His work investigates industrial modes of production, bringing form to otherwise intangible socio-economic realities.

 

Presented in collaboration with the Western Front.