The book At the Catastrophy-Point: The analytical observer's notes on Complementary Cubes presents my artistic and media archeological analysis of the film Complementary Cubes 1 by artist Manfred Mohr. It is both a visual and theoretical account of how the original programming code that created Complementary Cubes is reconstructed from digital video material.
The film Complementary Cubes presented itself to me as I was looking for some kind of visual material generated from code. Manfred Mohr wrote a computer program in 1974, and that program created Complementary Cubes . In this book I use it as a starting point for an artistic and media archeological exploration of a field between surface and code, between the product of a computer program and the programming code. My first intention was to use Complementary Cubes merely as an example that would initiate a gen
The catastrophy-point, according to Mohr, is where the illusion of a three-dimensional cube collapses into a visual impression of lesser dimensions. I build on this notion of collapse into different dimensions to acknowledge that already the digital video is dependent on an illusion, and threatens to collapse into digital material of other dimensions.