Joost Rekveld – Light Matters

Joost Rekveld
Film47 – Joost Rekveld

Light Matters is the online home of filmmaker and writer Joost Rekveld. I first stumbled upon Joost’s site when doing some research on visual sound a few years ago, specifically Hans Jenny’s Cymatics and his precursor in the field of sound visualisation Ernst Chlandi. Recently Joost uploaded more material and organised his output with a new, easy to navigate site – also including a blog.

Light Matters contains documentation of Rekveld’s films which deal with the refractive/reflective/interference qualities of light ‘inspired by concepts found in medieval and renaissance optics’. The description for #23.2 Book of Mirrors reads:

‘These images are caused by the interplay of light waves directly onto the emulsion, not using lenses as they are used normally to reproduce a scene outside of the camera. In that way I try to explore alternative forms of spatiality not related to traditional pictorial perspective’

#11, Marey < -> Moiré is a film where filaments of light converge and diverge to produce colourful light interference known as Moiré patterns.

Included in the writing section are a number of excellent articles dealing with abstract film and the sonics of visual systems – visual music. Symmetry and Harmonics, for example is replete with many traces to the history of arcane sound/image contraptions like the kaleidophone and relationships between geometric glyphs and sound waves.

Light Matters was rediscovered via a post at the excellent Moon River Blog

related:
Early Abstractions (1946-57) Harry Smith
Paul Friedlander – Oscillating light kinetics
Abstronics: Mary Ellen Bute
Kinetic colour sound
Jordan Belson

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