Thanks to the generous support of the City of Boston’s Arts and Culture, RPM Festival 2025 presents Frequency, Joost Rekveld. The programs showcase five abstract pieces by Joost Rekveld, exploring the intersection of technology, science, and abstract visuals. His films focus on sensory experiences created by machine-driven systems and complex interactions.
Joost Rekveld (1970) is an artist who is motivated by the question of what we can learn from a dialogue with machines. In his work, he explores the sensory consequences of systems of his own design, often inspired by forgotten corners in the history of science and technology. These systems combine temporary dogma’s in the form of procedures or code, with more open-ended elements such as material processes or networks of interactions that are too complex to predict. His films, installations and performances are composed documentaries of the worlds opened by such systems. In their sensuality they are an attempt to reach an intimate and embodied understanding of our technological world.
His abstract films have been shown world-wide in a wide range of festivals and venues for experimental film, animation or other kinds of moving image. He had retrospectives at the Barbican in London and the Ann Arbor film festival amongst others, and in 2017 he was filmmaker in focus at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Individual films were screened at hundreds of venues, including the ICA and the Tate Modern in London, The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
His film #11, Marey <-> Moire was the first Dutch film ever to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival.
Intro & Post-screening discussion: Ethan Berry, Ian Sexton & Joost Rekveld
Ethan Berry A producer and designer for film, video, and performance events, he is past president of the Board of Directors of the Boston Film/Video Foundation, which was founded in 1976 in order to provide artists with an organizational support system for the creation of independent film video. He is a co-partner in ART ON DEMAND, a consulting group that provides arts programming and design consulting services. His work has also been shown at the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; the University of Massachusetts; the Provincetown Young Artists’ Exhibition; and the Drawing Show at the Mills Gallery, Boston.
Ian Sexton
is an internationally exhibited filmmaker and photographer located in Boston, Massachusetts. His works arrest and elongate photographic time by layering, compressing and extending the photographic instance. He received his MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University as well as an MA in Media Arts from Emerson College. His undergraduate work was done at the University of Rhode Island where he received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Political Science. He has taught courses at Boston University, Emerson College, and Harvard University. He is currently a visiting faculty member in Digital Media at UMass Lowell.
#11, Marey <-> Moiré
1999, 21 minutes
#43.6
2013, 11 minutes
#67
2017, 17 minutes
#57
2017, 14 minutes
Ueda’s Shattered Egg, Prologue to #59
2023, 14 minutes, with live narration
Total: 75 mins
Marey <-> Moiré (1999, 21 minutes)
Rekveld's most well-known work, #11 (Marey <-> Moiré) is a film in which all images
were generated by intermittently recording the movement of a single line. It is a film about the
discontinuity that lies at the heart of any moving image medium, the product of an interest in the
technological history of cinema and a speculative search for imagery that the "film apparatus would
come up with if left alone". Apart from leading to this film, this interest led to installation
experiments with mechanical scanning devices such as anorthoscopes and Nipkow discs.
#43.6 (2013, 11 minutes)
The images in #43 are generated by systems in which the pixels are agents that are, in
some respects, comparable to cells in an organism. These systems are put into motion by
disruptions that cause a difference between some pixels and their neighbours. Edges become the
seed for processes of decay and growth, imbalances that embody a store of energy for the system as
a whole, similar to electrical potentials. Under some circumstances the cells in the system feed each
other so that oscillations or other kinds of order are produced spontaneously, sometimes stable in
themselves, sometimes feeding on noise to stay active.
#67 (2017, 17 minutes)
In #67, we witness a stroll through the electromagnetic worlds of machines and men,
a world with a tonal coherence that humans rarely perceive. 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. #67
was conceived as a tribute to ‘Reminiscence’ and ‘Telc’, two videoworks made by Steina and Woody
Vasulka in 1974.
#57 (2017, 14 minutes)
A categorical accumulation of abstract patterns. Lines, colours and sounds obey an
impenetrable logic in a quiet film that dares to be resolutely experimental. #57 is the result of an
encounter between chaotic equations by the Chinese mathematician Wang Lin, an analog computer,
Joost Rekveld, and a small battery of surplus high-frequency oscillators previously used for testing
military and medical sonar equipment.
Ueda’s Shattered Egg, Prologue to #59 (2023, 14 minutes, with live narration)
This work starts out with the re-enactment of a concrete event: the discovery of chaos
by the Japanese scientist Yoshisuke Ueda when working with an analog computer at Kyoto University
on November 27, 1961. When plotting the solution to a system of equations, Ueda noticed an
irregularity that could not be accounted for by a malfunction of the machine or with a known
mathematical explanation. Due to the hierarchical relations in the lab, Ueda's discovery was
dismissed by his superiors for many years and it did not get published until the early 1970's, at the
time of the student's protests in Japan. This work is part of Rekveld's long-running investigation into
the practice and utopian ideas around analog and otherwise unconventional forms of computing.