Concept and Direction Pete Gomes
10 mins looping
DV/Artificial Life Programming/DVD/5.1 surround sound

This film was, in part, conceived to try to induce a state of mind in the viewer. It stems from a series of films I made exploring “mandalic” film. It is exploring ‘perceptive visual automata’and altered states of mind in the viewer.

The work combines artificial and natural life forms and is exploring dynamic complexity. Every frame of the programmed pattern is symmetrical. 'Cycle' is an emergent film both in its music and visual aspects with the method and process of each being very similar. This film is entirely unedited in a traditional manner and was essentially about assembly.

It consists of three componants: two hand held video sequences shot over 10 minutes in real time (tree in blossom and earth) both moving from in focus to out of focus and one programmed artificial life pattern sequence, which forms the constructive architecture for the piece.

The exact result of this fusion before the 'assembly' took place was entirely unknown and the collisions and integration of the two video sequences and pattern resonate, functioning like visual harmonics in counterpoint to the music.

Technically this was during a period where I was exploring the elimination of editing. This is an extremely difficult film to represent as every frame uses travelling mattes using two different images at a pixel by pixel level, viewed through a vortex of moving pixellated squares.

This work has never been shown in its originally intended form, which is a similutaneous four screen back projection in full surround sound. The viewer is surrounded by four screens and full 5.1.

This was an early work for DVD during a period where 5.1 and DVD authoring was extremely difficult and expensive with on single blank DVD-R cost £50.00!!

This work is available as part of Sensory -
Collaborations 1999-2002 with the composer Marvin Ayres.