At the Catastrophy-Point : the analytical observer's notes on Complementary Cubes

At the Catastrophy-Point presents Carl-Johan Rosén’s artistic and media archeological analysis of the film Complementary Cubes 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 cover text reads: “The film Complementary Cubes presented itself to me as I was looking for some kind of visual material generated from code. The artist 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 general discussion of a field between surface and code. But as my research evolved, my interests gravitated toward the main topic of Mohr’s work: the cube, and my work became inseparable from his. I have sought the code that Mohr wrote and I have tried to find a path from the product to the program in reverse.”

The catastrophy-point, according to Mohr, is where the illusion of a three-dimensional cube collapses into a visual impression of lesser dimensions. Rosén builds 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.

Carl-Johan Rosén has previously published the book I Speak Myself Into an Object, in which he explores code on paper and the nature of being a computer software. Rosén has explored code and digital processes in a number of works. More information on his works is available at www.carljohanrosen.com.