KWADRAT (The Square)

–It was a mix of photography and animation and it took up my whole vacation - sixteen hours a day. I analysed, through a film camera, a loop of thirty-six squarish black-and-white photographs representing a human being moving in a circle. What was the logic of my analysis? I decided to photograph the loop on film and repeat it thirty-six times. During every new repetition I divided the film window ® which I made in the shape of a square ® so that in every circle there was an increasing number of subdivisions; today I would say different resolutions. I put a white square of paper in the subdivisions where in the photograph there was a part of a figure; where there was not, I put a black square. I had to rearrange the white and black squares at least a hundred thousand times. On the lens I put a color filter, and then rotated it - but I donêt want to bore you. What is most important about this is that not being aware of computer imaging - it was 1970, in Poland - I manufactured my own •digitalê processing on film. Strange that I needed twenty-six years of work - including my work during all my next twenty five vacations - to come back to Kwadrat with full awareness and understanding of why.” - Zbig Rybczynski –Looking to the Future - Imagining the Truth,” in FranÐois Penz, Maureen Thomas, Cinema& Architecture. Mþliús, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, BFI, London, 1997

A human figure is slowly generated from a white square, against a black background, and is colored and decomposed in space, generating in turn other squares, which reunite, retransforming themselves into the original white square.