In this piece I was thinking of the first filmmaker, Muybridge, and his motion studies and relationship to science. He began analyzing horses running and then dedicated his life to his motion studies of humans and animals. In Secret Machine the woman is subjected to Muybridge’s motion studies. She is treated in the same fashion as in the original Muybridge photography: with Greek aesthetic in a Cartesian grid. A short time later, Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) attempting to show time on a flat surface. It was similar to Muybridge, but with overlapping images. I think this is Duchamp’s most important work. He is expanding cubism and painting into another dimension: time. He is attempting to paint time, something that is a concept, not an object, just as Muybridge was attempting to capture motion (an impossibility). But Muybridge was not conscious of himself as an artist and Duchamp was. While receiving my education in Physics I thought a lot about time, and then later about the Philosophy of Science. Beginning with Descartes creating a representation of three-dimensional space as three axes producing a grid. This is the Cartesian system of mapping things out, which leads to great advances in math and science and I believe changed the way humans perceive themselves in the universe. I think Muybridge was subconsciously responding to this system. I think Muybridge saw his subjects and himself existing in a Cartesian system, because it is fundamental to his notion of space in which time is an extension, just another dimension of space measured in the same way. In the Cartesian system we imagine ourselves placed in this four-dimensional construction, but this view of reality has been proven to be false. Early 20th century science showed that these notions are fundamentally and philosophically wrong on every count. This is expressed with statements such as “ space is curved” or “the universe is relativistic”, or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. In Secret Machine I am also thinking of the parallel between how Einstein redefined space and time and how Duchamp redefined art in very fundamental and similar ways using conceptions beyond objects in three-dimensional space. I think of Muybridge as standing between them and film being the only medium able to express these ideas. Time is about movement and change, like our experience of reality. Without change life does not exist. Photography does not capture this experience. In Secret Machine I compare different filming techniques to the motion of the body. The film camera becomes another measurement tool in a way a video camera cannot. My intention was to make an art piece from the point of view of a machine, specifically a camera.

Director:   Reynold Reynolds  (their other films)
Producer:	Genre:  Video Art / Film Art
Country:  Germany	Copyright Year:  2009
Original Format:  video	Color Type:  B&W/Color
Sound Type:  Dolby SR	Length:  00:10:00
Original Language:  no dialogue	Subtitle Language:
Other Info: Cinematographer: Carlos Vasquez
Film Website:  http://www.reynold-reynolds.com/pages/secret_machine.htm

Upcoming Screenings
Venue/Organization	City	Country	Date

Screening History
Venue/Organization	City	Country	Date
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston	Houston	USA	2010-11-13	Event Details

Microcinema Interview/Article:

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