Across civilizations and centuries, mathematics has shaped how we understand the universe — and how we see. This issue explores cinema through numbers, patterns, algorithms, and abstraction: films where geometry becomes choreography, probability becomes narrative, and equations dissolve into image and sound. From rational structures to irrational dreams, mathēmatiká traces the hidden logic of moving images, revealing cinema itself as a system of rhythms, symmetries, and infinite possibilities.
If the universe doubled in size, would anybody know? One person does. This is his story. A first-person narrator declares his certainty that, last night, the entire universe doubled in size. He speculates about the possible effects this might have on perception and motion, and concludes that there a
In times of duress, nothing adds up. "Coup d'état Math" is an animated short film that depicts four stories that speak to the complex equation of each immigrant's journey.
Pure Difference asks us "What is a number?" It is the debut episode in Anti-Racist Mathematics and Other Stories, a series of learning tools towards a post-capitalist education system. Using the visual tropes of a tech-conference presentation, trashy YouTube video and film essay, Peters sifts the fo
A little night music for the eyes. Geometric shapes dance… the rain falls, a storm approaches.
An optically printed dream of falling, both gorgeous and ominous. The body in mid-air. A canyon of high-rise buildings. This project is inspired from a recurrent dream of falling from skyscrapers, my head facing the sky. Jury Prize for Best Canadian Work, WNDX Festival (Winnipeg, MB), 2010
Short experimental animation about childhood, school and mathematics based on my exercise book in second grade.
In a blockbuster paper in 1948, Claude Shannon introduced the world to the "bit" and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas ripple through such diverse fields as communication, linguistics, genetics, computing, cryptography, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and cosmology. In his
In 1956, Dutch artist Maurits C. Escher challenged the laws of perspective in his work "Exposition of Prints." This unfinished masterpiece quickly became one of the most impenetrable enigmas of contemporary art. Half a century later, mathematician Hendrik Lenstra astonished everyone by bridging the
A team of mathematicians is working together on a big project. Excitement of discovery, hope and disappointment, competition and recognition are shown from an infinitely close distance. Scientists united by the idea of discretization, which, in short, means: constructing continuous objects from basi
Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician, logician, and cryptographer. A Cambridge graduate who was fundamental to cracking the Nazi's Enigma Code during WWII, Turing created what is hailed by some as the first modern computer and was a legendary innovator in his field. He was also gay, and fell vi
SYNOPSIS A structuralist film created by laser printing on 16mm blank film, to experiment with synchrony as an elementary effect of cinema. The images are symbols taken from Game of Life and then are adapted to the sound area on film, so that the shadows they cast into the optical sensor of the proj
Art meets science - a poetic math road trip Chasing the world's largest number is a 22 minute mathematics short film/documentary, made up of sex 3-4 minute long episodes. This collaboration between director Christian Holm-Glad and Norwegian mathematician, musician and cult TV show host Dr. Jo Roesli
Is there a mathematical formula for love without death? The film "Rites of Love and Math" is a sprawling allegory about Truth and Beauty, Love and Death, Mathematics and Tattoo, set on the stage of Japanese Noh theater. About the Directors: Edward Frenkel is Professor of Mathematics at University of
Five of the most brilliant scientists of our time, gathered at the famous Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, take us on their search for a groundbreaking discovery. They face an enormous challenge. Because how do you go beyond the existing frontiers of human knowledge? By becoming part of th
Music, audible expressions of basic mathematical proportions, is broken. This secret has been covered up by legendary thinkers such as Pythagoras, Plato, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and modern mathematicians. To cement their Eurocentric ideas of perfect tone and what ought to be in
A transcendental film inspired by Marcel Duchamp's "Anemic Cinema." I set out to create a film composed within a circular frame. This circular composition led directly to using the number pi for the underlying structure. Having the digits of pi sung on the soundtrack is an homage to "Einstein on the
Emmy is a tribute to the german mathematician Emmy Noether. it's the portrait of a woman, of a scientist and the times she lived in. As she travels to paris on board of the Orient-Express, Emmy works on an equation deemed impossible to prove. The film follows her over the day, as landscapes and diff
After he traveled to the city on foot, the mathematician stuck his gaze onto the overpasses, cable-stayed bridges, and even light beams randomly colliding at night. When he's finally tired of only seeing things on the ground, he decided to take off from a bridge, and hunt his "angles" while cruising
How do mathematicians think? This 60 minute documentary film features nine world-leading UK-based mathematicians offering insights into their mathematical thinking across a broad range of mathematical research fields. Through explorations of their various thought processes, the film portrays mathema
STAMPFER DREAMS is a homage to the scientist Simon von Stampfer, who presented his invention of the Stroboscopic Discs in Vienna in 1833. These discs show all kinds of animated loops from abstract to figurative and from (literally) experimental to documentary, and in this way forshadow the variety o
How do we know that a problem is impossible to solve? In Until the Sun Engulfs the Earth, some of the world's leading researchers and rising stars in the field of computational complexity play a memory game, find their way out of a maze, and explore an imagined landscape, as they make sense of the m
Warning: The stroboscopic nature of this film may be unsuitable for some viewers. prime perfect was largely a black and white flicker film. prime perfect 2 is a primary color flicker film. Frames numbers that are prime numbers are red. Frames numbers that are perfect numbers are white. Frames number
In uniform darkness, we are driven to shine. In an age of wire and string, futuristic visions anchor in lithic time. In the dark, people are driven to shine in the most spectacular ways. Light, emitted from our digital extensions, has roots traversing millions, even billions of years.
In a shared space in between leisure and work, the protagonists wander, manipulate, seek and find. The objects seem to be playing tricks on them but never catch their attention. It is ten past ten and the criss-cross can (re)start, characters soon replacing each others.
Shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, Lines Drawn looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City's attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the s
To most people math appears abstract, mysterious. Complicated. Inaccessible. But math is nothing but a different language to express the world. Math can be sensual. Math can be tasted, it smells, it creates sound and color. One can touch it - and be touched by it...
Under erratic skies, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a battlefield of nervous dreams. Using found and natural objects,
"Once, there was a circle who wanted to be a square so she dated a triangle..."
A passage between two buildings, a nail salon, a stairwell, a badminton hall, an atrium, a hospital culvert. Life takes place. With the small details of existence in focus, rather than the larger narratives and conflicts, fragments are connected to a possible outcome. Participants improvise based on
The unrelenting ebb and flow of Earths great bodies of liquid water is an ancient, coastal shaping influence. A cycle where impermanence manifests itself vividly on a twice daily basis. Coastal management is, by its very nature, a process of prolonging that impermanence. One manifestation of this is
Magicicada is a meditation on prime numbers and (super)natural phenomena, filmed during a solar eclipse in 2021 at last emergence of the Brood X periodical cicada.
The film highlights the existence of rogue waves and how understanding their genesis is relevant to a number of areas of science. Through visual metaphors and a journey with a physicist from the university to the sea, the objective is to show all the facets of rogue waves: the positives and negative
In Algebra of Awe I took a dive into space-like nebulae between fractal dimensions. As if we're attuned to gasping upon the intricacies of mathematics, delightful geometry, algebra of awe. Creating this was a mix of fun and technicality, working with Mandelbulb3D to reveal different layers. Each lay
Mathematicians have feelings too! - In this animated web series professors of mathematics tell us about their emotional experiences and how mathematics indeed is beautiful. This short series was created by Sarah Gorf-Roloff aka Studio Ranokel. It was commissioned by the science communication departm
This short film explores the possibility of two unlikely worlds of – art and science – colliding, and the stories of two powerful creative minds grappling with the truths they seek. A cognitive psychologist from the Philippines and an artist from the US – what do these two have in
'In the Atom' explores the strangeness inherent in both the human condition, and within the structure of reality. A dialogue between British Quantum physicist Sebastian, Japanese artist Hanae, and future beings. Through chimeric visuals and poetic narrative, the film examines the arcane role of obse
In the warm light of a glowing filament the moving machine parts resemble spools, wires and gearwheels. A turntable with a numerical scale spins slowly and shows various readings, though their significance is never revealed. Details, parts of which are out of focus, appear on a black background, and
In the purest line of French experimental cinema of the 1970s, Masses Turbulentes explores the following cinematographic themes: experimental animation, direct animation, animated painting, scratching designs, and graphic cinema.
After attending The Nova Convention in New York City in 1978, I was inspired by Brion Gysin to write permutation poems. This experimental film is based on a permutation poem I wrote in 1979. The film explores selective viewing by overloading the brain with different presentations of my permutation p
Nature, said Galileo, is a book written in the language of mathematics. Fast-forward 400 years and mathematics has become the essential tool for driving human progress and innovation. From a stand up comedian to a professional juggler this film puts together science communicators who you would not e
All kinds of natural symmetries found throughout nature are governed by fundamental geometric laws. The origin of the word 'cosmos' comes from Greek 'kosmos' in the sense of 'ornament'. In many cultures, geometric forms used in ornaments makes the viewer sensitive to the subtle harmonies of the natu
A shorthand study of the mythology of numbers, from 1 to 12. Scientific tradition is adopted then eschewed for rumours, legends and defunct theories from across the ages. The camera pens a year-long record of space, movement and the passing of time in historic locations around the world. This almana
Gwendal Sartre invites us to a fugue of numbers, stories and breaths. The secret links between numbers secretly stimulate eroticism, they are the warmth that we perceive in the movement of bodies or the simple hairstyle of a woman. The film tends to the infinite as much as to the infinitesimal: faci
This film is about Year One of five year a project on re-storying math with a whole intergenerational community, through the arts. Through shared explorations of intriguing mathematical patterning, we hope that people will have start to have better stories and friendlier relationships with math. Mat
A microscopic observation of physicists' notes and equations jotted on whatever was on hand, bringing us into poignant intimacy with the scientific creative process and the travel of the human mind. Using physicists' notes made on whatever they happened to have at hand – napkins, scraps of pap
2021 | 4 min. | Color | Silent Refracted light commingles in spectrum pools. The recursive lattice presents itself. It gives us, for nothing in return. The landscape senses indifference, vibrating impermanence. Notes: The imagery was created in-camera. The camera lens was flanked by double concave g
Based on a mathematical equation, the work CASE STUDY OF AN EQUATION is made to ridicule the process of coping with fear, to quantify emotion in space and in relation to others. It is the full length of a 50 feet reel of super 8 film with in-camera editing, and is the result of an immediate investig
In 1921, a manuscript appeared whose fragmentary texts sounded suspiciously like they had come from Edgar Allan Poe – except for the fact that it was illustrated with technical drawings, and accompanied by massive mathematical formulae. After a few decades it dawned upon researchers that this
An experimental film about Fibonacci numbers and after images. Fibonacci numbers are everywhere in nature and this film. If you watch intently you may experience colors you have never seen before! This is caused by an afterimage of a color being superimposed on the complimentary color, creating a co
You thought geometry was just a bunch of happy shapes. You were wrong. This combination of stop motion animation and direct film animation takes you into the dark heart of geometry.
Inspired by the joint Jasper Johns retrospective exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, I created three permutating pride flags.
Confronted with the evidence that the Earth is not eternal, Ernesto is inspired by the Metatron´s shape to design his own alternative universe. Obsessed by how he and his project will be recorded, he has the certainty that only the ideas and not the creator should transcend.
A well meaning math teacher finds herself trumped by a post-fact America.
Three graduate students race against the clock to solve their professor's final equation, before they meet the same grisly fate as him.
A film centred on the production of landscape and concrete in the Arrábida Natural Park, Portugal. Covering a vast area of coast, caves, mountains and forest, the park is inhabited by a massive concrete factory that branches through the landscape. Documenting the various layers of the sourced
Over 100 years ago, Albert Einstein grappled with the implications of his revolutionary special theory of relativity and came to a startling conclusion: mass and energy are one. E = mc2 was just one of several extraordinary breakthroughs that Einstein made in 1905, including the completion of his sp
An adaptation of an ancient story of a mass general strike, told via a present-day crowd-modeling and crowd-control software. While showing the "artificial-stupidity" of technologies used for the training of enforcement officers and security design, it presents an anachronistic world where numbers d
The work is an investigation on the correspondence and coefficience of image and sound. The rules of an old Arabian game, Kalah, played by two players with 36+36 stones, work as a ready-found system for generating the film. The filmstrip registers all the positions of the steps of a drawn game, conv
A little-told chapter in the story of black holes begins in 1930 Madras, India. 19-year-old Indian physics prodigy Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Chandra) is awarded a scholarship to go to England to study with Sir Arthur Eddington, the world's most famous astronomer. While on his sea voyage, young Cha
Set between a children's play town that playfully delivers sincere propositions for a collective logic of political imagination. Drawing from anti-bias curricula alongside radical positions on colonial and historical debts, 10 – 3 = 13 offers a lesson on the 'misinvention' of negative numbers.
An architect's sculptural work intervenes in the Greenlandic nature of which it is itself a product on the country's western coast. A construction that becomes a reflection on the natural conditions from which it springs. High up in the cliffs and facing the sea in Sarfannguit in western Greenland,
This project moves sound and image using, mathematically extracted, wind movements of landscape video sequences. It shows the alteration of a spectrogram with these motion vectors and applies a sound resynthesis. The result is a sound and an image linked in these metamorphoses. Acoustic Shadows is u
A one-hour biographical documentary, Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem tells the story of an important American mathematician against a background of mathematical ideas. Julia Robinson, a pioneer among American women in mathematics, rose to prominence in a field where often she was the only
Between the Folds chronicles the stories of ten fine artists and intrepid theoretical scientists who have abandoned careers and scoffed at hard–earned graduate degrees—all to forge unconventional lives as modern–day paperfolders. Between the Folds, premiered on PBS's Independent Le
A peculiar math teacher from Transilvania is becoming a local Don Quijote when he quits the conventional educational system and opens a private lectures office in his own two-room apartment. Throughout a school year we follow his struggle and persistence in bringing back the passion of learning and
This is a second series of visual proofs I assembled for the Pythagorean theorem. I wanted to feature the elegant beauty of these proofs, seeing them as a system of ingeniously choreographed puzzles.
Filmed in Canada, Iran, and the United States, Secrets of the Surface: The Mathematical Vision of Maryam Mirzakhani examines the life and mathematical work of Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian immigrant to the United States who became a superstar in her field. In 2014, she was both the first woman and t
The work Penrose 11 by mathematicians William Casselman, David Austin, and David Wright, and the cross-section of a fruit fly's eye, narrated by biologist Jean Claude Ameisen.
lotte schreiber and norbert pfaffenbichler´s 36 is a rigidly mathematical and graphic composition based on the number in its title. All of this video´s elements, including its length, are variables of this figure. three apparently independent fields of perception are linked to stefan n&e
A surrealist journey through colours and shapes inspired by the poem "Romance Sonámbulo" by Federico García Lorca. Visual poetry in the rhythm of fantastic dreams and passionate nights.
A video made in tribute to my father - a mathematics book editor - although I have myself no special knowledge of mathematics. This is a work about those parts of ourselves that drift away, maybe only to be recovered in memory. My father, born in 1944 in Germany, emigrated to the US in the early 197
Only Mars appears in this movie. Mars has own shadow . I can feel Integration from shadow. I can feel other things from shadow to shadow.
The shapes and structures that appear in this video installation and 3d printed sculptures are created on a computer using equations that mimic the way that elements of the natural world – including roots, clouds and lichen – take, develop or change their form. These intricate, hybrid fo
To win a research grant at one of the world's leading tech giants, gifted PhD Arturo "Rey" Reyes enters an unprecedented academic contest: the first-ever DUEL FOR THE LARGEST FINITE NUMBER. Facing his rival, PhD Daniel Evans, Rey must inscribe the biggest number he can conceive on a chalkboard. As h
Many people believe that mathematics and science somehow detract from the beauty of nature. We respectfully disagree – for science has shown that nature is mathematics and mathematics nature. With the right kind of eyes, flowers are no longer just flowers and stars are no longer just stars. Ra
In CHANCES ARE, a mathematics whiz, compulsively totting up the chances on everything, uses his skills to locate the girl of his dreams after a chance encounter with her at a bar. When a probability geek loses a $20 bill with a girl's phone number on it, he tries to calculate where the bill, and his
The young quantum physicist Konstantin teaches at university and during summer vacation he goes to a university's sea campus. Every day he teaches for a group of students, and at night he keeps order in he dormitory. Students prefer summer, girls and their own youth instead of physics. Like a fish o
The Stability of the System is an exploration into the material agency of images and of forms and their ability to call each other into being.The film begins with a mathematical point willing itself into dimensional existence, inventing/discovering space, then time. Shot on the volcanic island of La
Square the Circle is a little circular film about one person's round trip out to the (un)known universe and into themselves, in search of a sense of belonging. To "square the circle" is an attempt to do the impossible: look into infinity, accept the perpetual passing of time, survive a long dark win
Neural network neurons printed to film through static electricity. All imagery is derived from visualization techniques exposing the inner workings of machine learning vision models. These base components mirror the base elements as a universe is born. Sound Design by Kamuter.
Four-dimensional quaternions (fractals) are visualized by projecting them into three-dimensional space. Instead of modeling objects of human imagination the realm of mathematics is explored. Only the variables of one formula (x[n+1]=x[n]^p-c) were changed. It took me about a year to get an idea of t
Exclusively generated by code, moon blink is a video that highlights the unique aesthetic decisionism of its narrative model. Initially, it is the motion that is irritating. Although the undulating, disordered sequences of lines stabilize into strictly regulated, ascending patterns of movement in th
Searchers pursue mysterious and seemingly unreachable objects. And what will happen if they are found?
Robin Riad's film ostensibly teaches the Arabic alphabet. In reality, the letters are printed onto the 16mm film's optical track, creating sound from the projector's reading of their visual patterns.
Fleeting Structure is a documentary film exploring the art and science of fluid flow and crystal growth in the living and nonliving worlds through stunning photographs and breath-taking cinematography driven by an intriguing original soundtrack. It is also a call to action to reestablish truth in so
Summoned to a remote warehouse by the enigmatic Fermat, four brilliant mathematicians are given pseudonyms -- Galois, Hilbert, Olivia and Pascal -- and tasked with solving highly complex numerical riddles. As the apparent strangers struggle to solve the puzzles and determine why they are there, the
Time is measured by folding a piece of white linen in front of a black background: altogether I fold it seven times, each time starting anew and executing an extra fold. The proportions of the cloth correspond to the picture size of a 16mm film, its width is the distance between my two outstretched
Warning: The stroboscopic nature of "prime perfect" provides an intense viewing experience. My film was inspired by the artist Tony Conrad's 1965 film "The Flicker." Frame numbers that are prime numbers are white (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, … 8,123). Frame numbers that are perfect numbers are red (6
The video is presented on an infinite loop and explores the homeomorphism—or topological transformation—of primordial geometric forms: the cube, the sphere, and the tetrahedron. In this experimental demo, human gestures drive seamless transitions between these shapes, creating an infinit
Filmed in the basement of the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium in Bengaluru (IN), the seamlessly looped video shows a Shive wave generator in operation. Invented by physicist John N. Shive in 1959, the device is used to illustrate wave motion, giving physical form to forces otherwise invisible to the hu
Gentle rain pitter-patters on wooden shingles. Fibonccci spirals map out the internal story of a 1960s cabin nestled in the woods. A man circles by. Tea on the stove and whiskey on the rocks. The radio crackles, blankets rustle, lanterns sway. Fake flowers and thriving thistle.
MultiTwo explores the interplay between construction and deconstruction through interwoven visual and sonic systems. The work builds a minimal architecture of symmetry, rhythm, and signal, only to gradually erode its coherence through shifts, pulses, and interference. Image and sound act as structur
Born into a world of numbers, an oppressed zero discovers that through determination, courage, and love, nothing can be truly something.
Space voices, what we can't hear, what we can't see. This film is a marriage of art and science. Not only the concept is based on science, but also the progress of producing the film is based on some technical and mathematical approaches. The wave features of recorded audios of Saturn and Jupiter ha
Theorem 9 (latent figures) is a video installation that combines computer science and cinematic art. Every frame in a digitized version of the film Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) is reconstructed using four distinct sets of prototypical frames ("visual archetypes") extracted from that same film.
Light. Sound. Matter. Intricate landscapes emerge from multitudinous overlapping waves of film and quantum physics. Film created as part of the Symbiosis 2022 competition during the 15th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival around the theme of the Science New Wave.
He is Mr. Carreaux. He walks towards you imagined, he sees you, Blanche. He sees you. And, from the depths of winter, and from the city, he writes you in truth, for you to exist. You're here, reading his words. He is here, writing to you. You want what he offers you: at the end of the day, you answe
A man with no home and no job, Paul Erdos was the most prolific mathematician who ever lived. Born in Hungary in 1913, Erdos wrote and co-authored over 1,500 papers and pioneered several fields in theoretical mathematics. At the age of 83 he still spent most of his time on the road, going from math