What happens when we scale things? Increasing or reduzing size may seem an innocuous practice which only changes the measurements of an object. But in fact, scaling provokes brutal breaks and uncanny tipping points where things become radically and irrevocably different. This is what the vision machines of film with its variable image sizes always tried to tell us: how things by being scaled can fall apart – a lesson perhaps not only about our perception but also about our fragile world at the verge of tipping points.

An accidental research video essay on the Desktop as medium.

"Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. And in me too the wave rises." Virginia Woolf: The Waves. As an homage to film theorist and experimental filmmaker Thierry Kuntzel and his work on waves, and in particular his interactive video installation

What is there to see when characters turn their back on us? Back views in cinema are experienced as disturbances of their visual regime. But by hiding the faces these images point towards another presence, both familiar and uncanny to us all: there’s an off-space we all carry with us but can never look at without optical help. The part of us, where we become strangers to ourselves.

Picking up on Pierre Schaeffer’s musical theory, this video essay looks at the final scene from Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly as a source of concrete sound. No additional sounds were used. The stroboscopic audio is nothing but the original soundtrack, dissected and interrupted by clicking manually from frame to frame.