Creating an intricate visual map, photograms provide the opportunity to travel through the space of a spider’s web.

Processing by hand means also to give oneself over to the chance encounter, there is nearly a kind of occultism at work, an automatic writing, a hand guided by spirits. Inscribed into the dark emulsion of this movie is a white grid (since the Renaissance an emblem of orderliness in the visual world, a mapping of space which ensured that hierarchies of visibility and ownership would be maintained. The subject position stabilized. I eye captain.) Here the grid emerges as a more fugitive principle, its totalizing impulse thwarted by its shuddering, kinetic application. Inside the grid lines there are further separations and subdivisions, a teeming, molar, microverse of life, ant colonies underfoot. We move into parts of the grid and examine its molecular structure, we move away from its wavering lines, attracted and repulsed, more and less aware of the foundational structures which continue to frame our lives. (Dad, is that you?) [Mike Hoolboom, 2007]