Cinema Redux, Brendan Dawes

Part of MoMA’s permanent collection, Dawes’s Cinema Redux transformed the experience of a film into a singular visual artifact. This innovative concept distills an entire movie into one image, where each row corresponds to one minute of the film, with each of the 60 frames representing a second. This technique effectively creates a “visual fingerprint” of a film, capturing its essence in a composite image. Acquired by the MoMA in 2008, Cinema Redux was a work on Processing by Dawes.

Dawes recalls the impact of the piece and the relevance of Processing to its success:

“Then in 2007 I got an email from The Museum of Modern Art asking if they could feature Cinema Redux in their new exhibition called Design and the Elastic Mind. I still remember starring at that email in absolute disbelief — after all I only managed to get a grade C in art at high school. This was ridiculous. In 2008 myself and my wife travelled to New York for the opening and saw Cinema Redux printed thirty feet high, proudly sat alongside other beautiful work. MoMA would then go to acquire the work for the permanent collection, featuring in three more MoMA exhibitions as well as other exhibitions around the world including Big Bang Data. All this made possible because of freely messing about in this wonderful thing called Processing.”