A collaboration between the London-based electronic musician Max Cooper and the visual artist Kevin McGloughlin in Ireland, Repetition invites viewers to take a mind-bending dive into an audiovisual world of infinite regress. Extrapolating from everyday images, McGloughlin constructs roads and traffic lights that intertwine endlessly, and escalators and elevators that traverse high-rise buildings with no top floor. These mesmerising visuals are accentuated by the ceaseless, steady pulse of Cooper’s ambient score. Intermittent land- and oceanscape imagery seems to draw out parallels between patterns in human engineering and nature, as well as tensions between human expansion and the natural world. But, ultimately, what Repetition offers viewers most forcefully isn’t social commentary, but an immersive experience that’s somehow at once meditative, disorienting and thrilling – and best viewed at full screen.
Director: Kevin McGloughlin
Composer: Max Cooper
video
Progress and modernity
Moving from Tibet to Beijing, Drolma reconciles big dreams with harsh realities
31 minutes
video
Consciousness and altered states
What do screens depicting serene natural scenes mean to those living in lock-up?
12 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes
video
Gender
A catchy tune explains the world’s ‘isms’ – according to your mum doing the laundry
5 minutes
video
Consciousness and altered states
‘I want me back’ – after a head injury, Nick struggles with his altered reality
7 minutes
video
Biology
Butterflies become unrecognisable landscapes when viewed under electron microscopes
4 minutes
video
Gender
A filmmaker responds to Lars von Trier’s call for a new muse with a unique application
16 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes