Constant
ABOUT
"Constant" is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. “Constant” asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.
Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker and writer, whose work is situated on the uncertain thresholds of the perceptible and the communicable, organism and environment, and knowledge regimes and power, at the intersection of media, ecology and the history of science. Since 2018, much of her work is produced in the context of the ongoing collaboration with Beny Wagner. Her work has been exhibited and screened worldwide including at the Berlinale, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Courtisane, Cinema Du Reel, Punto de Vista film festivals, the Baltic Triennial and Venice Architecture Biennale, Museum of the Moving Image New York, ICA London, LA Filmforum, Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Transmediale, Videobrasil, Berlin Atonal, and Criterion Channel, among many others. Her films have won numerous awards internatioanally, including the Sylvestre Award for Best Short Film at IndieLisboa and Best Short Documentary at Guanajuato Film Festival.
Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner are artists, filmmakers, researchers and writers. They’ve been working collaboratively since 2017. Focussing on moving image as a tool for the active production of new worlds, their practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world. Their combined and individual work has been presented globally: Berlinale, Rotterdam, Courtisane, Cinema Du Reel, RIDM, Ann Arbor, Alchemy and Guanajuato film festivals, Eye Film Museum, HKW Berlin, ICA London, CAC Vilnius, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Berlinische Galerie, MUMOK Vienna, Sonic Acts, Impakt Festival, Berlin Atonal and the Videobrasil, Moscow Young Art, Wroclaw Media Art, Venice Art and Venice Architecture biennales.
CREDITS
Sasha Litvintseva
Sasha Litvintseva
Guillaume Cailleau
Sasha Litvintseva
Beny Wagner