Frames per Stone

Fossilised 16mm film

Frames per Stone is Louis Braddock Clarke’s research into the materialisations of cinema through geological filmmaking. The work explores a current artwork called As Gems in Metal and focusses of the formations of moving-images within deep-time. For the film, a series of Mining Industry Machine Learning (MIML) algorithms direct a camera that prospects and drills geological scans. It investigates the act of searching for Rare Earth Elements (REEs), juxtaposing economic extraction with abstract meaning-making. Two algorithms operate in parallel: one replicates industrial techniques for ore detection, while the other searches for phenomenon through amplifying anomalies, and performing divinations that defy quantification. The films will be tested out on a series 16mm experiments, where alchemical mining recipes are used in the analogical developing of the negatives.