Scientific Creativity: The Notebooks of Rose Lowder

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I was first exposed to Rose Lowder's films in 2003, while attending monthly screenings at Pittsburgh's experimental film focused micro-cinema, Jefferson Presents. The audience for Jefferson Presents typically consisted of artists, musicians, filmmakers, and experimental film enthusiasts. Screenings were loud and lively, and it was uncommon for a film to go by without enthusiastic cheers and jeers from the audience. But when a Rose Lowder film was shown, the room was inevitably silent (as are most of her films), and the audience became fully immersed in an all-engrossing visual experience: red poppies danced in sunny fields traversed by sailboats gliding on shimmering blue oceans; bustling city streets in summer intertwined with empty urban plazas in autumn; peach trees trembled between morning light and evening shade, l ime and space juxtaposed in rhythmic visual patterns, and brought about an acute awareness of each frame of film and its relationship to the cadence of the overall composition. I was mesmerized by those first experiences of Lowder's work. As an artist interested in the engagement between vision and the physiological experience of projected celluloid cinema, I wanted to decode the structures of Lowder's films to better understand the perceptual dynamics of her work. In 2011, as part of my thesis work at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, I invited Lowder to the United States for a lecture and screening tour of Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York. While in Boston she gave a lecture on her unique approach to working with 16mm film as a tool for perceptual experimentation, showing excerpts from her film notebooks to demonstrate her methods. Each hand-drawn page, Lowder explained, was transcribed after the film was shot, and served as both a record of the process and an illustration of the resulting structure of each individual film. Graphically complex, semantically rich and visually stimulating, each design revealed the complexity of Lowder's techniques, and demonstrated the results of her experimentation with the perceptual potential of 16mm film. Since being introduced to these documents in 2011, I have come to understand how the notebooks are vital to understanding the phenomenology of Lowder's films, and provide a key to comprehending how her work integrates her creative process with the scientific method. In the opening sentence of Opticks, Sir Isaac Newton declared his intention to prove his theories on the nature of light and color--not by hypothesis, but through direct experimentation and observation. (1) Using detailed diagrams and descriptions to illustrate his procedures, Newton set forth an inductive approach to the method of scientific investigation, proclaiming that the only truth is one that can be directly observed. Newton's notebooks reveal his dedication to recording and transcribing every visible detail of his experiments, sometimes through mathematical equations, sometimes through pictorial illustration. The resulting text introduced graphic illustrations that have remained essential to the study of the scientific properties of light. Lowder has been a prolific practitioner of perceptual experimentation with 16mm film since the 1970s, and, like Newton, has kept detailed records of her research over the course of her career. Born in 1941 to British parents in Lima, Peru, Lowder now lives and works in the bucolic municipality of Avignon in southeastern France. She has composed more than fifty experimental films exploring the beauty of the botanical world, scenes of daily life in various towns and villages, and extraordinary moments of ordinary existence. Her films are methodically composed entirely in camera, using a precise, frame-by-frame technique which, when projected, culminates in an astonishing perceptual experience of light, color, form, and motion. In many of her films, she captures sequences of individual frames along the film roll, winding the film back and forth through the camera to choose frames selectively, rather than successively, as a painter would choose a point on a canvas upon which to compose. …