Open City Documentary Festival

Constant
Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner | 2022 | Germany, UK | 40’ | digital | English spoken

This essay film by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner interrogates moments of change within the history of measurement standardisation. Complex social and political contexts are traced: land surveying, the invention of the metric system at the time of the French Revolution, and more recent digital innovations. Radical and democratic forms of knowledge are possible in this new landscape, but this is problematised by the accompanying possibilities of control and demarcation.

LiDAR scans portray the omnipotent possibilities of digital measuring systems. These point cloud visuals are set against staged speculations and live action performances of Enlightenment scientists at work in French fields, and early mapped projections of the earth from above. Corporeal embodied forms of measuring shift from tangible space to a newly quantified and abstracted landscape. The resulting film explores how systems of measurement radically alter our lived experience of the world.