A film by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, Constant is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement and the human body.
Constant (2022) film still
Image Description: A distorted image made with a 360º camera forms a circle in the centre where trees point to a bright sky. On the outer part of this circle, a forest environment is populated by two figures dressed with historic costumes.
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.
Constant (2022) film still
Image Description: In a digital 3D environment, a group of five people sit around a table, the setting is somehow bureaucratic, the render is in black-and-white.
Constant is a sociopolitical exploration of histories of measurement standardization, primarily in Europe. The initial spark for the research came when Beny Wagner and Sasha Litvintseva learned that the standard meter was derived from a calculation of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. The meter was calculated as one ten millionth of that distance. Even more striking to us was the fact that this was done in the middle of the French Revolution, and that the meter was saturated with an ideological belief in egalitarianism that drove the revolution and the enlightenment principles it was based on. Still lacking any further knowledge about measurement systems, they knew, like many people do, that measurements were once intimately related to the human body, identifiable in older measurements like the foot, the ell, the digit. They knew the meter represented a major historical transformation in the understanding of and relationship to the body and were inspired to learn more.
Litvintseva and Wagner encountered a rich history of power, hidden behind the seemingly benign notion of precision, in which measurement served as a central tool in the centralization of power and the ability to control others. And yet, at every moment in the history of measurement, advances were driven by a similar belief that drove the French revolutionaries; the idea that a single measurement system was the condition for equal societies. Today, metrology, the science of measurement, seems very distant from concerns around egalitarianism, and yet the closer they looked the more clearly they identified the same dialectic at play; freedom and power, rights and coercion are always oscillating around the centralized structures of metrology.
Constant (2022) film still
Image Description: In a digital 3D environment, a man stands in a field. Around him, just the darkness of the empty virtual space.
The film is organized in three main parts, each of which are broken down into three chapters. The first part is a reenacted story of the artists’ meeting with representatives of the National Physics Laboratory, the UK body that researches and standardizes every form of measurement imaginable, from biometrics to nanophysics. The second part concerns the story of the two astronomers, Pierre Mechain and Jean Baptiste Delambre, who set out to measure the distance of the North Pole to the equator by triangulating the length of the meridian that runs from Dunkirk to Barcelona. The third part is set in early modern Eastern Europe, where new measurement systems were used to enforce land enclosures and new taxation systems on peasant farmers. These three stories are interwoven in a way that produces unexpected parallels between these distinct moments in time as a way of tracing the dialectic of freedom and power through the history of measurement standardization.
Beny Wagner states that:
“[a]ll of our films so far have been driven by the desire to explore a given subject matter through forms that are specific to the themes. This means that with every project we set out to learn and use new technologies and filmmaking tools. Constant is probably the best expression of this process in that the story is really told through formal devices of measurement. In this case we used photogrammetry to produce landscapes and figures which we then animated together with Matteo Mastrandrea in a rewarding collaboration. We also worked with actors to reenact parts of Mechain and Delambre’s journey, filming them primarily with 360 cameras, which made direct reference to the techniques (and the failure of those techniques) for triangulating distance in the late eighteenth century.”
Talking about the creation process, Wagner says that “[w]hile we cover quite a bit of historical, philosophical and political history in this film, we were equally concerned with formal experimentation and accessibility. We wanted people to enter it in many different ways, whether through the saturated, sometimes psychedelic images, or through the layered soundtrack, which I collaborated on with the band Dead Hand. We worked on an elaborate 5.1 surround mix which feels quite immersive in a cinema environment.”
Installation view at Seoul Media City Biennale, 2023
Image Description: At the end of a long room there’s a projection of the film “Constant” with a bench in front of it. At the entrance of the room there are vertical lights going from the floor to the ceiling, both close to the walls and in the middle of the room.
So far, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner have had several opportunities to show their film in exhibitions and to consider how the film could work spatially. One recent example of this an installation for the Seoul Mediacity Biennial at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) (image above) which the artists developed in collaboration with the scenographers Matteo Mastrandrea (who also worked on the film’s animations) and Isabel Ogden. Together they drew on themes from the film relating to measurement and the body and translated these into a spatial experience.
Beny Wagner, lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, works across moving image, text, installation and lectures, constructing non-linear narratives that explore the threshold of the human body in time. Wagner has explored themes ranging from histories of metabolism, to the social and political histories of measurement standardization, histories of animation at the intersection of science and art. Since 2017, much of his work is produced in the context of his long term collaboration with Sasha Litvintseva.
Credits
Text / direction / edit / sound design: Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner
Produced by: Guillaume Cailleau for CaSk Films, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner
3D and point cloud animation: Matteo Mastrandrea
Camera: Sasha Litvintseva
Original music: dead hand / Additional music: Beny Wagner
Narration: Cynthia Beatt
Supported by: Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg; Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien
Awards
Silvestre Award for Best Short Film,Indie Lisboa Film Festival, 2022
Best International Short Documentary, Guanajuato Film Festival, 2022
Main Award, Olomouc Festival of Science Documentary Film, 2022
Jury Special Mention, EXiS Seoul, 2022
Longlisted Academy Award short documentary category, 2022
