Hollis Frampton begins his 1973 essay, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract” by lamenting “an irksome paradox of public consciousness” that, “to be accorded the status of a legend is to be whittled down to a microscopic point, a nonentity at the intersection of a random handful of idiosyncrasies, tidbits of gossip, shreds of advertising copy.”[1] Frampton lists the microscopic points to which René Descartes, Beatrix Potter, the Reverend C.L. Dodgson, and finally, the subject of his essay, Eadweard Muybridge had been whittled into: “three little words, in Latin no less,” authoress of Peter Rabbit, the literary persona of Lewis Carroll, and “a technician hired by a California nabob to settle a colossal wager over whether a galloping horse, at any instant in its stride, has all four feet off the ground.”[2] These “microscopic points,” and their avoidance of such “impedimenta” that can be unfolded from them such as Descartes’s “exquisite adventure of the mind, the marriage of geometry with algebra,” evoke for a contemporary subject the handiwork of AI. For instance, here, Google’s AI assistant whittles Hollis Frampton down into a few bullet points.
Fig. 1. Google AI Mode Search for “Hollis Frampton,” February 7, 2026 12:30 (PST).
The tesseract, especially in Frampton’s thinking, moves counter to the reduction of information into singular points, expanding toward further dimensions and perspectives. As AI whittles information down into efficient bullet points, contemporary cinematic exhibition is expanding from the single channel and single point of a rectangle like a tesseract into and onto gallery spaces and building façades, begging for a reconsideration of the inherent plasticity of cinema that Frampton rigorously explored. Both the age of AI and that of expanded cinema lend novel importance to the tesseract as a trope that runs through Frampton’s work.
Fig. 2. Diagram of a tesseract (a four-dimensional hyper-cube). Image courtesy of Jason Hise and Wikipedia Commons.
Frampton notes in his essay that some of Muybridge’s earliest landscape works, “seem positively to seek, of all things, waterfalls, long exposures of which produce images of a strange, ghostly substance that is in fact the tesseract of water: what is seen is not water itself but the virtual volume it occupies during the whole time-interval of the exposure.”[3]
Fig. 3. An example of the waterfalls Muybridge photographed that Frampton describes: Pi-Wi-Ack (Shower of Stars), Vernal Fall, 400 Feet, Valley of Yosemite, Eadweard Muybridge (1872).
Fig. 4. An example of waterfalls photographed by Muybridge as described by Frampton: Wildcat Fall, Valley of Yosemite, Eadweard Muybridge (1872).
Such a description recalls the parallel Érik Bullot draws between Elie Faure’s and Jean Epstein’s contemplations of cinematic plasticity which both invoke volcanic metaphors. Faure ends his 1922 essay “De la cinéplastique,” by invoking Mount Vesuvius as a “symbol of this grandiose art (cinema) we seek to perceive…a great moving construction constantly bringing itself back to life under our eyes from sheer internal force and which the great variety of…forms help build.”[4]In Le cinematographe vu de l’Etna, reflecting on the animistic power of Mt. Etna, Epstein writes “the cinema unites all the kingdoms of nature into a single order, one possessing the most majestic vitality.” (see Fig. 5). For Bullot, “the attraction of the volcanic eruption represents the ultimate metaphor of cinema’s plasticity. Just as lava fuses different states of matter, the cinematic image produces dissimilarity without rupturing its resemblance to its referent….Epstein says that cinema would be useful for justice because it works like a proof, revealing not truth or falsity but rather producing both truth and skepticism.”[5]
Fig. 5. From La montagne infidèle, Jean Epstein (1923).
Similarly, it seems that what fascinates Frampton about Muybridge’s waterfalls is their “production of dissimilarity without rupturing resemblance to their referent.” That is, their location in the photographic arts (the basis for cinema) of resemblance and difference, “truth and skepticism,” “not water, but the virtual volume of water.”[6] Ask ChatGPT who Hollis Frampton is today and then again tomorrow and its answers, stated in the most definitive and truth-asserting tone each time will have nevertheless changed, like the virtual shape of water pictured by the time-interval of Muybridge’s camera, the positions of the source data having shifted. At 12:30 on Feb. 7th, Frampton was whittled down to “a preeminent figure of the American avant-garde, renowned for his intellectually rigorous films, photography, and pioneering work in digital art…a central architect of structural cinema.” By 17:00 the same day he was “a seminal American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer and theorist…a leading figure of the 1960s and 70s New York experimental scene.” You can never dip your foot into the same AI river twice for, as Heraclitus would argue, it is not the same information stream, and you are not the same person. Frampton’s work betrays a life-long investment in tesseract-like ways of thinking that challenge truth with skepticism in the form of contesting the solidity of objects, the discreteness of facts, closed systems or final thoughts, insisting upon a world that can always be perceived from a slightly different angle unfolding as a tesseract does from a microscopic point, a world that is thus never complete.
Projected around a cube, the tesseract is an inherently sculptural figure, its relationship to the cube being analogous to the relationship between a mobile spectator and a sculptural object. It is thus somewhat unsurprising that Frampton begins his essay on Muybridge with a quote by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, “It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop” (1911).[7] Rodin’s quip was in response to Muybridge’s photographic motion studies and conveys the meditations on temporality that in the 1890s more or less convinced Rodin that the art of sculpture, which had since Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 Laocoön essay been thought of as a spatial art of simultaneity was in fact an art experienced over time. The different views photography yielded of Rodin’s sculptures, photographs he commissioned in the vein of motion studies, from slightly different angles at slightly different times of day, suggested that sculpture was a virtual art (see Figs. 6-9). In fact, the perspectives on a given sculpture assembled by the chronophotography Rodin commissioned (and the sculptural object they collectively project) seem to constitute tesseracts of the original sculptures; just as a tesseract is a “hyper cube,” a 360-degree circumambulatory perception of a sculpture might be said to create a “hyper sculpture.”
Fig. 6. Eadweard Muybridge, Human Motion Studies (University of Pennsylvania), 1887.
Fig. 7. Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss as photographed by Jacques-Ernest Bulloz in 1886.
Fig. 8. Auguste Rodin’s Fugit Amor as photographed by Charles Bodmer in 1884.
Fig. 9. Auguste Rodin’s Pierre de Wisant as photographed by Charles Bodmer in 1886.
As a tesseract’s four dimensions can only be apprehended through three-dimensional modeling supplemented by our mind’s projections, Rodin’s experiments with spatially successive photographs of his works suggested that the apprehension of a sculpture depends upon our imaginative assembly of multiple viewpoints that we cannot physically access simultaneously in space. In his essay, Frampton describes how in Muybridge’s 1877 San Francisco panorama (Fig. 10), he “…condenses an entire rotation of the seeing eye around the horizon (an action that must take place in time) into a simultaneity that is at once completely plausible and perfectly impossible: it is as if a work of sculpture were to be seen turned inside out, by some prodigy of topology.”[8]
Fig. 10. “Panorama of San Francisco,” Eadweard Muybridge, 1877.
This depiction manifests the problematic photography helped Rodin grasp, that the continuity of his sculptures was challenged by their rejection of frontality and their dependence on a circumambulatory viewer who could never see the work simultaneously from all angles. This reality suggested the potentially infinite viewpoints that comprised Rodin’s works in the mind of any given viewer, viewpoints Rodin’s commissioned photographs show were also subject to changing atmospheric conditions, sunlight here and shadow there, etc. Chronophotography’s revelation of such contingencies of perception, making sculpture a virtual art, that is, inherently partial and incomplete at any given moment, calls to mind the great preoccupation of much of Frampton’s work with the unpredictable ways in which the spectator will perceive or project images on screen. Films like nostalgia, Poetic Justice, and Zorns Lemma use words that invite spectators to summon their own images (Fig. 11-12). Special Effects even skips the use of language altogether, asking the viewer to do all the work in populating the jiggling outline of a frame within a frame. Such films underscore their own incompleteness, their virtuality, on account of their dependency on a viewer’s perception and participation over time. They can thus be seen as inherently works-in-progress dependent on the contingencies and vagaries, the open system, of a viewer’s imagination and memory.
Fig. 11. Poetic Justice (Hapax Legomena II), Hollis Frampton (1972).
Fig. 12. Special Effects (Hapax Legomena VII), Hollis Frampton (1972).
The productive “failure” at completion characteristic of Frampton’s early 1970s films foreshadows failure always being “part of the horizon of possibility for the Magellan project,” as Michael Zryd has argued, “Magellan is an incomplete work that might not have been fully comprehended even had it been finished.”[9] Indeed, as Zryd notes, the Magellan films “were perplexing to many viewers partly due to the work-in-progress status of the larger project… many films were not meant to be viewed in one screening.”[10] Magellan performs a resistance to closure (rather than simply “failing to be complete”) in the minds of the spectator on a hyper-level (a tesseract to) the ways in which say Poetic Justice resists completeness. That is, just as the film that exists in the mind of a spectator of Poetic Justice at any given time changes on the basis of what that person pictures in the positions of “Me,” You,” and “Your Lover” and the different spaces and objects the numbered shots describe, so too did the viewer’s experience of films comprising the lengthy MagellanCalendar change on the basis of how the overall work and the spectator’s engagement with it evolved (what screenings they attended and in what order). Frampton appears to have factored the mutability of this experience into his “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” particularly Goal 2: “The malleability of the sense and notion of time in film. Investigation of the temporal plasticity proper to an art that subsists at once within the colliding modes of memory, absolute ‘presentness’ and anticipation.”[11] (By the way, this reads like a description of nostalgia.) This goal of Magellan performs a meta-history of various 20th century avant-garde approaches to the “temporal plasticity” of the filmic experience that also contemplated its virtuality in the mind of the spectator. I think here not only of the volcanic-inspired writings of Elie Faure and Jean Epstein cited by Bullot, but also of Luis Buñuel’s theories of découpage and segmentación that posit as Tom Conley explains, “the shot as a larval mass of images in perpetual metamorphosis…a sudden perception of these masses becomes the commanding event of a film.”[12] (Fig. 13-14)
Fig. 13-14. “…a larval mass of images.” Stills from Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929).
This sudden perception strikes me as generating the same kind of “virtual volume” as Muybridge’s photographic capture of a waterfall. There are also Sergei Eisenstein’s foundations for montage, particularly his argument in “Dramaturgy of Film Form” that in Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithograph of Miss Cecy Loftus “if one logically develops position A of the foot, one builds a body in position A corresponding to it. But, the body is represented from knee up already in position A + a. The cinematic effect of joined motionless pictures is already established here! From hips to shoulders we can see A + a + a,”[13] (Fig. 15) suggesting a virtual movement gleaned from simultaneous still images in the mind of a viewer.
Fig. 15. “Miss Cecy Loftus,” Lithograph, 1894, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.
Maya Deren evokes a similar virtuality in the structure of her “Anagram” essay which analogizes the film experience where “all the elements exist in a simultaneous relationship; nothing is first, nothing is last; nothing is future, nothing is past, nothing is old, nothing is new, except perhaps the anagram itself.” (Fig. 16) The glimpses of 20th century avant-garde explorations into temporal plasticity “proper to an art that subsists at once within the colliding modes of memory, absolute ‘presentness’ and anticipation,”[14] that Magellan affords us offer a virtual volume of the virtual, a hyper-virtual work that rather than whittling down temporal plasticity to a single point, performs the virtual’s propensity to continue to unfold.
Fig. 16. Table of Contents from Maya Deren’s An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film illustrating the “anagram” organization.
Frampton’s generation of the virtual through language in his earlier films which largely depend on the projections of a spectator’s mind in response to verbal, textual, or imagistic signifiers, translates to Magellan’s suspension in the viewer’s mind and experience, its status as a “work-in-progress.” Sculptural elements of films from the early to mid-1970s generate similar virtualities as they translate the Hapax Legomena films’ dependence upon the spectator’s flexible generation of image from word to the contingent and elastic nature of our durational perception of three-dimensional objects. Lemon (1969) acts as a sculptural precursor to the perspectival elasticity of what connects word to image, sign to referent that Frampton will explore in his Hapax Legomena films (and Zorns Lemma), but also as a harbinger of the meditations on physical and temporal plasticity to which he returns in Magellan. As a changing light source breaks the yellow-orange object featured in the film up into different shapes and colors, we project the fruit as a singular whole from the glimpses we gather over the course of the film, a virtual volume our mind assembles from perception and memory like the tesseract of a waterfall produced by the long-exposure of Muybridge’s camera (Fig. 17).
Fig. 17. From Lemon (Hollis Frampton, 1969), photo-collage created by Maya Chami, https://mayachami.wordpress.com/transitional-digital-objects/frampton-lemon/
Several of Magellan’s films lead us to contemplate how a physical world becomes virtual due to the always-changing perceptions and mental projections of a human observer. In particular, At the Gates of Death, takes inspiration from Rodin’s unfinished Gates of Hell and Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), which contemplates the limits of human experience as inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 6.4311: “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death….Our life has no end just as our visual field has no limits.”[15] (Figs. 18-19). As Magellan positions itself as a metahistory of cinema, the Gates of Hell are a metahistory, a tesseract, of Rodin’s oeuvre, a single work shaped around miniatures of the multiples made over the course of his career (Figs. 20-22).
Figs. 18-19. Stills from Stan Brakhage’s Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1970).
Fig. 20-22. Gates of Hell, Auguste Rodin, close-up on a miniaturized Fugit Amor included in Gates of Hell and the original Fugit Amor.
Combining its reference to The Gates of Hell with Brakhage’s contemplation of the limits of human experience, At the Gates of Death insists upon death as an event projected from a collection of images, something experienced virtually rather than physically. INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT similarly engages the viewer in virtual projection, presenting a nude woman whose movements are made discontinuous by repeat frames that halt and stutter her body, often underscoring the singularity in time and space of each image. Our perception of her depends in part upon the ways a single light source reveals her white body as she moves before a black background (Fig. 23). As the film intersperses images of the woman with images of the same outline of a frame Frampton used in Special Effects [eg at 1:03], it walks us through populating that frame with the views of the woman we have just collected in our mind. The virtual volume of the woman is assembled by our perception like the virtual volume of Muybridge’s waterfall is assembled by his camera’s time-interval. The film’s title, a Latin phrase lifted from Book 2 of Propertius’s Elegies translates into English, “The girl made us ingenious,” referring in the Elegies to the ways the beloved (rather than divine inspiration) powers poetic creation or productive genius. Thus, the synthetic operations performed by the perceiving subject’s work of love (and looking) power the image rather than an unseen authoritative source.
Fig. 23. Three stills from INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT (Hollis Frampton, 1975).
Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation registered the world as spherical rather than flat, an aspect of the influence for Frampton’s final film cycle that is rather suggestive in this context. The sphere (like the cube) suggests the movement between two-dimensionality and three central to chronophotography’s virtualization of the sculptural object, a virtual collection of views analogous to early photography’s virtualization of a moving substance. It is in the tension between flatness and depth that Frampton locates an equivalently productive plasticity of perception to the plasticity of imagination he beckons between sign and referent in his earlier films. In “Goal 6” of his “Statement of Plans for Magellan,” he writes, “The graphic cinema is as old as filmic illusion…the…presence of intertitles…recalls our attention to a frontal picture plane that we feel to be at odds with that deep space whose aggressive recapture more clearly marks the onset of cinematic thought than the…analytic film strip or even the illusion of motion.”[16] Frampton thus locates the “onset of cinematic thought” in the confrontation between the picture plane and deep space.
Confirming Magellan’s status as a metahistory of cinema, this location recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s use of the spiral in Vertigo and predicts Gilles Deleuze’s interest in the fold. The spiral and the fold are both plastic and metaphoric figures emblematic of an “infinite cinema” where thought and review replace reception, “producing dissimilarity without rupturing resemblance to the referent,”[17] as Bullot puts it. The spiral and the fold figure the transition between dimensional planes, spaces where perspectives on the same object multiply. The perspectives a line affords a point, and a square a line, a cube a square, and a tesseract a cube mimic the “frontal picture plane…at odds with…deep space,”[18]as lesser dimensional figures are incorporated into more complex structures that multiply their relations. Vertigo’s spiral motif figures the different ways that the “same” subject (Madeleine as Judy, Judy as Madeleine) can be perceived from different points in the film’s plot embodying Scotty’s differing angles of view on the original imposter as he follows her through San Francisco assembling the virtual volume of his fantasy (Figs. 24-26). Similarly, in Citizen Kane, the “first great film of a cinema of time”[19] for Deleuze, for all the glimpses we collect of Charles Foster Kane, the man himself, like Rosebud, resists being whittled into a microscopic point as we can always imagine another view to be taken of him, another person interviewed, another plane unfolding from the deep space that dominates the film.
Figs. 24-26. The spiral motif in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959).
Fig. 27. The unfolding deep-space of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).
I close with another waterfall, the first “Given” of Marcel Duchamp’s “object in Philadelphia,” Étant donnés. In an interview with Peter Gidal, Frampton notes that it is “impossible to photograph the thing…one has had, therefore, to get by with verbal description of it.”[20] This impossibility was due not only to Duchamp’s prohibitions against photography but also, Frampton notes, to “the mode of the construction of the thing,”[21] and we might assume he is referring to the glimmering nature of the “given” gas and the “water” which pose the same difficulties for photographic capture as the time interval of Muybridge’s camera posed for 19th century waterfalls. Etant donné’s stubbornly fixed frame, “two peepholes,” make it, as Frampton asserts, “impossible to shift your view to see if in fact she has a head, right hand, or feet,”[22] (Figs. 28-30) as these items have been left out of the frame. Indeed, Duchamp’s “object” elicits Frampton’s desire to move around the work, underscoring the same dependency of most sculptural objects on multiple perspectives that chronophotography illuminated in the case of Rodin’s sculptures. Frampton notes that “no two people describe [Etant donnés] the same way,” and envisions asking twelve different people to describe the object in twelve sentences each,[23] essentially proposing a virtual object constructed from twelve different perspectives put through what Brakhage called Frampton’s “sieve” of language. Thus, while Etant donnés makes the virtual reality of the sculptural encounter, a characteristic of its plasticity, visible by limiting it to the unmoving frame of the “peephole,” the impossibility of photographing the work translates the virtuality elicited by plasticity and dimension to virtuality elicited by language in Frampton’s earlier films. But that is what cinema, for all its promise to totally represent the world in space and time, comes down to. The curve, the fold, and sculptural reception figure these viewpoints on the “same object” forced by time, space, and subjectivity to be different, assembling the virtual. Despite AI’s authoritative postures and promises of encyclopedic knowledge, it too assembles viewpoints as the viewpoints of a sculpture are gathered in space and synthesized as a virtual object in the mind of a viewer. Just as these points are in flux rather than static, incomplete as there are always possible views that have not yet been had, so too is AI’s data-whittling virtual projection. Perhaps Frampton’s aesthetic contemplations of the tesseract and its sculptural essence can help illuminate how the fundamental dynamism of information at work in the proliferation of screens in our physical expanded media environment undermines AI’s authoritative rumblings.
Figs. 28-30. The door, the peephole, and the view of Etant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau, 2. le gaz d’éclairage, 1946-1966 (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Rebecca A. Sheehan
[1] Bruce Jenkins, ed. On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT Press, 2009), p. 22.
[2] Ibid.
[3] On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, p. 27.
[4] Érik Bullot, “Thoughts on Photogénie Plastique,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, edit. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 246. Bullot is quoting from Elie Faure, “De la cinéplastique,” in L’arbre d’Eden (Paris: Crès, 1922), reprinted in Faure, Fonction du cinéma à son destin social (Paris: Gonthier, 1964), pp. 16-36.
[5] Bullot, “Thoughts on Photogénie Plastique,” 246.
[6] On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, p. 27.
[7] On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, p. 22.
[8] On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, p. 28.
[9] Michael Zryd, Hollis Frampton: Navigating the Infinite Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2023), p. 218-219.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Quoted in Zryd, p. 57.
[12] Tom Conley, “A Rape of the Eye,” in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, edit. Jeffrey Geiger and R.L. Rutsky, pp. 197-215, p. 203.
[13] Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and the Film Sense, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian, 1959), p. 50
[14] Hollis Frampton uses this phrase to describe Goal 2: Time in his “Statement of Plans” for Magellan, as quoted in Zryd, p. 57.
[15] As quoted by Stan Brakhage in Metaphors on Vision, edit. P. Adams Sitney (Film Culture, Inc., 1963), unpaginated.
[16] Hollis Frampton, “Goal 6: Graphic and Plastic Elements” in his “Statement of Plans” for Magellan, as quoted in Zryd, p. 65.
[17] Bullot, “Thoughts on Photogénie Plastique,” 246.
[18] Zryd, 57.
[19] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 99.
[20] Peter Gidal and Hollis Frampton, “Interview with Hollis Frampton,” October, vol. 32 (Spring 1985), pp. 93-117 (MIT Press), 101.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Gidal and Frampton, 101-102.
[23] Ibid.