Video Library
10 films watchable now — plus the complete catalog of 146 finished films whose footage is not on the site yet
10 films are watchable right now — the “Available now” row below. The rest of this page is the catalog of the full archive: titles, collections and sizes are listed, but that footage has not been added to the site yet, so those entries are marked and cannot be played.
Why put this tradition on film at all?
The material these films cover has always travelled as pictures. drew the as a diagram because prose cannot hold ten centres and twenty-two connections in the mind at once. Renaissance alchemists published whole books as emblem series — numbered symbolic engravings meant to be read in order, storyboards before the word existed — and seventeenth-century encyclopedists like Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher argued their entire cosmologies in engraved plates rather than in paragraphs. A diagram shows every relationship at the same time; a sentence can only walk through them one by one. For structural material like this, the picture is not decoration — the picture is the argument.
Motion joined the toolkit long before cameras did. In the thirteenth century Ramon Llull built paper machines — concentric disks lettered around their rims — so that physically turning them generated combinations of ideas; medieval astronomy books carried similar rotating paper wheels, called volvelles, for working out moon phases by hand. Every letter-combination animation on the Gates & Letters shelf has those wheels as an ancestor. The oldest source behind this site points the same way: describes being weighed, carved and permuted — pairing letters is presented as an activity someone performs, not a finished table someone consults. are what that activity produces when it is run all the way to the end.
The modern strand is sound made visible. In 1787 Ernst Chladni drew a violin bow against a metal plate dusted with sand, and the sand jumped into geometric figures — the first time anyone watched a tone draw a shape. In the 1960s the Swiss researcher Hans Jenny filmed fluids and powders under vibration and named the study cymatics; the Frequency & Sound shelf sits in that lineage. One honest label, as everywhere on this site: the patterns themselves are ordinary physics — standing waves — and anything they might mean beyond physics is interpretation, filed as interpretation.
What film adds is the one thing a printed plate cannot do: a rotating form shows its symmetry only while it turns, and watching a structure assemble is a different experience from inspecting one already finished. Think of these films as the site's plates set in motion. They carry no written commentary of their own — the titles were derived from the filenames — so the written pages of this site remain the place where the claims are argued, and the footage is where you watch the structures move.
The wheels that turned before film did
Llull's device was meant seriously. He believed that if every basic concept had a letter, then turning the wheels would mechanically enumerate every possible pairing of concepts, and truth could be searched the way a locksmith tries keys. The idea fascinated Europe for centuries — Leibniz wrote his own treatise on the art of combinations after reading him, one early step on the long road that leads to computing.
The Renaissance art of memory worked the same muscle in the opposite direction: instead of external wheels, practitioners such as Giordano Bruno built rotating wheels of letters and images in the imagination, nested and spun by a trained mind. Whether or not one accepts what any of these systems claimed to find, the method is the point here — in this tradition, combination has always been something you watch happen. Which is exactly what an animation is.
Available now 10
These are the only films whose footage is on the site. Press one to play it in the panel above; everything further down is the written catalog of an archive whose files have not been added yet.
Collections
What the footage shows, argued in words