2001: a space odyssey was produced in 1968, and raised the bar in audience expectations towards the science fiction genre. those newly introduced aesthetics were not only implemented in the futuristic props, also the camera followed a very stringent and minimalist approach to add calmness, a certain degree of coolness and an absence of emotional involvement in the scene. i saw the movie for the first time in the 1990s. i knew that the lookout was far too optimistic from a technologically and civilizatory point of view. but still the movie‘s implicit meaning and interpretation is still recent, not only because it is concerned with metaphysical questioning, also simply because it is 2009 and we obviously did not reach the state of development suggested in the movie. this gives the movie a timelessness, at least an up-to-dateness, as it deals with scenarios we still have to accomplish in reality. as a result, i still feel and interpret the aesthetic of the movie as contemporary and as interesting as it might used to be in the year of it‘s release.

The aesthetic of the movie in setting, color, movement and music is complex but coherent. my interest was to articulate a brief exploration in the aesthetics of color, composition and music by deconstructing original content. in the used i call "cross-scan" a certain spot in the image is observed and spread over the whole view. the result is a removal of original space and shape, leaving only color, light and gradient of the respective spot in the source image intact. if the spot of interest changes with a certain rate an animation of ever changing patterns with smooth and harsh gradients will occur. hidden grainy textures from the film material reveal themselves. a contentless, marginalized and glitchy aesthetic is filtered out, but still visibly related to it’s original.

In the animation, this aesthetic is added with the strict and linear movement of the technique, the chronologic order of the source images, and, for the auditive part, the granularized music of the soundtrack, related to the original image and its state of plot within the movie. it works analogue to the cross-scan: it takes out points of interest and emphasizes and stretches them to examine its highly aesthetic potential.

How i learned to love the pasts future is a digital structural film i would like to understand as a personal declaration of admittance for the movie, a remix, as well as a magnifier for its often sublime and delicate aesthetic.

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