The book At the Catastrophy-Point: The analytical observer's notes on Complementary Cubes presents my artistic and media archeological analysis of the film Complementary Cubes1 by artist Manfred Mohr. It is both a visual and theoretical account of how the original programming code that created Complementary Cubes is reconstructed from digital video material.

The film Complementary Cubes presented itself to me as I was looking for some kind of visual material generated from code. Manfred Mohr wrote a computer program in 1974, and that program created Complementary Cubes. In this book I use it as a starting point for an artistic and media archeological exploration of a field between surface and code, between the product of a computer program and the programming code. My first intention was to use Complementary Cubes merely as an example that would initiate a general discussion of a field between surface and code. But as my research evolved, my interests gravitated toward the main topic of Mohr’s work: the cube, and my work became inseparable from his. I have sought the code that Mohr wrote and I have tried to find a path from the product to the program in reverse.

The catastrophy-point, according to Mohr, is where the illusion of a three-dimensional cube collapses into a visual impression of lesser dimensions. I build on this notion of collapse into different dimensions to acknowledge that already the digital video is dependent on an illusion, and threatens to collapse into digital material of other dimensions.

The book I speak myself into an object is also a computer program by the same name. They contain each other. The book contains the computer program as text spread over its pages. The computer program contains the book as the potential result of its process: when the program is run it lays out its own code as a book.

Apart from giving form to and presenting the code/text, the program create all paratext including the list of content, pagination, cover and references. The references are code libraries1 written by others that I speak myself into an object build on. The book contain six such reference libraries presented in binary form (as columns of black and white pixels) in the final part of the book.

The story of the cover is presented in the chapters Cover and ScreenTools. There it is told how the program chooses a small area of the screen on the computer running the program, and expands it. How the title and name of the author are positioned on the spine and front through a number of operations. Additionally how a thin gray surface cover what will become the spine, and how a light noise is applied to the whole cover.

All of this is revealed to the reader. The text speaks of nothing but the construction of the book, but it is written in a language rarely seen in print: C++. It is one of the most popular programming languages, read and written by thousands around the globe. Precisely read and written, because it lacks common pronunciation. It is primarily a written language, and it is through digital writing that its potential as agent and transformer is considered to be realized. As spoken language or analogue writing (as in I speak myself into an object) the language is shifted outside the typical context. When the text is read (both quietly and aloud) we have the opportunity to understand the code differently, beyond efficiency and function.