Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in 2012 for Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, further developed during a residency in Warsaw, and premiered at South London Gallery in 2014. The project extends Nipper’s performance-based practice—where actions accumulate into 3D, flattened into film, and expanded into 4D, operating at the intersection of movement research, photographic systems, and spatial notation.
Set within controlled, entropic, low-contrast environments, the film examines imaging technologies that record and measure motion, mapping the body through apparatus, exposure, and duration. Begun while she was living in Northern California, the work connects landscapes shaped by Ansel Adams’ photographs with the vacant geometries of technology campuses. Exposure—time made visible—emerges as a central material, echoing the tonal logic of the Zone System while reframing it through bodily effort and movement.
The project draws on histories where bodies and image-making converge, including Oskar Schlemmer’s black-screen experiments, Étienne-Jules Marey’s motion studies, and Merce Cunningham’s CRWDSPCR using LifeForms software. These references inform the film’s use of the black screen as both camera and stage—a material chamber where space compresses and time expands.
Developed through long term collaboration with dancer Marissa Ruazol and grounded in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis, the movement research focuses on countertension, shifting weight, and the redistribution of force across low and mid-levels. Movement is treated not as expression but as code and program—a means of testing how perception is organized through optical systems, spatial logic, and duration.
“Tessa Pattern,” derived from “test a pattern,” functions as both concept and character: an imagined community of figures linked to the Black Forest as a site of origin, craft, and industry. Across the project, world and body are constructed as co-evolving architectures.
Grounded in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis as a conceptual and computational grammar, Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture establishes a movement-based operating system through which bodies, cameras, and space are jointly programmed.
