Geoffrey Alan Rhodes is an instructor and graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo and filmmaker. His latest work is tesseract, a 20 minute experimental film telling the story of Eadweard Muybridge's obsession with time and its image at the turn of the century as well as his murder of his wife's lover. Tesseract has been awarded the prize for Best Photography at the Jutro Filmu international film festival in Warsaw, Poland.

It's a heck of a film and really manages, I think, to express how revolutionary Muybridge's work is - not something easy to do.

I'm not blogging about this film simply because it is a good film, but because it demonstrates what it is like to be on the cusp of a new technology and way of viewing the world. To see the potentials of the future and reach beyond what exists at present for what might be. Seeing Muybridge's work is like reading science fiction written before the invention of movies. However, Muybridge was not simply some futurist who anticipated a new medium, but someone who brought us an entirely new way of looking at the world, someone who has shaped the very way we experience our lives.

I think the title tesseract, a hypercube, is incredibly apt. As in the "romance of many dimentions," Flatland, we often do not realize what it is that we cannot see. Muybridge helped us to see in a new dimension. We are still puzzling out some of the implications.

I often wonder who are our Muybridges are today.

Watch it.

via DocBug (who is the brother of Rhodes - congrats!)