F for Fibonacci

2014
Gibson, Beatrice
Beatrice Gibson’s work explores the relationship between music and film, in particular the link between the scored and the scripted. F for Fibonacci (2014) takes William Gaddis’ modernist novel JR (1975) as its starting point. This tells the story of a gifted 11-year-old capitalist who creates the greatest ever virtual empire via the anonymity of his school’s pay phone. Inside the mind of the child protagonist, F for Fibonacci refers to a part in JR in which a televised music lesson is scrambled with a maths class on derivatives. It unfolds through the aesthetics of the video game ‘Minecraft’, featuring images of textbook geometry, graphic scores, physics experiments and cartoon dreams, blended with stock market crashes and algorithms. The film also draws on the work of little-known British experimental educator and composer John Paynter, who advocated creative music-making with emphasis on the importance of music education for children. Following Paynter’s lead, Gibson worked closely with an 11-year-old named Clay Barnard Chodzko on a number of the film’s production elements. The artist and child’s musings on the subject of the protagonist guide the viewer through F for Fibonacci’s hallucinatory soup.
  • Artwork Details: running time: 16 minutes 20seconds
  • Edition: 1 of 5 + 1 AP
  • Material description: 16 mm and 35 mm transferred to HD video, surround sound
  • Credit line: © the artist. Image courtesy of Laura Bartlett Gallery.
  • Theme:
  • Medium: Film and Audio Visual
  • Accession number: ACC34/2017

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