Ulla Nolden’s Pure Movements series articulates her perception of the beauty of movement itself, separate from the entities which produce it. Pure Movement 1 is the result of her fascination with the complex yet elegantly fluid movement of spiders.

Nolden experiences the visual perception of movement as accumulative. Over time, she layers observations of similar movements to form one complete percept. As part of this process, the rules governing the movement are clarified, formalised and translated into computational instructions. The spider’s basic gait pattern is an alternation of 2 tetrapods with 4 legs moving while 4 remain on the ground. The steps are altered in length and frequency according to variations in the environment. Furthermore, the gait of some spider species becomes irregular as they move faster.

Nolden visualises the abstract algorithm using the aesthetic language she developed in her photographic work. She states: “I situate the algorithm in different environments. For this work I place the movement into the digital frame of an image taken from the Everyday project, a daily photographic record of my visual perception.”

Pure Movement 1, environment 1.2, iteration 7 is part of a series of 9 unique iterations of the algorithm (+1 artist’s proof), each generating a subtly different movement.