How Long Is “Syzygy”?

Syzygy an eleven-minute silent, black and white film, shot on 35mm (later transferred to 16mm) made in collaboration with the animator Ram Mohan has been located and digitized. It is an abstract work, inspired by Paul Klee’s pedagogical diagrams, for which Padamsee developed his own mathematical pattern, and produced 1000 drawings on transparent cell animation sheets. Each drawing composed of numbers, alphabets, abstract geometric shapes, dots, dashes, was based on a differing configuration generated by his own devised code. Syzygy is a remarkably complex work that Adajania associates with the 1960’s experiments of John Cage. When she queried Padamsee about this connection, he acknowledged that he was reading Cage’s writings at the time, and was acquainted with the work of Iannis Xenakis.