Much of Joost Rekveld's work finds its inspiration in media history and the history of science. When considered as cultural phenomena and disconnected from notions of progress, these histories are a rich repository of ideas, many of them wrongly neglected and interesting to revisit. This work - and the longer film it is part of - are outcomes of Rekveld's long-running investigation into the practice and utopian ideas around analog computing. Its point of departure is a re-enactment of a concrete event: the discovery of deterministic chaos by Yoshisuke Ueda when working with the analog computer at Kyoto University on November 27, 1961.
There are several origin stories of chaos theory, and the most well known is undoubtedly the story of Edward Lorenz and his digital calculator. Around the same time as Ueda, Lorenz discovered that a very small rounding error in his data resulted in large-scale divergence of the outcome of the weather model he was calculating. Years later this phenomenon became generally known as 'The Butterfly Effect'.
Ueda's discovery was also made in collaboration with a calculating device, in this case an electronic analog computer constructed by a fellow doctoral student a few years his senior. When plotting the curves produced by a system of equations, Ueda noticed an irregularity, similar in shape to a 'shattered egg', that could not be accounted for by any malfunction or known mathematical explanation. Due to the hierarchical relations in the lab, Ueda's discovery was dismissed by his superiors for many years and it did not get published until the early 1970's, at the time of the student's protests in Japan.

This work is also the prologue to Joost Rekveld's film "Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59" (DCP, 2023, 79'). More info here.

The equations are:
ẋ = x − yz
ẏ = x − by + xz
ż = −az + xy

The equations are:
ẋ = x − yz
ẏ = x − by + xz
ż = −az + xy

The equations are:
ẋ = x − yz
ẏ = x − by + xz
ż = −az + xy

The equations are:
ẋ = x − yz
ẏ = x − by + xz
ż = −az + xy

The equations are:
ẋ = x − yz
ẏ = x − by + xz
ż = −az + xy