The Diamond (Descartes Daughter)

“This is a stand-in for Francine, Descartes’ daughter, who never washed up on the shores of Sweden. (…)” with this sentence, a mechanical sounding Swedish accent begins the film The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) (2008, 15min ). Taking the mythical story of the death of Descartes’ Daughter as a starting point to search for her again without the anchor of Rational thought, The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) is a disembodied wandering through scenes from a film where a diamond is protected by lasers, to images of a girl playing on a Nintendo Wii in a homemade version of the costume that Eitienne Jules Marey would dress his subjects in when conducting Chromophotography , through logic experiments, Ready Maids and words shattered like a crystal refacting light – the dispassionate reeling off of the text breaking up: sentence fragments are repeated, amended, the voice skipping as though trying to jump a programming error.