Skip Sweeney

In April 2013, a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire submitted a paper to the Annals of Mathematics. Within weeks word spread: a little-known mathematician, with no permanent job, working in complete isolation, had made an important breakthrough toward solving the Twin Prime Conjecture. Yitang Zhang's techniques for bounding the gaps between primes soon led to rapid progress by the Polymath Group, and a further innovation by James Maynard.

Film becomes a metaphor for lost history and its “negative“ impact on successive generations who look for stability in an electronic world that lacks sufficient mediation. Video retrieves lost memories for the child who, through her camera, seeks to find her father.

A love story for the 90s: Valery falls in love with an identical twin, a virtual reality scientist, and finds she can have a more intimate relationship with him through the computer screen than in person. Or is it really him?

Four "seduction ads" placed on cable TV stations invite unexpected responses. This short film is about fantasy and desire in a mediated world.

Fact and fiction blur in this faux documentary about a lost woman, Lian, who is searching for her own identity. Lian is manipulated by Dennis, a video editor. He captures surveillance footage of her and manipulates it in an attempt to manipulate and then possess her real life.

Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem features a heroine driven by the quest to solve one of the central problems of modern mathematics. She rises above formidable obstacles to assume a leading role in her field. Julia Robinson was the first woman elected to the mathematical section of the National Academy of Sciences, and the first woman to become president of the American Mathematical Society. While tracing Robinson's contribution to the solution of Hilbert's tenth problem, the film illuminates how her work led to an unusual friendship between Russian and American colleagues at the height of the Cold War.

Based on Robert Heinlein’s 1941 story “Universe,” Double Lunar Dogs presents a vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a “spacecraft,” travelling aimlessly through the universe, whose passengers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. As a metaphor for the nature and purpose of memory, the two main characters (portrayed by Jonas and Spalding Gray) play games with images of their past; but their efforts to restore their collective memories are futile, and they are reprimanded by the “Authority” for their attempts to recapture their past on a now-destroyed planet Earth.

Hi-fi for the eyes

Illuminatin' Sweeney features interviews with the artist, as well as excerpts from his early image-processing experiments. Sweeney's credo — "to make tapes as satisfying to me as listening to music" — is explored in short pieces that use the Moog Vidium process, which improvises and abstracts images using musical feedback. The concluding footage of his father's funeral heralds the more personal documentary approach that characterized his work in the 1980s.