Beyond abstract film: constructivist digital time

The paper reviews aspects of abstract films and the notions of time that occur in them. A series of developments by the author in making various generative digital abstract, or concrete, works are described and compared to film. The generation of the time element of the works described is integral with the generation of images. It is shown how different approaches to dealing with time in the digital context have emerged. In particular, an integrated constructivist approach has built from concepts in abstract film to go beyond cinema in a way that makes significant use of digital media.