This work is inspired from Mary Martin’s “Drawings for Expanding Permutation, 1969”. The film uses various patterns and colours of Washi tape adhered onto 16mm clear film. Multiple black and white film prints are made and presented on two film projectors. The sound is also produced from the printed through lines of the patterns onto the soundtrack side of the film. In addition, photo-resistor microphones are used.

“The Washi films were inspired, according to Loo, by Mary Martin’s drawings for Expanding Permutation (1969), in which a grid pattern composed of black and white squares is exhaustively varied – the squares vary in darkness (depending upon how thickly Martin applied the ink) and are filled in by horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines. The resulting impression is one of implied movement as the grids vary in tiny increments from one drawing to the next, not unlike individual frames of an abstract film. Loo’s films seize upon this permutational quality, extending it into the temporal dimension suggested by Martin’s work, and further elaborating the permutational field by layering multiple films at once and adjusting the audio output live as she watches and responds to the patterns unfolding on screen. Loo thus grants, as it were, temporality and movement to Martin’s static abstractions, in yet another variant of the notion of abstraction’s, inherently dynamic form – as in “gestural” and “action” interpretations of Abstract Expressionism, which we will see taken furthest in Ken Jacob’s Nervous Magic Lantern performances. Loo’s methodical approach to live projection parallels the hidden labour behind Martin’s work, making that labor, by necessity time-based, explicitly part of the work.”
– Jonathan Walley from Cinema Expanded. Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia. pg 236. Oxford University Press 2020