permutations

For a year I made a small film everyday, called, Permutations. These were every day recording of life. Some stills below.

Cinema is identical to life, because each one of us has a virtual and invisible camera which follows us from when we’re born to when we die. In reality cinema is an infinite film sequence-shot. Each individual film interrupts and rearranges this infinite sequence-shot and thus creates meaning, which is what happens to us when we die. It is only at our moment of death that our life, to that point undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended, acquires a meaning. Montage thus plays the same role in cinema as death does in life.

Pasolini, “Ora tutto è chiaro, voluto, non imposto dal destino”, Cineforum 68 October 1967, p. 609,

A series of films, one produced each day of the year, 2005 and then on a more occasional basis.

Here is an essay on the work, 'The Death of the Reel: Harnessing the Image in Marc Lafia’s Permutations' A synopsis below.

Coffeen frames Permutations as a rule-driven practice that shifts the artist from creator to facilitator, allowing images to assert their own force. By eliminating editing and imposing constraints, Lafia becomes an “agent of the image,” aligning with a Deleuzian idea of the modern artist who does not impose form but channels chaotic, generative forces. The work exists on a threshold between order and chaos, where images risk both collapse into incoherence and overdetermination, ultimately sustaining a living balance.

He argues that the project is not a diary or record of life but an exploration of the image as a banal, everyday event. The “single day” rule structures production rather than meaning, emphasizing that images are ubiquitous, non-hierarchical, and detached from narrative or memory. In this sense, Permutations treats images as autonomous “sense-affects,” liberated from context and experienced as part of a larger, indifferent visual field—what might be understood as a database of perception.

Finally, Coffeen highlights how Permutations radically reconfigures cinema by spatializing and “polytemporalizing” the moving image. Through multi-screen grids and sequential sound that reshapes visual relations, the work breaks linear time and conventional spectatorship, dispersing attention across simultaneous durations. The result is a new architectonics of film—an ecology or “ethology” of images—where meaning emerges from their interaction, repetition, and variation rather than from narrative continuity