In 2006 I made a video called The Constant Battle Against Self-Constraints (an endless loop).
Two channels, side by side. On the left, hands unbound, resting in a lap. On the right, the same hands tied at the wrist with gaffer’s tape and muslin strips. But it doesn’t stay that way. The left channel slowly ties its own hands. The right, playing in reverse, ends up free. Then they swap places and the loop begins again.
The Constant Battle Against Self-Constraints (an endless loop), 2006. Two-channel video.
I didn’t have a theory when I made it. I had a question. Why didn’t the free hands look free?
I had reasons, not all of them about art.
What I kept noticing was that freedom and constraint weren’t opposites. They were the same problem viewed from different angles.
The unbound hands aren’t free. Look at them. They’re fidgeting, clasped, nervous. Caught in a different kind of restraint. The invisible kind. The self-imposed kind. The kind that doesn’t have a name but is always there, shaping what you reach for and what you don’t.
The tied hands are more honest. At least you can see what’s stopping them.
When I was teaching at Bennington College, I gave assignments built around constraints. Students made a short video, then remade it with a rule I gave them: shoot only from below the knee. No cuts longer than four seconds. Use only found sound. The constraint came from outside.
One student told me she was going to make a piece about the bus system in her town. She came back with a 45-minute film of a single bus ride, camera below the knee. Unobtrusive, easy to shoot. Also unwatchable. Minimalist cinema is one thing, but asking your classmates to sit through 45 minutes of feet on a bus is another. The lesson ended up being about audience, not buses.
Another student was working through a breakup. She knew how to make the film she was making: close-ups, slow movements through her apartment, her own face. The constraint took that away. Nothing above the waist. What she made instead was three minutes of feet, hers and her ex-partner’s, on a kitchen floor. It showed the thing under the thing she’d been trying to show directly.
The constraint took away the version of creativity she already knew how to do.
Constraints subtract. They take away the infinite, and the infinite is the problem.
When you can do anything, every choice is equally uncertain. You can always imagine a better version that made a different decision. The constraint forecloses that. You’re no longer choosing between all possible films, you’re choosing between the films this rule makes possible. That’s a smaller set. A smaller set is workable.
I keep seeing this.
Analog video is a medium defined by what it can’t do. The NTSC signal separates brightness from color imperfectly. Tape decays. Magnetic particles fall off the substrate. Color bleeds. Signal drifts. Every limitation produces a signature, a visual fingerprint that you can recognize on a monitor from across a room. That fingerprint is the aesthetic. Artists like Nam June Paik didn’t fight those limitations. They grabbed them and pulled. A magnet held to a CRT. The electron beam distorted into something the medium was never supposed to make. The constraint became the generator.
A sonnet is 14 lines, iambic pentameter, a specific rhyme scheme. The form is a pressure system. The constraint forces language into shapes it wouldn’t find on its own. What survives the compression is what the poem actually needed to say.
In game design, constraints define what a choice means. Without limits on what a player can do, no decision has weight. It’s only when certain paths are closed that the open paths become meaningful. The constraint creates the stakes.
In the work I’ve been doing with AI-driven characters, the ones that come alive have the most coherent limitations, the internal rules that make their choices consistent. One character I’ve been testing dialogue with for months only became convincing when I understood what he couldn’t do.
The resistance to a constraint is information.
When a student fights a constraint, I’ve learned it’s usually because it’s threatening something they didn’t know they were protecting. They thought they were making the choice to shoot that way because it was right for the piece. The constraint reveals that it was also safe. The familiar frame. The angle they already knew how to manage.
Sometimes the opposite happens. A student works within the constraint and the piece gets better. Not because they had a breakthrough, but because the constraint closed off the obvious choice and they had to find another one.
You can’t just give yourself a constraint. Self-imposed rules have a trapdoor. You make them small enough not to scare you. The most useful constraints come from outside, from someone who doesn’t know what you need to protect, so they can’t avoid threatening it.
I keep thinking about that diptych. The hands on the left look free but they’re tense, managing something. The hands on the right look captive but there’s a kind of clarity in it. You know where you are. You know what you’re working with. And then they trade places, and the loop starts over.
The invisible one was there first, before anyone put a rope on your wrists.
The battle isn’t between constraint and freedom. It’s between the constraint you can see and the one you can’t.
The Constant Battle Against Self-Constraints (an endless loop) is available on YouTube.
Related reading
- Where the Feet Need to Be: what moves when a constraint stops feeling like one
- The Rope from the Inside: what happens once a constraint has been absorbed completely
On the signal processing parallel to nervous system dysregulation, see The Timebase Corrector and the Traumatized Brain.