Peter Gidal’s structuralist experiment Condition of Illusion, dating from 1975, records in silence the effect of camera movement on an otherwise static environment, appearing to see beyond immediate material reality to a shifting, molecular-level patterning. Repeated anchor points - a stack of white paper covered by handwritten script; books lined up on makeshift plank and brick shelving; the white expanse of bed linen - provide basic orientation within the geography of a single room. The jerkily hand held moving camera comes momentarily to rest on individual features; a ceramic mug; a poster image of a young male face in profile; a record player; a metallic animal statuette, before motion blur transforms apparently solid objects into a rapidly shifting patterning of film grained lines and circles. What appears as a direct play of light on retina shifts into blurred shadows, occasional textures, a fleeting glimpse of a clock. After rotation has been completed three times, passages from Louis Althusser’s On the Materialist Dialectic and Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable scroll upwards, slowly filling the white screen.