EXCERPT In the silence and the void, Standing alone and unchanging, Ever present and in motion. Perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things. I do not know its name. Call it the Way. Laozi Ten Thousand Coins Over the last decade, LA-based artist David Lebrun has been making stunning short videos of traditional art and artefacts. These range from palaeolithic stone tools to Karnatic temples, to Irish standing crosses, to medieval Iranian finials. The videos are not only beautiful but also offer, in the way art sometimes can, a new way of seeing the world and ourselves. Lebrun’s technique begins with dozens or even hundreds of still images of a specific class of artefact—for example, in his work 137 Coins, gold staters, with both faces of the coin shown side by side against a black background. These shots are arranged into a sequence based on visual similarity, or chronology, which often amounts to much the same thing. A Greek stater in the fourth century BCE, for instance, features a realistic rendition of Philip of Macedon on the obverse and a two-horse chariot on the reverse. Three centuries and one hundred and thirty-seven coins later, both human and horse have undergone such transformation and abstraction that at times it is impossible to tell what the designs represent. Although many conscious aesthetic choices were involved, it seems likely that some of the artisans who engraved these designs were equally in the dark. Certainly, none of them could step back to see the whole. Like neurons in a giant brain or filing clerks in the great Chinese room of human culture, they were vehicles for the creation and transmission of a numismatic ‘text’ that transcended their own understanding …