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50.000 SCANS is part of Benjamin Verhoeven's on-going project called Scanning Cinema, which revolves around the scanning and re-composing of moving images and clearly engages in a dialogue with the history of the moving image in general and with the recording of movement within photography in particular. The grid that we see in the background of Verhoeven's film, 50.000 SCANS, serves as a tool for the analysis of motion, and it recalls, unmistakably, the early photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge and the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey.

With the aid of a flatbed scanner and a monitor, Verhoeven converts a series of film frames into an extensive collection of digitally scanned image lines. The individual scans are subsequently processed into an animated film in which the resulting and reinterpreted motion, clearly distinguishes itself from the initial one. A two-dimensional linear motion, which unfolds both horizontally and vertically, seems to collide and become intertwined with the initial movement that we more commonly would perceive and understand as being three-dimensional.

Building on the findings of a previous work, i.e., Sculptural Movement: Chapter I & II, the video-essay, 50,000 SCANS, now concentrates on how the human body - captured in a preconceived choreography - takes shape through the application of scanning techniques, which in themselves determine how the digitised body behaves and operates within the boundaries of the resulting scanned reality.

The clearly demarcated sequences in 50.000 SCANS, which Verhoeven calls Acts, aim to function like files within the classification system of an archive. The different film sequences contain, altogether, the formal and technical information needed to open up possible conclusions and by extension, they become vivid to our imagination.

The soundscape that accompanies the images is based on the original sound of the pre-scan registration. These recordings were then processed into a kind of self-regulating staircase model that audibly adapts to the scanned images in terms of time and images passing.