Robert Arnold was born in 1954 in New Jersey, USA, and lives in Boston where he teaches film at Boston University. He obtained a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Illinois in 1977, an MA from the University of Iowa in 1980 and a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Iowa in 1994. He has received numerous awards and fellowships and his works have been widely exhibited. Arnold's approach is based on advanced digital editing techniques, which he uses to create short videos, designed to be exhibited on a loop. His videos often use effects of sped-up spatial movement and light to manipulate the viewer's optical experience of the passing of time. Though the works are in a sense highly formal, focussing on transformations of colour, shape and form within the video image, in each video these effects are illustrative of a specific theme, ranging from the uniformity of heterosexual desire in pop culture imagery to Ancient Greek philosophical ideas.

The Morphology of Desire is an ongoing experimental media project which explores the commodity representation of gender and desire in popular culture, and the relationship between the still image and illusion of cinematic motion, using digital morphing to animate romance novel cover illustrations as a never-ending dance of unrealized desire. This third version uses of DVD scripting capabilities to randomly sequence the order of image and text as a continuous but non-repeating loop that is constantly shifting narrative implication.

An experimental digital video exploring the illusions of cinematic movement and depth as corollaries of Zeno’s paradox: There is no motion because that which is moved must arrive at the middle of its course before it arrives at the end. There is a picture on a tree, seen from a certain distance. The picture on the tree depicts the scene described in the previous sentence. Without moving the camera during filming, first by dissolving between a series of zooms and then by morphing between stills, we appear to approach the tree until the picture fills the frame and we are back where we started.
Zeno’s Paradox was shot on 16mm film in 1982, and completed on Digital Video in 2003.

Whar are the consequences of endless repetition of words and phrases in our environment? What are the heavy and big words, what is their echo, what is outside and what is inside? Is this intesified and 'beautified' process of repetition, can we recognize what hipnotizes us and makes us being 'perfect victims'?