David Edward Gatten (Born February 11, 1971 Ann Arbor, Michigan) is an American experimental filmmaker and moving image artist.

In November 2011 Texts of Light: A Mid-Career Retrospective of Fourteen Films by David Gatten, curated by Chris Stults, opened at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Gatten's interest in the moving image originated in the mid-1980s, while in junior high school, when he began writing video game software with the TRS-80 operating system.

The resulting sounds and images were produced by the physical and chemical interactions between the film's emulsion and the surrounding salt water, sand, rocks, crabs, fish, and underwater creatures.

[13] Since 1996, Gatten has been at work on a nine-part film series that takes as inspiration the 4,000-volume library of William Byrd II, an American colonial writer, planter, and government official.

[1] Curator and writer Henriette Huldisch described the cycle as follows: "Focusing on specific volumes from the library, letters, and personal papers, Gatten's series probes the relationship between printed words and images, philosophical ideas, historical records, and biography.

[15] The series has been credited as having a "unique approach" to biography,[2] and the films have been compared to the works of artists Agnes Martin[3] and Marcel Broodthaers;[16] filmmakers Hollis Frampton,[1] Nathaniel Dorsky,[17] Robert Beavers[18] and Stan Brakhage;[19] poets Susan Howe[3] and e.e.

[25] In addition to his work in Vienna, Gatten's films were the subject of a recent retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea.