SIAH PGR Seminar Series | Post-Industrial Metabolism and the Discorrelated Moving Image, Beny Wagner Event
- Time:
- 17:00
- Date:
- 23 February 2022
- Venue:
- Online
For more information regarding this event, please email Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities at siah@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
These PGR-led, monthly sessions are aimed to share the excellent doctoral research being undertaken within the Faculty. These are an opportunity to engage in cross-School and cross-Faculty discourse and to be part of an inclusive community of ideas, concepts, methods, and approaches that characterise research in the Arts and Humanities. Initially these sessions will be run online, with a view to moving to a blended approach in the new year.
Post-Industrial Metabolism and the Discorrelated Moving Image
In 2017, a group of scientists working at the intersection of molecular biology and neuroscience at the Harvard Medical School, published an article in Nature detailing their experiment using the CRISPR-Cas system to encode a moving image into the DNA of living bacteria. The images they chose to encode were none other than Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic sequence of photographic stills from 1879, capturing the horse Annie G. in full gallop, images largely considered to have established some of the technical conditions for the emergence of cinema. The decision to use Muybridge’s stills as the first animation to be encoded in a cell’s genome was intentionally reflexive, a nod to the experiment’s place within a longer historical genealogy of the study of organic movement. Yet beyond its symbolic meaning, the experiment serves as a prism to interrogate the ways in which both image production and the study of life are deeply intertwined.
In my talk, I will first give a brief introduction to my PhD, which develops a historical concept of metabolism as an engine for thinking through the history of moving image and its continuous renewal, its perpetual reconfiguration of bodies, and its immersion within the world it records. I will then give a detailed analysis of the CRISPR/Muybridge experiment by reading it through Shane Denson’s concept of Discorrelation , related the onto-epistemological changes to cinema brought on by networked digital media, and through Hannah Landecker’s Post-Industrial Metabolism , a term she has coined to identify radical transformations in the metabolic sciences and therefore contemporary models of life.
Biography
Beny Wagner is an artist, filmmaker, writer and doctoral researcher at the Archaeologies of Media and Technology group at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton in association with Bath Spa University. He has presented his work globally: Berlinale, IFFR, Eye Film Museum Amsterdam, Museum of Moving Image New York, Transmediale, Los Angeles Film Forum, 5th and 6th Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Berlin Atonal, Venice Biennale, White Columns among many others. His writing has been published in e-flux Journal, Valiz and Sonic Acts Press, among others. He was a lecturer at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam and is currently an assistant lecturer at Queen Mary University, London.
Professor Jussi Parikka will chair this seminar.
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