Metabolisms of moving image

Abstract

My thesis is situated at the intersection of film and media archaeology, history and philosophy of science, and artist moving image. The project started with an idea that stemmed from my filmmaking practice: what if moving image media could be considered as a kind of metabolism, understood as a system that actively produces change, has cycles of regeneration and decay, and which occupies the thresholds between seemingly stable states such as life and death, human and nonhuman, subject and object. The central argument of my written thesis is that metabolism’s scientific, technological, and cultural evolution over the last two centuries serves as an engine for theorizing moving image media as they emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and have continued to evolve over time. Both metabolism and moving image are changing indexes of change. Both are systems that break down the incessant flux of all things into measured intervals in order to produce models of living things, which, in their altered reconstruction, appear to be objectively known. Yet both metabolism and moving image media in a sense betray their purposes of quantifying and regulating the world in flux, because they themselves are constantly changing. When media become outdated and die, they are thrust back into the world as material objects, no longer capable of accurately mediating the real. Techniques and concepts for studying metabolism a century ago likewise become historical objects of curiosity, incapable of producing working knowledge in metabolic science today. Seeking to produce data about change from outside change, metabolism and moving image can never actually extricate themselves from the world’s flux because they are ultimately part of the world they measure. Throughout the different themes addressed in each of the chapters, I argue that the articulation of this fact is essential to reclaiming unquantifiable agencies of change from the biopolitical stratification of life processes that both metabolism and moving image media have historically served to strengthen and regulate. Alongside the theoretical arguments outlined in the written chapters, I have produced a film (in collaboration with my long-term creative partner Sasha Litvintseva), titled My Want of You Partakes of Me. The film is a tapestry of narrative threads on the complexity of incorporation, consumption, and digestion as a physical, perceptual, and psychological foundation of being. The film emerges from a practice-driven methodology which transformed my historical and theoretical insights into metabolism through an artist moving image practice centered on processes of embodiment, chance, and transformation.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jussi Parikka: orcid.org/0000-0002-2248-6377

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