Metabolic Filmmaking: A History of Rhythm, Scale and Metaphor in the Life Sciences and Moving Image

The principle aim of my practice based doctoral project is to historically contextualise the evolution of moving image in relation to the emergence of the term 'metabolism' in the life sciences, in order to propose the concept and artistic practice of 'metabolic filmmaking'. While early moving image has been studied in depth in relation to the late 19th century physiological laboratory, it has yet to be understood in relation to the transformations in the perception of life, rhythm and scale that evolved in the natural sciences at the beginning of the 19th century through the emergence of the notion of metabolic change. A historical study of the modern term 'metabolism' reveals its enigmatic roots in late 18th century physiology, where it evolved as a way to account for a world reconfigured through the lens of constant biological transformation and automatic movement, a term which has been widely used to describe early cinema. While the word metabolism generally appears as self-evident, a close look at its history and applications reveals discrepancies, contradictions and ambiguities. 'Metabolism' has furthermore been applied to processes across a variety of disciplines which defy an easy distinction between material and metaphor, and the study of metabolism therefore calls for a methodology that combines theoretical and historical work with artistic practice in order to experiment on the threshold between both of these spheres. The historical study will serve to outline the formal foundations of metabolic filmmaking' as a practice, focussing on two fundamental characteristics that unite the life sciences to moving image through the emergence of the notion of metabolism: scale and rhythm. The project will involve the creation of two films, which will seek to juxtapose a wide range of spatiotemporal scales, from that of the microbe to global infrastructure, by weaving disparate environments and scales of perception through their rhythms, biological and technological. The first film will create a portrait of the MIT platform 'Underworlds', an infrastructural sewage 'Internet of Things' that extracts microbial data from urban sewage systems around the globe in order to surveil infectious diseases in real time and predict outbreaks. The second film will bring together observational footage from a museum for microbes, an operational lab, and archival footage from medical history in order to observe the human and nonhuman coproduction of rhythms. Drawing on the project's historical research, the practice will animate the concerns in the contemporary as an aesthetic response to the complexities of human and environmental transformation in the present. Over the last century, the natural sciences have provided material foundations for radical reassessments of the human position in the world (Latour, 2018). Scholars across the natural sciences and humanities have used the term Anthropocene (a proposed geological epoch created by human activity) as a means to understand the scale of human intervention on the planet (Crutzen/Stoermer, 2000). The transformations that are recontextualizing our very conceptions of life should be met by a formal and narrative models in the arts. Yet dominant filmmaking models seem largely unable to bridge the gap between material reconfigurations derived from the sciences and the ways through which environments are perceived and narrated (Colebrook, 2016). As evidence of climate change becomes increasingly undeniable, the ways we perceive our position in the world is of utmost urgency (Ghosh, 2016). Mobilizing a transdisciplinary research methodology between film and media studies, the history of science and environmental humanities, my project will map the ways in which filmmaking can be activated towards necessary reconfigurations of dominant perceptual frameworks.