A screening of recent films by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner featuring A Demonstration (2020) and Constant (2022), and preceded by the filmmakers’ video introduction.

From the exploration of taxonomy in early modern science in A Demonstration to the investigation of the production of standardized measurement systems in Constant, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s latest two films explore different episodes in the history of science, offering theoretically rich ways of thinking about the gaps between the world and how we come to know it. The monster, on the one hand, is the object that breaks classification only to reinforce taxonomic logic, while measurement systems that attempt to remove human subjectivity are inscribed with the fallible human body at their core.

A Demonstration (2020, 24 minutes)
A Demonstration is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of early modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word “monster” comes from the latin “monstrare,” meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. A Demonstration picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.

Constant (2022, 40 minutes)
Constant is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. Constant asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. From early modern European land enclosures to the French Revolution to the current frontier of Big Science, the film traces the relationship of measurement standardization to power, ideals of democratization, and the realities of dispossession.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35931