Wagner, Beny. 2022. 'Post-Industrial Metabolism and the Discorrelated Moving Image'. In: PGR Seminar Series. Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities, United Kingdom 23 February 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

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.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture)
Keywords:	SIAH, Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities, University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, Beny Wagner
Related URLs:	Organisation
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Art
Dates:	Date Event 23 February 2022 Completed
Event Location:	Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities, United Kingdom
Date range:	23 February 2022
Item ID:	35959
Date Deposited:	17 Apr 2024 08:21
Last Modified:	17 Apr 2024 08:21
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35959

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