Moving Bodies
This course examines image production–from 19th century chronophotography to the biomechanical calculus underpinning CG animation–that influences not only how the moving body is understood and constituted, but also the ways in which it is quantified and targeted. We chart this media history–and the politics of the mediated body–alongside a trajectory of lens-based art and design practices that use the moving image to rethink the corporeal self through themes of identity, labor, war, and the virtual.
Throughout the semester, film and video work screenings will be accompanied by an engagement with labs, archives, and collections across the university in order to study the representation of the body within art historical, scientific, medical, industrial, and military contexts. In the past, these visits have introduced students to resources at the Yale Film Archive, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Medical Historical Library, as well as to research at the Yale Biomechanics and Control Lab and motion capture tools at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM).
Complementing these sessions will be discussions dedicated to writers on film, video, and performance such as Erika Balsom, Darby English, and Norah N. Khan. We will also engage with the writing of Vilém Flusser and Giorgio Agamben, whose thoughts on gesture address the rise of ‘immaterial labor’; Sylvia Wynter, whose assesses how the legacy of colonialism has come to define what it means to be human; and Edward Said, who argues that Orientalism is ‘anatomical and enumerative, to use its vocabulary is to engage in the particularizing and dividing of everything Oriental into manageable parts’. Together, these readings lead us to ultimately address Frantz Fanon’s conception of a moving body determinately shaped by racial and colonial capitalism.
On completing the course students learn how to critically position the moving body in their own studio work by bringing together artistic and design production into dialogue with media theory and the intersecting fields of performance and surveillance studies.