Moving Bodies

Moving Bodies—titled after an unfinished project by the filmmaker Harun Farocki—is a graduate seminar I created and currently teach at Yale School of Art. The course offers an introduction to contemporary debates in media theory through an interrogation of imaging technologies and their mediation and management of the body.
Course, 2024

This course examines image production–from the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge 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, there is a particular emphasis on engaging with archives and collections across the university to study the representation of the body across sources pulled from scientific, medical, industrial, and military contexts. Additionally, texts from an array of critics and theorists are read closely as we screen film and video work.

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.