Thursday, 3rd June 2021
12:15-13:15 CET

Abstract

In a “Desktop Essay” produced especially for this presentation, Kristoffer Gansing speculates on the changing contexts of film as research vis-à-vis film as artistic research, from early cinema and its connection to scientific discoveries and the advanced data-analysis of today’s streaming platforms. The presentation argues that the history of the moving image could be rewritten, beyond the scope of cinema, as a history of research. While early experiments in the moving image are often seen as instances of proto-Cinema, the canonical studies by Muybridge and Marey are just as well at home within the domain of knowledge production, even fulfilling formal definitions of Research and Development as creative work aiming to increase “human knowledge and to devise new applications based upon it” (OECD). Inspired by “The New Film History” and Tom Gunning’s influential notion of “The Cinema of Attractions” which revised the view on early cinema and the development of a filmic avant-garde, the presentation eventually focuses on artistic responses to the contemporary “Cinema of Extractions”, as a datafied infrastructure that now conditions what is knowable and sayable through the moving image.