Metabolic Filmmaking: A History of Rhythm, Scale and Metaphor in the Life Sciences and Moving Image

我这个以实践为基础的博士项目的主要目的是将运动图像的演变与生命科学中的新陈代谢这个术语的出现联系起来，以提出“新陈代谢电影制作”的概念和艺术实践。虽然早期的运动图像已经在19世纪后期的生理实验室中得到了深入的研究，但它与19世纪初自然科学中通过代谢变化概念的出现而演变出的生命、节奏和尺度的变化之间的关系还没有被理解。对现代术语新陈代谢的历史研究揭示了它神秘的根源在于18世纪末的生理学，在那里它演变成一种方式，用来解释通过不断的生物变化和自动运动的镜头重新配置的世界，这个术语被广泛用于描述早期电影。虽然新陈代谢这个词通常看起来是不言而喻的，但仔细看看它的历史和应用，就会发现差异、矛盾和模棱两可。新陈代谢还被应用于各种学科的过程中，这些学科无视物质和隐喻之间的简单区分，因此新陈代谢研究需要一种将理论和历史工作与艺术实践相结合的方法论，以便在这两个领域之间进行实验。这项历史研究将勾勒出新陈代谢电影制作作为实践的形式基础，重点关注通过新陈代谢概念的出现将生命科学统一为运动图像的两个基本特征：规模和节奏。该项目将涉及制作两部电影，这两部电影将寻求通过生物和技术的节奏编织不同的环境和感知尺度，将从微生物到全球基础设施的各种时空尺度并列在一起。第一部影片将为麻省理工学院的“地下世界”平台制作一幅肖像。“地下世界”是一个基础设施污水“物联网”，它从全球城市污水系统中提取微生物数据，以便实时监测传染病并预测疫情的爆发。第二部电影将把微生物博物馆、操作实验室的观察镜头和医学史上的档案镜头结合在一起，以观察人类和非人类共同产生的节奏。借鉴该项目的历史研究，该实践将活跃当代的关切，作为对目前人类和环境变化的复杂性的审美反应。在过去的一个世纪里，自然科学为彻底重新评估人类在世界上的地位提供了物质基础(拉图尔，2018)。自然科学和人文科学的学者使用了人类世(由人类活动创造的一个拟议的地质纪元)这一术语作为一种手段来理解人类对地球的干预的规模(Crutzen/Stoermer，2000)。改变我们对生活的概念的转变，应该由艺术中的正式和叙事模式来应对。然而，占主导地位的电影制作模式似乎在很大程度上无法弥合来自科学的材料重新配置与感知和叙述环境的方式之间的差距(Colebrook，2016)。随着气候变化的证据变得越来越不可否认，我们如何看待我们在世界上的地位变得迫在眉睫(Ghosh，2016)。我的项目调动了电影和媒体研究、科学史和环境人文科学之间的跨学科研究方法，将绘制出电影制作可以被激活的方式，以必要地重新配置主导的感知框架。

The principle aim of my practice based doctoral project is to historically contextualise the evolution of moving image in relation to the emergence of the term 'metabolism' in the life sciences, in order to propose the concept and artistic practice of 'metabolic filmmaking'. While early moving image has been studied in depth in relation to the late 19th century physiological laboratory, it has yet to be understood in relation to the transformations in the perception of life, rhythm and scale that evolved in the natural sciences at the beginning of the 19th century through the emergence of the notion of metabolic change. A historical study of the modern term 'metabolism' reveals its enigmatic roots in late 18th century physiology, where it evolved as a way to account for a world reconfigured through the lens of constant biological transformation and automatic movement, a term which has been widely used to describe early cinema. While the word metabolism generally appears as self-evident, a close look at its history and applications reveals discrepancies, contradictions and ambiguities. 'Metabolism' has furthermore been applied to processes across a variety of disciplines which defy an easy distinction between material and metaphor, and the study of metabolism therefore calls for a methodology that combines theoretical and historical work with artistic practice in order to experiment on the threshold between both of these spheres. The historical study will serve to outline the formal foundations of metabolic filmmaking' as a practice, focussing on two fundamental characteristics that unite the life sciences to moving image through the emergence of the notion of metabolism: scale and rhythm. The project will involve the creation of two films, which will seek to juxtapose a wide range of spatiotemporal scales, from that of the microbe to global infrastructure, by weaving disparate environments and scales of perception through their rhythms, biological and technological. The first film will create a portrait of the MIT platform 'Underworlds', an infrastructural sewage 'Internet of Things' that extracts microbial data from urban sewage systems around the globe in order to surveil infectious diseases in real time and predict outbreaks. The second film will bring together observational footage from a museum for microbes, an operational lab, and archival footage from medical history in order to observe the human and nonhuman coproduction of rhythms. Drawing on the project's historical research, the practice will animate the concerns in the contemporary as an aesthetic response to the complexities of human and environmental transformation in the present. Over the last century, the natural sciences have provided material foundations for radical reassessments of the human position in the world (Latour, 2018). Scholars across the natural sciences and humanities have used the term Anthropocene (a proposed geological epoch created by human activity) as a means to understand the scale of human intervention on the planet (Crutzen/Stoermer, 2000). The transformations that are recontextualizing our very conceptions of life should be met by a formal and narrative models in the arts. Yet dominant filmmaking models seem largely unable to bridge the gap between material reconfigurations derived from the sciences and the ways through which environments are perceived and narrated (Colebrook, 2016). As evidence of climate change becomes increasingly undeniable, the ways we perceive our position in the world is of utmost urgency (Ghosh, 2016). Mobilizing a transdisciplinary research methodology between film and media studies, the history of science and environmental humanities, my project will map the ways in which filmmaking can be activated towards necessary reconfigurations of dominant perceptual frameworks.