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

我的实践为基础的博士项目的主要目的是历史上的背景下的运动图像的演变与生命科学中的术语“新陈代谢”的出现，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世纪后期的生理实验室中进行了深入的研究，但它还没有被理解为与生命、节奏和尺度的感知中的变化有关，这些变化是在世纪初通过新陈代谢变化的概念的出现而在自然科学中发展起来的。对现代术语“新陈代谢”的历史研究揭示了它在世纪后期生理学中的神秘根源，在那里它演变为一种解释通过不断的生物转化和自动运动的透镜重新配置的世界的方式，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，但仔细研究它的历史和应用就会发现差异，矛盾和模糊。此外，“新陈代谢”还被应用于各种学科的过程，这些学科无视材料和隐喻之间的简单区别，因此新陈代谢的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，以便在这两个领域之间进行实验。历史研究将有助于概述代谢电影制作作为一种实践的正式基础，重点是通过新陈代谢概念的出现将生命科学与运动图像结合起来的两个基本特征：规模和节奏。该项目将涉及两部电影的创作，这两部电影将寻求并置广泛的时空尺度，从微生物到全球基础设施，通过编织不同的环境和感知尺度，通过它们的节奏，生物和技术。第一部电影将描绘麻省理工学院的平台“Underworlds”，这是一个基础设施污水“物联网”，从地球仪的城市污水系统中提取微生物数据，以便在真实的时间内监测传染病并预测疫情。第二部电影将汇集来自微生物博物馆的观察片段，一个操作实验室，以及来自医学历史的档案片段，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，实践将使当代的关注成为对当今人类和环境转型复杂性的美学回应。在过去的世纪里，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术语人类世（人类活动创造的拟议地质时代）作为理解人类干预地球规模的手段（Crutzen/Stoermer，2000）。这些转变正在使我们的生活概念重新语境化，应该通过艺术中的形式和叙事模式来满足。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源于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是最紧迫的（Ghosh，2016）。调动电影和媒体研究，科学史和环境人文之间的跨学科研究方法，我的项目将绘制电影制作的方式，可以激活对主导的感知框架的必要重新配置。

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.