Aqua Kinema

Locomotion in Water and Aqua Kinema developed out of my longstanding interest in the linked roles of film, video and non-human animal life in contemporary and historical scientific practice. In this project, I used multi-channel installation and digital filmmaking in a project which both reflected on, and drew together, representational media practices from the last hundred and fifty years. 
 

Aqua Kinema was produced as part of the exhibition "Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy" at the Zentrum für Kunst und Media Technologie in 2005. In four different channels, I took four different approaches to the problem of understanding a particular moment of history through multimedia production. Screen One ("Wave") oscillated between past and present — a metronomic fluctuation between the immediacy of the digital representation of movement and the dreamy evanescence of history and the flickering, archival photograph. Screen Two ("Epistle") vivified through the resuscitation and integration of archival photographs a handwritten letter from 1890. Screen Three ("Researcher") juxtaposed contemporary laboratory practice with its historical antecedents, drawing on the rhythms of a modern scientist's use of high speed video and prismatic mirrors to study rainbow trout's fin movement and underwater eddy formation. Screen Four ("Fish Market") confronted the visitor with the experience of movement, fish and culture at the fish market in Naples. The installation aimed to reconstruct, through stratified image and object-based evocations, the laboratory practice and visual contexts of French scientist-chronophotographer Etienne-Jules Marey's experiments on fish locomotion in late-nineteenth-century Naples. This collaboration drew together institutions (the Lauder Lab, The Marey Museum, the Cinématheque Française, the Stazione Zoologica Napoli, the Zentrum für Kunst und Media Technologie) and individuals both historical and contemporary — scientists, engineers, museum professionals and artists.