The Spider and the Fly in the Camera’s Eye
For the past two posts I’ve discussed where film can take humans with regards to entering or understanding animal worlds. This could lead to the assumption that I am proposing film as an extension of human faculties and, while this is to some extent true, it is important to also note the very non-human elements … Continue reading
Becoming-Balthazar?
In the very beginning film had trouble with the issue of inner-worlds. It was groundbreaking in the field of presenting action but attempts at characters lacked depth, audience members had trouble identifying with the onscreen personas. All those essential editing devices, which are so necessary to the integrity of film’s diegetic space, had yet to … Continue reading
The Zoopraxiscope
On the 15th of June 1881, approximately fifty years before Uexküll wrote his treatise on the Umwelt, (when he would have been 15 years old) inventor and artist Eadweard Muybridge publically ran his first Animals in Motion experiment. Consisting of a shed housing twelve cameras, a measured backdrop for horses to run through, and an … Continue reading
Uexküll’s Umwelt: a Primer
This post is meant to lay some of the basic conceptual groundwork for what is to follow. This means that some of the more enigmatic sections of Uexküll’s writing will be left out, to be returned to later. Living from 1864 to 1944, Uexküll operated in a time when specialization had not yet divided the … Continue reading
The Object's Gaze 