How to Measure the World
Filmexplorer's Video Essay Gallery 2024 | Exhibition 2 | 28/10-24/11/2024

Volker Pantenburg presents:
«capricorn sunset [a constellation]» (2023) by Johannes Binotto
Julian Ross presents:
«Constant» (2022) by Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner
Evelyn Kreutzer presents:
«Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone» (2024) by Occitane Lacurie
The Podcast Discussion
Listen to the podcast discussion with Evelyn Kreutzer, Julian Ross and Volker Pantenburg on the theme «How to Measure the World»
This article contains a third-party video. If you would like to watch the video, please adjust your settings.
The cultural technique of measuring is intimately connected to practices of visual representation. As Harun Farocki’s seminal essay film Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1998) – an implicit reference and background to the video essays featured here – argues, a historical thread links Albrecht Dürer’s scale drawings with the codification of the laws of perspective in the Renaissance, which later was embedded in photography and its corollary, photogrammetry. In each of these instances, images are understood as both the source and the result of spatial data. Instead of measuring the facade of a building on site, Albrecht Meydenbauer, the inventor of photogrammetry in the mid-19th century, had the idea of taking a photograph and executing the measurements from the safer position of his desk at home. At one point of Farocki’s film, the female voice-over (Cynthia Beatt) extrapolates this historical line into the present: «The calculating machines of today make pictures out of numbers and rules».
The three video essays of the second gallery – “How to Measure the World” – suggest different perspectives on the relationship between measuring and image production.
Johannes Binotto’s capricorn sunset [a constellation], first published in Interfaces 50 (2023), pays tribute to The Powers of Ten (1977) by Charles and Ray Eames, a prime example for the “politics of verticality” (Weizman 2002) and the effects of the “technological sublime” (Curtis 2011). Binotto adapts elements of the Eames’ iconic animation film, which measures the distance between the infinitesimally small (the nano-particles of biological cells) and the incredibly big (the vastness of the universe), to the cosmos of cinephilia. Starting with unrecognizable grains and pixels, a steady step-by-step zoom out discloses more and more information about the image (and sound) that we are confronted with. Conversely, instead of building certainty and mastery, Binotto’s essay emphasizes the disconcerting effects of measuring: «[N]ot only the outer space in which we supposedly begin will turn out to be something (and somewhere) completely different, but we are also unsure in what direction we are actually moving.» (Binotto 2023, p. 3)
Constant (2022) by Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner focuses on a crucial moment in the history of measuring: it takes us to the period of the French revolution when the exact definition and standardization of the metre was supposed to establish equality in the realm of measuring. However, despite their humanistic and democratising aims, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre-François-André Méchain could not prevent the violent and inhuman consequences of their progress in quantification. Going hand in hand with colonialism and expropriation, the practice of measuring was instrumental in supporting exploitation and land ownership. As in Farocki’s 1988 film (and his final installation cycle Parallel I to IV), it is Cynthia Beatt’s voice that informs us of the destructive potential of measuring: «Abstract notion of space becomes a tool of dispossession. Land without body, land without experience.»
Finally, Occitane Lacurie looks at the iconography and quantification of menstruation. Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone (2024) celebrates the genre of the “Doomscroll Documentary”, as the author calls it, picking up a term coined by Kevin B. Lee. How is the imaginary of menstruation shaped by the images of film history? How do period tracking apps, claiming to make life easier for the female users, feed into the datamining of large corporations and take part in «an extraction and accumulation process that lies at the very core of the production structures of computational capitalism» (Lacurie 2024)?
(Volker Pantenburg)
*
References:
Binotto, Johannes (2023): “capricorn sunset [a constellation],” Interfaces [online], 50, online since 31 December 2023, accessed on 9 September 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/ 7501 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/interfaces.7501
Curtis, Scott (2011): “Vergrösserung und das mikroskopische Erhabene”, in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 3 (2011), n. 2, pp. 97-110. DOI: 10.25969/mediarep/2624.
Lacurie, Occitane (2024): “xena’s body”, NECSUS Spring 2024 (#open), https://necsus-ejms.org/xenas-body/
Weizman, Eyal (2002): “Introduction to The Politics of Verticality”, in Open Democracy, April 23, 2002 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_801jsp/