Workshop

Workshop

Time-lapse microscopy has been at the centre of the way we know about cellular behaviours since the early 20th century and today continues to condition how scientists create images of cells in laboratory settings. Cinemicroscopy footage has also been deployed as a communication technique in documentaries and films that address social crisis topics, including epidemics, ecological crisis and reproductive politics and policies. This workshop looks at how the biological time of the cell, the labour time of the lab experiment and a social conception of time, encompassed by the notions of ‘crisis’ or ‘decline’, link up in the use of time-lapse.

The 4-hour workshop will introduce participants to the main History of Science and Film Theory tenets that have situated science and microscopy film production and dissemination across lab, hospital, studio and avant-garde contexts. How has the making and re-framing of time-lapse microscopy registered not only changing knowledge of the cell but changing experiences, definitions and materialities, of life, death and time?

Rebecca Close works at the intersection of art and Science and Technology Studies. They are currently a DOROTHY MSCA post-doctoral fellow leading the project Imaging/Imagining Reproductive Crisis: time-lapse microscopy, animation and fertility discourse. Their experimental animation film The Wife of Them All (2022) premiered at the 27th LesGaiCineMad Festival and travelled to the 69th Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and was recently part of Labocine’s Ecosystem program, running parallel to the 17th Science New Wave Film Festival, New York.

Michał Matuszewski is a PhD researcher at the Doctoral School in Humanities, University of Warsaw, Poland, in the field of cultural studies and critical “film animal studies”. He is working on a dissertation entitled "Bloodless hunting? Polish Nature Film 1945-2005" on a cultural history of polish wildlife films and discourses on nature and animals. Michał is also a film curator, festival programmer, researcher, author, and film essayist. Head of a Film Essay Studio at the vnLab of the im Łodź Film School. He is a scholarship holder of the Culture and Animals and Animals Foundation and works on the film project based on visual research on the animal gaze in cinema.