Rendered Bodies: Film Art and Expanded Organology
Event details
Digitally-animated figures - or ‘rendered bodies’ - appear with great frequency in gallery films concerned with contemporary computational capitalism, technological change and deepening ecological crisis. Rendered bodies are typically presented less as bounded or self-contained figures, and more as mutable figures in which elements from a technical and environmental expanse are brought into relation. This talk discusses why film artists have turned to the rendered body now, rather than framing figural alternatives such as the incarnate body or the cyborg. It then sketches a theory of the rendered body by developing an expanded version of Bernard Stiegler’s ‘general organology’. These ideas will be explored through the example of Ed Atkins’s art. The talk argues that such film artists foreground the rendered body to highlight transformations in ontology, agency and psychosomatic experience occurring at scale in the techno-capitalistic present, and to mount urgent reflections about the harms and possible cures accompanying these transformations.
Dr Lucy Bollington
Lucy Bollington is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Film at University College London. Her research centres on Film and Visual Studies, with a focus on the shifting relationships between aesthetics, politics and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her articles have been published in venues including Screen, The Cine-Files and The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, and she is co-editor of Citational Media (with Annie Ring, forthcoming with Legenda, 2024) and the ‘Screening Hands’ dossier (with Michele White, forthcoming with Screen, winter 2024). She is currently writing a book on ‘rendered bodies’ in contemporary artists’ film.