Collectivized Cine-Trance in the More-Than-Human Moving Image

‘Slow motion and fast motion reveal a world where the kingdom of nature knows no boundaries. Everything is alive. A surprising animism is being reborn.’ (Epstein, 1935) An attentiveness constituted by cinematic technologies and discussed by early film theorists like Jean Epstein, foregrounds investigations not only toward how we see nature but to where the boundaries of nature are located. As the apparatus of cinema continues to expand, the intertwined relationship between what has agency and is alive, as opposed to what is merely a mechanism of media technology (Fisher, 1999) urges us to question the subject and source of animation further. And where we find more than a single subject, between Interdisciplinary practice and research, artists studying the natural world do so through a networked form of attention or distributed noticing of changes in the environment.

To address these novel forms of attention, through and toward which a form of ‘collectivized subjectivity’ re- frames nature, this paper will analyze the production processes and ecologies of two artists collectives operating at the extreme opposites of historical digital and analogue divisions (ScanLAB and Sustainable Darkroom). Speculating on the chiasm that binds these two seemingly opposed practices, the emergence of a collectivized form of cine-trance will be discussed. From its original formulations through Jean Rouch and Gregory Bateson at the site of anthropological study, to the development or processing of images in the context of a newfound ‘animatic apparatus’ (Levitt, 2018). And where trance, often conceived of as a form of non-attentiveness (Holl, 2017) can be discussed as a necessary state of mind for connections between the human and the more-than-human to permeate.

Epstein, J. (1935), “Photogénie de l’impondérable” in Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Seghers, 1974), 250. Quoted in Castro, T. (2019) The Mediated Plant. e-flux journal, Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/102/283819/the-mediated-plant/ (accessed 28 January 2024)

Fisher, M. (1999). Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. University of Warwick.

Holl, U. (2017) Cinema Trance and Cybernetics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Levitt, D. (2018). The animatic apparatus : Animation, vitality, and the futures of the image. New Alresford: John Hunt Publishing Limited.