What a great way to end the year: hearing that my moving image work - The Porous Body - has been selected for the Two Short Nights Film Festival , which takes place 5th-6th March next year.
This experimental short explores the dark and claustrophobic world of the late 19th / early 20th century seance room -- from the point of view of a female medium. It is based on first-hand accounts by believers, sceptics and scientists.
Mediums aroused curiosity and suspicion in equal amounts. Often treated like scientific specimens, they were subjected to intrusive examinations and troubling experiments in order to demonstrate their integrity.
It's a tangled story of faith and rationality, the limited power that women held in a highly patriarchal society, and the Victorian obsession with pushing at the frontiers of scientific discovery.
The film's low-tech, low-budget aesthetic reflects the simple means by which these women conjured their manifestations of ectoplasm and other phenomena -- as well as the still-evolving technology that was used to record and comprehend them.
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