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Soft Science "Cinema of Attractions"

Rachel Mayeri

2004 00:04:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo
Tags:
Documentary, Science

Description

The Soft Science “Cinema of Attractions” is a series of short movies by scientists. Commission and concept by Rachel Mayeri, electronic compositions and musical accompaniment by Joe Milutis. Many of the videos can be found on the web, posted for public appreciation of a scientist's lab work, as instructional material, or for communication to peers as data. As "data," the videos are non-narrative, scientific information. As "film," the videos are reminiscent of one shot, one reel novelties from the turn of the 19th century - some magic tricks, some actualities - which film theorist Tom Gunning dubbed the "Cinema of Attractions." In the context of art, the videos contain aesthetic, imaginative layers, embellished by Milutis' musical interpretations.

Part I: Steering, High Speed Saccade, Fly Eye, Haltere Motion Digital videos courtesy of Caltech Professor Michael Dickinson, Caltech, 2:00, 2004. Produced while conducting research on the neurobiology, aerodynamic abilities, and behavior of flies. Professor Dickinson is also striving to build a truly robotic fly.

Part II: Repressilator+Noise and The Multispore Variants, 1:00, 2004 Caltech Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics Michael Elowitz genetically engineered bacterial microcolonies to glow according to different genetic circuits. The colors in these videos are determined by the expression of fluorescent proteins copied from jellyfish.

Part III: (1) Spread the Aliquot over the Agar Plate Surface, (2) Non-Linear Shape Statistics in Tracking, and (3) Carbon Nanotube Gears, 1:00, 2004 Video sources: (1) Microbiology Class for Undergrads at Brunel University, (2) Daniel Cremers, Timo Kohlberger, and Christoph Schnorr at UCLA (3) Jie Han, Al Globus, Richard Jaffe, Glenn Deardorff at NASA 

This title is only available on Soft Science.

About Rachel Mayeri

Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. Her multi-year project Primate Cinema explores the scientific and popular representations of the boundary between human and non-human primates in a series of video experiments. In 2011, she received a major arts grant from the UK-based Wellcome Trust to make original videos to entertain captive chimpanzees. The resulting project, commissioned by the Arts Catalyst, is called Primate Cinema: Apes as Family and has been screened at major film and art festivals such as Sundance, Berlinale, True/False Film Festival, Transitio Mexico Festival of Electronic Art, Abandon Normal Devices and Edinburgh Festival of Art. It won a prize for hybrid art at Ars Electronica. Previous projects include Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends (2007), Stories from the Genome (2003), and the compilation Soft Science (2004). Her most recent work is the multi-screen video installation Life cycle of Toxoplasma Gondii (2015) on the toxoplasma gondii parasite in rats, cats, and humans. Her chapter on artists’ experiments with science documentary was published in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip (MIT Press. 2008). She was a Guest Curator at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and is currently Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College.