Moving Bodies & Motion Capture
Cinema at the Dortmunder U | Level 0
Bild: Harun Farocki, Deep Play, 2007, Videostill
As part of the exhibition Holding Pattern, HMKV will host a lecture by author and reader in film studies Erika Balsom (King’s College, London). In her talk, Erika Balsom will explore Harun Farocki’s unfinished project Moving Bodies, which examines the capture and analysis of movement through technical media.
Drawing on Farocki’s collected film material, Balsom will offer insights into the fragmentary ideas behind this final, unrealized work. She will contextualize Moving Bodies within Farocki’s later projects, such as Parallel I–IV (2012–2014), in which the artist investigated how technical apparatuses record, control, and represent movement.
The lecture will be followed by a discussion with Thomas Venker (Kaput Magazin), which will also include a conversation about Farocki’s 12-channel video installation Deep Play (2007) – a work featured in Holding Pattern that explores the algorithmic analysis of the final of the World Championship of Football in 2006. By linking Farocki’s final artistic inquiries to the themes of the exhibition, the event offers a deeper reflection on the mediation of movement in contemporary visual culture. The event thus creates a bridge to the central questions of the exhibition: What are the patterns (of movement) that guide our lives? Do we design them ourselves, or are they written elsewhere, in dark zones that we can only glimpse but never fully see?
Erika Balsom
Erika Balsom is a Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017, Columbia University Press) and TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in venues such as Cahiers du cinéma, Cinema Scope, e-flux, Grey Room, New Left Review, and Screen. With Hila Peleg, she is the editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press, 2016) and Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2022). In 2022/23, she was the co-curator of “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (HKW Berlin/Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw).
The event takes place as part of the Kleiner Freitag event series in the cinema of the Dortmunder U on level 0.
