A talk with Erika Balsom, a scholar and critic focusing on the history of the moving image in art and experimental documentary practices.
Her work has appeared in publications such as Grey Room, e-flux, Cinema Journal, and numerous exhibition catalogues. She is senior lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London and holds a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.
From its very beginnings, the cinematic apparatus subjected human and animal movement to unprecedented forms of quantification and analysis, serving as a technique for the management of life itself. And yet at the same time, it opened new realms of visibility by recording the ephemeralities of our world in time – a vocation now under threat as computer-generated images increasingly displace lens-based images. In this talk, Erika Balsom will explore this ambivalence of capture through a consideration of the late works of Harun Farocki.