Artist Film Workshops: Specimen

Experimental film is best understood as the search for a model of the cinema. But what is cinema a model for, and what is it modelled on? Cinema is both a specific thing and also a generalised description of the world. It is a scientific instrument, an atlas indistinguishable from the globe, a monument to vision, an eye, the industrial conventions of the movie-world. In the camera, the model is the ether. Lucretius spoke of film before the common era. Film cannot be dead, it never lived. It is populated by zombies and docile bodies. Technology is the afterlife.

Specimen is an exhibition by the Artist Film Workshop. Participating artists include: Hanna Chetwin, Tim Coster, Samaan Fieck, John Flaus, Nina Gilbert, Aurelia Guo, Lucas Haynes, Olivia Koh, Lucy Kostos, Zi-Yun Lam, Travis MacDonald, Madeleine Martiniello, Sabina Maselli, Emma Phillips, Callum Ross-Thomson, Richard Tuohy.

Curated by Giles Fielke.