Sam Kaufman

Research project: Entangling Umwelten: Towards a New Ecology of Moving Images and Nonhuman Worlds

Abstract

My practice-based PhD looks to reappraise the biologist Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt against the theory and practice of contemporary film and artists' moving image. I will follow Inga Pollmann's previously under-theorised argument in Cinematic Vitalism (2018) that Umwelt theory grew out of Uexküll's experiments with early cinematography, and that it can stand as a way of complicating conventional discourses of cinema. That is to say, cinema, just as Umwelt, works as a milieu which acts with rather than simply upon being. I will explore the politically and intellectually radical potential of Umwelt theory in the light of how thinkers and artists after Uexküll have used the concept to create openings for re-fusing the anthropocentric gaze and being with nonhumans in their environments. My work will proliferate out from a written thesis alongside a body of work consisting of a long cycle of films, sound pieces, as well as a collection of photographs and fiction.