Moving bodies: captured life in the late works of Harun Farocki

Abstract

At the time of his sudden death in 2014, Harun Farocki was at work on a project called Moving Bodies. The project would explore the history of motion capture, from the chronophotographic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge to engagements with robotics and computer animation in the present. Based on an examination of the corpus of footage Farocki assembled for Moving Bodies and his correspondence about it with collaborator Matthias Rajmann, this article charts the inchoate propositions of a final installation we will never see. While it remains impossible to reconstruct what the completed form of the installation might have been, this article explores why Farocki was drawn to the subject of motion capture by contextualizing his research for this final project in relation to the problem of captured life in his late works Serious Games (2009–2010), Parallel I–IV (2012–2014), and Labour in a Single Shot (made in collaboration with Antje Ehmann, 2011–2014). The article argues that Farocki’s interest in motion capture is exemplary of a broader concern that runs throughout his late work – namely, an interrogation of the mediation and management of life by technical apparatuses. Thinking alongside Farocki’s final projects, the article proposes that lens-based capture possesses a double valence: it is at once a medium through which operations of control and mastery are articulated and a site at which an encounter with worldly complexity may occur.