Abstracts
Panel 1. Film as a Research Tool | 9:10–11:00
This presentation explores the role of film not merely as a documentation tool, but as an analytical research method in the study of biological invasion processes. Based on our research on the invasive plant wild cucumber (Echinocystis lobata), it demonstrates how moving images can function as primary research data, revealing dynamic phenomena that are difficult to capture through static observation. The presentation includes four short research films documenting processes relevant to invasion dynamics: plant growth, attachment mechanisms, seed swelling analyzed using Digital Image Correlation (DIC), and seed behavior in water. These examples demonstrate how film enables the precise observation and analysis of plant behavior and structural changes over time. Through time-based recording and image-based analysis, subtle movements, micro-scale transformations, and mechanical responses within plant tissues become observable and measurable with high precision. Processes that remain imperceptible to the naked eye can thus be quantified and interpreted in relation to invasion dynamics. Such approaches represent a promising and rapidly developing direction in plant research. By providing detailed insight into plant growth patterns and behavioral responses to environmental conditions, film-based analytical techniques expand our understanding of invasive species. A more precise recognition of these processes may contribute to improved management strategies and innovative approaches in nature conservation.
Sexual selection, the lesser known part of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, proposes that evolution favours traits that help individuals increase their number of offspring. Courtship, attractiveness, and mate choice are important components in our understanding of sexual selection.
In our work, we extensively use film recordings of courting and courted birds. We extract data from our recordings by using lists of definitions of behaviours (ethograms) to count the number and duration of different behaviours, as well as computational methods to track limb and body movements.
Most of our projects focus on wild birds and involve travelling to remote locations to film their behaviour in their natural habitats. Motion-triggered camera traps allow us to record all the action that unfolds within the camera’s field of view for birds that tend to court at the same location (bower birds, birds of paradise). We have also used specialized camera systems to capture the motion of a small tropical bird, the golden collared manakin, in 3-D. Finally, we also work with a domesticated bird, the ring dove, in a laboratory setting. As well as filming doves during courtship interactions, we also carry out playback experiments in which we present films of courting males to female birds. We can manipulate the film material in targeted ways (e.g. modify the relative timing between video and audio; occlude visual or auditory components) that allow us to experimentally test whether these manipulations affect females’ behavioural responses to the courtship shown on screen.
Our ultimate goal is to use our findings to understand whether and how a potential partner’s attractiveness arises during multisensory and often quite elaborate courtship interactions.
Time-lapse video provides a precise methodological framework for the investigation of plant growth, development and organ movements in relation to exogenously induced and endogenous electrical signals. Continuous, many-days-lasting time-lapse video measurements capture temporal patterns of plant behaviour that are inaccessible to direct, short-term observation. Time-lapse recordings function both as an observational tool and as a primary scientific output, enabling the visualization and quantification of parameters of plant growth, development and movements. Thus, time-lapse imaging establishes a controlled analytical space for examining interactions between growth, development, movement, and electrical signalling.
Plant growth exhibits endogenous rhythmicity, evident in circumnutation – the helical and oscillatory movements of elongating organs such as hypocotyls, shoots, and stems. These movements reflect coordinated cellular processes and intercellular synchronisation. Time-lapse sequences are analysed using computational tracking with the Circumnutation Tracker software, which reconstructs organ movement trajectories and extracts quantitative parameters such as period, length, rate, shape, angle, and clockwise and counterclockwise directions. This tool enables high-throughput, objective analysis of movement patterns.
Simultaneously, spontaneous electrical signals – including action potentials and variation potentials – are recorded and analysed. Signal processing extracts parameters such as amplitude, half-time, propagation velocity, and interval. The integration of electrophysiological and video data allows investigation of interactions between electrical signals and organ motion, including phase relationships and potential causal links.
This integrative approach treats the plant as an electromechanical system in which electrical signalling, movement, development and growth form a unified, complex, space- and time-dependent phenomenon. Combining full high-definition time-lapse video, computational tracking with Circumnutation Tracker, and electrical signal analysis provides a systems-level perspective for studying growth-development patterns and adaptive responses in plants.
When a plant falls in the frame, it often marks the end of the experiment, but rarely the end of the question. In films recording plant kinetics, the moment when the stem loses its orientation, the leaf droops, or the root ceases to respond to a gradient is usually interpreted as a failure of the measurement system or the death of the research subject. This presentation proposes a different perspective: that “failed” sequences reveal something that scientific narrative does not allow us to see. Falling as movement, not as a lack of movement. Deviation from the axis as a response, not as a loss of signal. Despite quantifying tools, biological film tends toward fictionalization: it seeks an arc, a vector, a result. Meanwhile, a plant that topples over may, precisely at that moment, speak most accurately of the limits of its own plasticity, of where adaptation ends and something else begins—something not necessarily named. The question this material poses to the researcher is, in essence, epistemic: what do we see when the camera does not get what it was set up for?
Panel 2. Discussing Scientific Images | 11:30–13:20
Contemporary biological research increasingly relies upon film and video documentation as primary evidence for behavioural, developmental, and ecological phenomena. However, the methodological literature has failed to address a fundamental epistemological question: the relationship between the perspectival position of the recording apparatus and the perceptual world inhabited by the organisms under investigation. This paper argues that this oversight constitutes a systematic anthropocentric bias that shapes which biological phenomena become scientifically visible and measurable.
The theoretical foundation for this analysis draws upon Jakob von Uexküll’s (2010) concept of Umwelt, the species-specific perceptual world in which each organism exists and acts as developed in contemporary biosemiotics (Favareau 2010) and sensory ecology (Stevens 2013). Each organism inhabits a distinct sensory environment: bees navigate through ultraviolet light patterns imperceptible to human vision; zebrafish respond to lateral line mechanoreception of water displacement; rodents communicate through olfactory signals that leave no visual record. Standard biological film methodology documents organisms from human-accessible visual perspectives using cameras sensitive to wavelengths within the human visual spectrum, thereby creating what this paper terms the “Umwelt gap”: a systematic exclusion of the sensory modalities that structure organismal experience and behavior.
This methodological problem has received minimal attention despite its significant implications for biological interpretation. Drawing upon Nagel’s (1974) foundational analysis of subjective experience and recent advances in multimodal biological sensing (Cade et al. 2021), this paper proposes that biological film studies should incorporate explicit “Umwelt Statements”- systematic accounts of which sensory dimensions are captured by filming apparatus, which are necessarily excluded, and how these exclusions shape the interpretation of documented phenomena.
The paper demonstrates this framework through analysis of three research domains: schooling behavior in teleost fish, where mechanosensory lateral line information is entirely absent from video records; plant-pollinator interactions, where ultraviolet nectar guides visible to pollinators fall outside standard camera sensitivity; and mammalian social behavior, where chemical communication driving behavioral responses produces no visual trace. In each case, the Umwelt gap generates systematic interpretive limitations that current methodological standards neither acknowledge nor address.
This analysis does not advocate for methodological abandonment of visual documentation, but rather for epistemological precision regarding its inherent limitations. Film-based biological research requires explicit theorization of the perceptual relationship between recording technology and the organismal experience it claims to document.
The linear structure of film used in the first cinematographic studies of reproductive cells came to embody the temporal order of late 19th and early 20th century biology, where developmental events were seen to be anchored on a timeline, moving teleologically from origin to destination. The reproductive cell biology imaging experiment today has less to do with tracing, accelerating or even reversing developmental events, and more to do with cross-referencing synchronous reproductive processes, pursuing functional interdependencies across multiple cytoplasmic zones and noticing intra-connections between organelle objects as they float across multiple screens. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in reproductive biology labs, this paper elaborates on the image ontology of 4D confocal microscopy as it shapes a scientific imagination of reproductive biology; situating these shifts in relation to the reconfigured matrix of genetic, biochemical and molecular forms of fashioning the cell; and the transformed metaphors and programs of scientific study that have developed in the interim.
Pain presents a persistent epistemological challenge within the life sciences. Biomedical frameworks typically privilege measurable nociceptive processes, yet the lived experience of suffering unfolds as a temporally distributed phenomenon that resists stable localisation, quantification, and propositional articulation. This tension becomes particularly visible in endometriosis, a condition in which ectopic endometrial tissue grows and migrates across the body, producing fluctuating pain that emerges in different anatomical locations and contexts over time. The biological dynamics of the disease are therefore inseparable from shifting perceptual relations to the body.
This presentation proposes moving image practice as a methodological interface for investigating these dynamics. Building on approaches in visual epistemology developed by L.Daston and P.Galison, film is approached as a knowledge-producing instrument capable of organising temporal observation. Unlike static visualisation, film allows the simultaneous registration of biological transformation, spatial displacement of tissue, episodic emergence of pain, and the evolving phenomenology of bodily awareness. Through sequencing, framing, and temporal modulation, the filmic method allows these heterogeneous processes to be situated within a shared temporal field.
Through a research-creation methodology combining documentary fragments, microscopic imagery, embodied performance, and metaphorical visualisation, the project situates subjective experience alongside biological processes within a shared temporal field. This approach resonates with scholarship on scientific imaging and medical visual culture, engaging phenomenological accounts of illness such as those proposed by H.Carel.
In this configuration, film becomes an epistemic interface capable of articulating the feedback loop between tissue transformation and the subject’s shifting locus of bodily perception. Moving image practice thus enables the study of subjective suffering as a temporally structured biological and experiential process rather than a purely private sensation.
Panel 3. Scientific Films: History and Circulation | 14:30–16:40
In our talk we propose a method of researching scientific, or more precisely, research films. With research films, we refer to a genre of moving images produced by and for researchers, typically not intended for cinema screening and often subsumed under categories such as non-theatrical and useful film. These films were produced to act as visual evidence, to support theories, or to collect the world on film. However, they were also used to popularize science, to justify political ideas and racial hierarchies, or to create aesthetic experiences. Given their multiple functions and uses, they cannot be fully understood at just one point in their existence. Rather, they must be considered through their ongoing analog as well as digital (re)cyclings in their shifting materiality (from 35mm nitro film to 16mm safety film to various file formats) and visuality (from rough cuts to post-processed found footage to digital color correction and noise reduction) as well as in their shifting epistemic functions (ranging from measurement, research, and teaching to memory).
In our collaboratively written book “Fließend. Geschichte, Ästhetik und Politik des wissenschaftlichen Films (2026; “Fluent: History, Aesthetics, and Politics of the Scientific Film”), we propose examining how, why, and when such film recordings were distributed, handled, and archived after their production in the laboratory, and how they ultimately became part of educational films, science communication films, or experimental art films. In this way, research films can become a means to better understand the multiple and subtle intertwinements between science, politics and the public sphere.
We support this methodological proposal with researchfilm.net, a collaborative web project that examines how historical research films can be accessed, contextualized, and reactivated under the conditions of digital media.
This paper revisits the film practice of Charles and Ray Eames as an early, design-driven model of “film as method” for studying living and life-like processes. Produced for museums, world fairs and corporate science communication, their works treated cinema not as an autonomous art form but as an epistemic instrument—“non-films” meant to communicate an idea—built from the same design variables they valued elsewhere: structure, material, and purpose.
Drawing on A Communication Primer, Powers of Ten, SX-70 and two exhibition-based dispositifs—IBM Mathematics Peep Show and Think—I argue that the Eames method operates through three coupled operations central to contemporary life-science imaging: (1) scaling (switching between macro and micro viewpoints, orders of magnitude, and projection formats); (2) temporal composition (rapid montage of stills and moving footage that turns change into an analyzable pattern of intervals and rhythms); and (3) spatialization (multi-screen or device-based architectures that distribute attention and turn the spectator into an active node of the experiment).
Foregrounding how framing, sequencing and display environments produce both knowledge and meaning, the paper proposes the Eameses’ “architecture of information” as a bridge concept between scientific film practice and visual/cultural studies. It also offers an analytical vocabulary for current biological and ecological film methods (time-lapse, microscopy, animal tracking, growth modelling): not only what film records, but how designed temporality and viewing situations shape inference, persuasion, and the democratization of expertise.
In 1920, a physiologist and professor at Masaryk University in Brno compiled his first film from his research footage, which he also screened publicly and titled “How Plants Live and Feel”. Through this film and its title, he also revealed the characteristic method and scientific concept of his subsequent research and filmmaking. During the 1920s and 1930s, Úlehla continued his study of plant movements using film in his special laboratory in the university’s basement. His method involved time-lapse filming of various plant species, always in response to specific external stimuli—typically light, but also gravity, weight, and others. Using a camera, he observed how plants grew or moved in response to these deliberate stimuli to which he subjected them, and through this, he explained his theories about the sensitivity and emotional life of plants to both scientific and lay audiences. My presentation, based on a study of Úlehla’s written and film legacy, including his correspondence with other scientists of the 1920s and 1930s who studied plant sensitivity, will examine time-lapse filming as a method for capturing and conveying insight into the plants’ umwelt and for developing a more-than human sensitivity through the film camera. The central theme of my presentation will be the time-lapse stimulation method (i.e., exposing plants to specific physical conditions and filming them at long intervals to create time-lapse footage), which enabled Úlehla to visualize this plant “sensitivity,” and thus to scientifically demonstrate it and present it to a wider audience.
The first film produced by Karol Marczak was “Nature Snapshots.” The film consists of a montage of short sequences depicting plant growth, the development of flowers, and the metamorphosis of insects. In his subsequent work, “Wonders of Nature,” Marczak employed time-lapse macro cinematography combined with camera movements. In 1947, he went on to produce the first microscopic film in Poland, “Moss-Dwelling Rotifers.”
This film, now regarded as lost, constitutes the central focus of my presentation. The archives of the Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny preserve the only surviving copy of the film, recorded on film stock with a nitrocellulose base, a material known for its high flammability.
Karol Marczak’s pioneering work combined technological innovation in cinematography with novel approaches to the production of biological films. His oeuvre represents a distinctive and highly original synthesis of cinematic art and scientific inquiry, a combination that undoubtedly merits deeper scholarly analysis and interpretation within an interdisciplinary framework.
In discussing Karol Marczak’s work, it is also important to acknowledge Marta Marczak, with whom he collaborated between 1946 and 1950 on numerous films, including the aforementioned “Moss-Dwelling Rotifers.” The breadth of subjects addressed in their productions is remarkable, ranging from botanical and zoological topics to complex questions within the field of zoopsychology.
Marczak’s films demonstrate both analytical rigor and originality in addressing challenging research problems, many of which required long-term scientific observation. In addition to his filmmaking activities, Marczak was also engaged in teaching, organizational work, and scholarly writing. Taken together, these contributions position him as an exceptional figure who left a lasting and significant imprint on the history of Polish biological cinema.
This paper explores a group of biological films produced in the 1950s and 1960s at the Educational Film Studio in Łódź (WFO). While these films have traditionally been framed as didactic or scientific tools, I propose to read them as complex cinematic practices that negotiate the boundaries between life, death, and the status of the moving image.
Focusing on works by filmmakers such as Karol Marczak and Aleksandra Jaskólska, I explore how early biological cinema operates simultaneously within the domains of scientific observation and cinematic experimentation, revealing unexpected affinities with avant-garde film practices. Films such as Marczak’s Work of the Heart of a Sea Trout Embryo, foreground the paradox of cinema as a medium that both animates and arrests life, raising questions about the epistemological and ethical dimensions of scientific imaging.
At the same time, I consider Jaskólska’s Tardigrades as a case study that invites a dialogue with contemporary theoretical frameworks, including environmental humanities, to rethink the materiality and the relational of more-than-human dimensions of life.
By situating these works within both the history of scientific cinema and broader debates in film theory, the paper argues that early Polish biological films offer a unique perspective on cinema’s capacity to produce, rather than merely represent, life.
Panel 4. Artistic Research / Screenings | 17:00–18:15
The microscope functions as a tool to pierce through the gaze into the unimaginable. In this context, we can trace colonial origins in certain visual regimes, such as the invention of panoramic painting to depict the lands of America that were desired for conquest. These visual devices conveyed the necessity and desire for colonization, rooted in an extractivist logic that the scientific method also shares. In extracting an animal or cells from their original environment to observe them under a microscope, there lies, therefore, a colonial gesture that produces an image. Does the violence of domination transfer into these kinds of images? How is it encoded? Does this violence intertwine with the pleasure of looking?
In our experience following an evolutionary microbiology lab studying corals, researchers speak of a drive for exploration and discovery. Although these processes are linked to this colonial past, we might ask what other critical ways of seeing these images offer in their dynamics of limitless magnification and detailing. It is undeniable that scientific imagery carries a multiscale perspective due to its abstraction, connecting everything from cells to celestial objects (from micro to macro). So, does microscopic imagery activate aesthetic and experiential associations? What possibilities for reappropriation do these images hold, and how can they help foster more interconnected conceptions, allowing us to perceive (ecologically) beyond the human?
In this presentation, we introduce a conceptual framework designed to explore the affective potential of microscopic imagery, particularly within the context of the ecological emergency. We aim to outline the foundational materials for a video essay, consisting of recordings gathered during scientific expeditions and theoretical notes.
This experimental documentary, shot on 16mm film, explores tree felling as a disruption of local memory and the landscape’s natural rhythm. The raw materiality of the analogue medium, with its grain and fragility, serves as a parallel narrative layer to the physical changes depicted on screen.
“The Water Stand” is a literary-theoretical extension of the author’s artistic project of the same title. The project emerges from an inquiry into the relationship between memory and nature, approached here as a potential medium for the storage and disclosure of historical traces. The case study centers on Lake Rusałka in Poznań – today a popular recreational site whose origins date back to the period of the Second World War. The reservoir was created by Nazi authorities with the use of forced labor, including that of Jewish prisoners, and fragments of the destroyed Poznań synagogue as well as matzevot from a nearby Jewish cemetery were incorporated into its construction.
The artistic project takes the form of an audiovisual essay based on laboratory video recordings of water collected from the lake. In this context, water is treated not only as biological research material but also as a metaphorical matrix of memory – a kind of “black box” in which traces of individual and collective histories associated with a given place may sediment. Within this framework, the natural landscape appears as a silent repository of the past, capable of holding meanings that exceed official forms of commemoration, such as monuments or memorial plaques. Testimony of remembrance thus manifests as something seemingly imperceptible, yet nonetheless present within the material fabric of the environment.
The paper reflects on how artistic practice may operate as a method for revealing latent layers of memory inscribed in space and matter. The Water Stand proposes an understanding of nature as an alternative archive of history and considers the role of art in uncovering less visible relationships between landscape, memory, and trauma. The project engages in particular with the concept of collective memory – most notably as theorized by Maurice Halbwachs – as well as with the notion of postmemory, widely discussed in recent decades. It is the traces of these phenomena that the work seeks within the landscape itself, understood as a stage upon which imaginaries and historical resonances are continuously shaped by time.
As a video artist, during my residency at Vila 31 x Art Explora in Tirana (January-March 2026) – held in the former villa of Albania’s dictator Enver Hoxha – winter conditions precluded both live sericulture work and my own materials recording. Instead, I turned to the Arkivi Qendror Shtetëror i Filmit (AQSHF) archive, editing footage from the Albanian propaganda film “Dy Endjet” (1972) as a research method interlacing silk production history with film analysis.
Silk production relies on tamed reliance. The silkworm Bombyx mori, bred by humans for over 5,000 years, exemplifies full domestication: leucism has eliminated protective coloration, vision atrophied to rudimentary eyes suited to confinement, silkworm dependent on supplied mulberry leaves. A single pupa yields one continuous filament –300 to 900 meters – secured through processing. Albania’s sericulture centered on the Bee and Silkworm Station (SBM-Tirana, established in 1957), managing cultivation via state plantations; output targeted export until post-1990s closure, mulberry groves lingering as historical traces.
In W.G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” (1995), silk maps cycles of creation and entropy across civilizations, intertwining sustenance with subjection. Sebald’s essay frames dependence as structuring force between species; Albanian sericulture’s engineered groves and stations position silk as material and conceptual filament – durable under duress, emergent through constraint.
“Dy Endjet” propagates state progress, its montage revealing silk’s entropic undercurrents. My presentation includes edited clips, Colors of Zadrima (women’s weaving collective) documentation, Open Studios footage, and research linking Ottoman/socialist sericulture. Film as method unravels ideology’s fragile thread, archival tape echoing silk’s continuous filament.