Animating Informatics

Abstract

Scientists have employed documentary filmmaking practices in their laboratory experiments since the late nineteenth century. Their efforts to visualize unseen organisms blended the documentary capacities of cinema with the medium's ability to animate and simulate life, and these practices continue in the twenty-first century. A core premise of this study is that early science films animated cells, just as computers now animate data, and all of these practices can productively expand our understanding of documentary film. Through close analysis of two exemplary films, Development of the Fertilized Rabbit Ovum (1929) and The Inner Life of the Cell (2006), this chapter explains how the visual representation of cellular life has been a critical site of intersection for science and film since the early twentieth century. Shifting to focus on the processes by which hard data in the life sciences are now converted into animated images in computers, the chapter then analyzes how these “informatic” images make powerful documentary claims despite their profound mediation by software that makes pictures out of numbers. The chapter argues that the resulting “images of objectivity” are shaped by narrative and aesthetic strategies that have, in turn, shaped the relationships between science, documentary, and animation from the origins of cinema to the present day.

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