Kristina Stallvik
Captive Technologies
“Bubble Bath”
Magma Maria (Frankfurt, Germany)
September - October, 2023
Curated by Lena Stewens & Jakob Fransicso
Captive Technologies consists of manipulated found footage from behind-the-scenes Hollywood production reels depicting the practice of “creature acting.” In this filmic technique, human actors clad in full-body green suits and prosthetics, physically enact imagined animal movements. During post production, the creature actor’s performance is used to directly program CGI animals. The green screen is thus produced as a highly ambivalent technology: both providing a space for speculative somatics and an anthropomorphic portrayal of non-humans. This slideshow juxtaposes bodily gestures with isolated canonical texts – the Bible, early Renaissance writings, and modern zoological pedagogy – to trace the cultural construction of interspecies understanding implicated, and bolstered, by the practice of creature acting
Documentation by Jacob Otter