Developed out of workshops with staff at the advanced biosciences research facility National Horizons Centre, Forms of Circulation explores the wider impact of routine machine processes on their human and non-human recipients. Captured on 16mm colour film, and also shot on location at Teesmouth National Nature Reserve, the film mediates on the labour involved including investigating deadly mouth rot in seal pups and fruit flies’ role in modelling for Parkinson’s disease cures.

Forms of Circulation #1 is also available in an installation and live event format. 

With thanks to amazing DoP Christo Wallers.

Ten years after Fujifilm stopped making moving image stock, the format is returned to Teesside University’s National Horizons Centre to capture the new forms of machine labour at work across the bioscience labs that include Fujifilm new product development. The film captures the new cycles of advanced technology and visual motifs of tubes, bottles and cabinets, pressure gauges, pipettes and pipes alongside microscopes, freezers and 3D printers, merging 16mm colour static shots with footage from the machine cameras themselves. 

This provides a framework to see the laboratory machines and the labour of those who operate and research as art. Analogue film has been implicit in cinematic depictions of work and labour since one of the most famous first films in 1895, Lumiere Brother’s Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon, (France), through film cooperatives and science educational films of the 1970s, and into more recent artist-auteurs such as Harun Farocki continuing to document with a self-consciousness of the technology itself. This research-based film continues this tradition of drawing attention to what the technology of filmmaking itself does to labour through its repetitive representation, as well as the juxtaposition of human and non-human. 

Alongside capturing the machines and lab scenes at the National Horizons Centre, we workshopped with staff to capture their words on their routines and experiences, and how these might be represented by film genres. Their words have been adapted by us into the poem that on occasion joins the images. In addition, diegetic sounds of these machines and actions were captured for the film’s soundtrack but are not intended to be synched. Staff do not appear in the film but will be able to recognise some of their experiences and presence in the documentary.

The Centre has conducted vital research into mouth rot that is seriously affecting seal pups in the Teesmouth National Natural Reserve, a population of Harbour and Grey seals that only returned to the industrial estuary in the 1980s, and whose numbers have been slowly raising since then. We think about how healthcare needs to cover not just people, but our whole natural environment, too often science is divided into work for people and work for everything and one else. Going forward the two are inseparable, as is the role of technology. 

Recent research (Max Planck Society, 2022) has also indicated that seals have a sense of rhythm similar to that of humans - it has evolved and does not require training - with seal pups responding longer to faster or more rhythmically regular ‘beats.’ Hence our inclusion of the 90s dance track, and that we also created a special 90s rave live event!