A Review of Jena Osman’s Motion Studies — December 21, 2019 by Ben Rutherfurd
In 1859, the French scientist and physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey invented an instrument known as the sphygmograph: a machine that measured the movement of blood coursing through the heart. Connected to a stylus registering the rhythms of a lever pressed against the wrist’s pulse, the sphygmograph etched out a read-out of blood pressure on a sheet of carbon. The body became script: a series of “repetitive peaks, oscillating hills, steep slopes, climbing waves.” So began Marey’s series of instruments that he would use to turn bodily energy into data, and so begins Jena Osman’s capacious and erudite Motion Studies, a work of experimental prose that examines the relationship between bodies and machinery and, inevitably, the use of bodies as machinery. Motion Studies is composed of three hybrid essays containing both prose and poetry—its title essay, a historical survey of motion study devices from polygraphs to video games; “Popular Science,” an examination of the history of phrenology; and “System of Display,” a work that inhabits the underwater perspective of coral. Osman’s angles of approach are as diverse as her subjects, though her focus at every turn is the advancements of science and the resultant diminishment of the individual. The title essay, for instance, is intersected with scenes of what we might call speculative fiction, pitting the past against a not-so-distant future where the means of surveillance have been exponentialized. In these passages, two lovers plan an escape from their society, a task that requires their virtual erasure given the extent to which citizens are watched. A country versus city dichotomy emerges, with the country idealized as a promise of anonymity where one can “disappear beyond the company horizon.” Erasure, then, is Osman’s true subject, both as a point of fascination and as the reality hinted at with each of Marey’s developments. The book is also multi-modal, guiding its reader via pictures and experimental prose. To encounter the images produced by Marey and others in their attempts to capture and dissect that ever elusive entity—“the real”—is to encounter something familiar, strange, and often absurd. In one of his more memorable experiments, Marey attached a kind of corset to a pigeon which was then connected to “a small metal pan with a spiral spring. Long transmitting tubes connected the pan with the recording drum.” When the bird flew, the motion of its flight was sent to the pan and drummed out on a cylinder’s surface. The result was “an ascending curve for contractions, a descending curve for undulations.” Despite the world of mechanization and oppression that they foreshadow, these passages gravitate toward the friction created between bodies “performing” and the shapes suggested by their read-outs:
She sees him in his suit, in the clinic, sleeping. The machine by the bed traces his breath and pulse. The charted lines become an ultrasound. The fetal shape becomes a shoulder of meat. The shoulder of meat becomes a foot. The heat becomes a skull. The skull becomes a face. The eyes in the face are in the rear view mirror. Rain hits the windshield. The windshield wipers wave back and forth, leave a trace of themselves from every position.
Perhaps what truly makes this book a collaboration between word and image are the moments when language itself aspires to the pictorial. The bird, for instance, is employed as a main character, stamped at the end of a number of paragraphs: “They’re just questions, says the analyst. It’s a test designed to provoke an emotional response. Shall we continue? The bird nods yes.” If you can’t tell, the dialogue is plucked from the opening scene of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, the test being the means by which humans could determine whether someone is a replicant. By attaching pieces of this scene (as well as dialogue from Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Brian de Palma’s Snake Eyes), Osman introduces a third layer to her investigation: a kind of commentary on her historical survey that can also be read as a possible outcome. But the bird also becomes a repeating picture at the end of certain passages creating a flip-book effect, so that, “as the pages turn, stillness becomes animate.” The exchange between word and image is also felt in the second essay, where each section opens by compressing remarks from both pseudo- and respected scientists into a prose block that functions as a kind of opening statement. We are offered a bird’s-eye-view of the discussion. Take the introduction to the topic of “Sublimity”:
Situated on the side-head, directly above Acquisitiveness and behind Ideality, the doughnut-shaped machine swallows the nun. A high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity. The vast, the grand, the majestic: Is there a God spot in the brain? Pin down what happens in the brain when people experience spiritual awakenings.
By collaging statements culled from sources both old and new, the prose explores its own spatiality, becoming a map of potential truths, half-truths and flat-out bunk not unlike the segmented brain that phrenology envisioned. The reader is prompted to consider the dangers in “mapping” an emotional experience. If mapping is a step toward laying claim, it is also a means of exclusion. Hence the belief in something like a “nature deficit disorder.” If Marey’s motion study experiments threatened to subsume their bodies into data by breaking them down to more easily observable patterns, it is interesting to consider certain means of image-production (perhaps most notably chronophotography) as responsible for returning to those bodies a degree of mystery and majesty, see Marey’s “Runner reduced to a system of bright lines,” an image in which the subject walks against a black background while covered with reflective markers that delineate his movements. With the motions of his stride “lifted” from his body, the man becomes a ghostly vertebra snaking through a sea of darkness. An image like this certainly mechanizes human energy, but it also transforms it, just as the separate panels of Edward Muybridge (who also makes an appearance) asked for narrative reconstruction on the part of the spectator. These were collaborative pieces, reliant on the eye to travel from one frame to the next or to interpret the sources of their apparitional patterns. We might extend this collaboration—between artist and audience, artist and subject—to Osman’s approach to the essay, specifically those moments where her prose fragments into planes of possibility. Midway through the title essay, the escapees are discovered when the woman’s wristwatch transmits their location to the invisible surveyors of their environment. The scene refracts into three scenarios: one in which a helicopter descends, and a rifleman leans out the door “with a rifle cocked. Aims. Shoots. She falls.” In the second, a hunter appears and “lifts his bow and arrow. Aims. Shoots. She falls.” In the last, a storm hits, “lighting lights, aims. Strikes. She falls.” The triad of attacks feels, at first, like a kind of choose-your-own-adventure. It is also a reminder of the malleability—nay, the godliness—of authority, along with its capacity to be everywhere because it is seemingly nowhere. Either way, the result is the same: “When he sees her there on the ground, the worldline tilts.” Indeed. Directly afterwards, the character’s near-death seeps into and swirls with the mechanics of Marey’s famous photographic gun as it is explained on a previous page:
A fly on a revolving disk An airplane creature Stretched and distorted on the anamorphic plate, But perfectly proportioned in reflection
Trees and rain and hawks, A face, a goat, a carousel Gas mask head on radio tower legs The bird on a tether, a journey—
Here and elsewhere, Osman’s historical survey collides and kaleids with her narrative in a zoetrope of impressions, wherein we find ourselves thrown into that indeterminate zone between the seeable and the sayable. Part of what makes Motion Studies so intoxicating is its cool, somewhat distanced observation. Its capaciousness is all the more intimidating for the insouciance with which stakes build. At one moment, you will be transfixed by a photograph of a walking man ghosted into an army of walking men, yet pages later the conversation reaches modern-day surveillance, motion-capture video games, drones. Whereas stating the ethical dimensions of these technological advances outright might feel automatic, Osman maintains just enough of a remove that the book reads as a celebration of mystery and fluidity rather than a work of moral outrage, though her lens is always focused by a keen understanding of the ever-elusive means of domination.
