research

 Moving Image as Inquiry

2026

What might it mean to approach moving image not as representation, but as a mode of being with?

My practice research engages cinema as a methodological orientation—an embodied and relational way of sensing, composing, and remaining within situations rather than extracting from them. This orientation emerges through ongoing work in critical and collective fabulation, where story-making is not treated as narrative construction but as an entangled, processual practice of relation.

End of Life (2017), developed over six years in collaboration with five individuals, unfolded through sustained, durational engagement. The work did not proceed through predetermined structure or explanatory intent, but through a commitment to remaining with—attending to bodies, environments, and the uneven temporalities of lived experience as they emerged.

Within this process, filmmaking operated less as a means of capturing what was already there than as a way of participating in the formation of relationships. The camera became an extension of the sensing body—a practice I describe as drawing with the camera: a choreography of movements in and through particular situations that privileges proximity, reciprocity, and partial perspective. What comes into view, what remains withheld, and what is felt but not seen all participate in a relational field that resists stabilization.

This approach unsettles conventional distinctions between observation and composition. Situations are not documented and later interpreted; they are composed and inhabited as the research itself. Duration, silence, gesture, and improvisation function not as aesthetic choices alone, but as methodological conditions through which knowledge takes form.

Narrative, in this context, does not organize experience toward coherence. Instead, it emerges through fragmentation, repetition, and openness—allowing for forms of sense-making that remain incomplete and situated. Moving image here operates alongside but differently from textual or analytic inquiry, sustaining forms of attention that exceed explanation.

By formalizing End of Life as a research object (Bruce & Wojtasik, 2017), the work enters into a different mode of circulation—one that allows it to be cited, referenced, and encountered within scholarly discourse (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19422679). Yet its primary operation remains experiential and relational. The question is not how to translate film into text, but how to recognize moving image as a site where inquiry takes place through encounter.

This reflection does not attempt to define a general framework, but to remain with one instance of practice as a way of approaching a broader question: how moving image might function as a method for composing relations, attending to what emerges, and engaging the world without reducing it to what can be known in advance.

This work emerges alongside ongoing inquiries into critcal and collective fabulation and the latent archive, where moving-image practices engage processes of rereading, recirculation, and relational becoming.

Latent Archive

forthcoming