The fool of Posillipo and other stories

In the winter of 1882, the physiologist and scientist Étienne-Jules Marey spent hours on the beach of Posillipo in Naples, pointing an odd-shaped gun at flying birds. The locals started calling him "the fool of Posillipo," as no one ever heard a gunshot. Nor did any birds die. Or, perhaps, Marey was involved in an imperceptible process of killing, shooting birds twelve times a second with his latest invention, the chronophotographic gun - a precursor to moving image technology. The audio-visual assemblage locates the "gun camera" as a speculative prototype of imperialist technology, shadowing related practices from the colonial sport of bird hunting to cartography, anthropometry, ethnographic field recordings, and modern warfare. As a celluloid strip mutates into the "kill box" inside a military drone screen or a laboratory fly resurrects as a cybernetic creature more than a century later, an elusive dove escapes from Marey's static frames and morphs into nothingness in a defiant affirmation of existential irreducibility.