Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė is a Lithuanian artist and a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Film and Screen, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on artists’ moving image installations and their capacity for affect and experiential critique. Geistė works at the intersection of media theory, media archaeology, film studies, contemporary art and philosophy.
The essay Notes on the Unfolding Flesh is included in the online publication Constellations – a research project by artists Esther Teichmann and Christopher Stewart, made up of commissioned essays and an experimental short film edited by Geistė Kinčinaitytė.
Geistė's essay Notes on the Unfolding Flesh is a collection of reflections on montage as a process of cutting through the chaos, bodies, space, and time, alongside the ongoing philosophical, artistic, and scientific quest to understand what it means to be a body. Montage here is thought in terms of world-building through an act of cutting and re-assembling. It refers not only to a technique of image-making like photography or video editing, but it also signifies a process that creates conditions for the new worlds to emerge, pregnant with potentialities that are waiting to be actualised.
Constellations research project is funded by the Wellcome Trust as part of the One Cell at a Time public engagement grant. The montage film draws upon surrealist layering and juxtapositions of fragments to explore the intertwining narratives of the Human Cell Atlas. A string quartet score composed by Deirdre Gribbin leads us through filmed and CGI visuals layered with archive footage from the Wellcome Collection. We move from the cosmic to the cellular, from flesh to data to the unknown of discovery and birth.
Geistė has also recently published a book review on Silvia Casini's 'Giving bodies back to data: Image makers, bricolage, and reinvention in magnetic resonance technology'.
