Out Of body, 4K video 29 min with 7.1 surround sound

Out of Body is a poetic and psychedelic rendering of impermanence, rupture, and fluidity. Focusing on maintenance work at various thresholds of the body, the film slips between the cracks of industrial spaces; below ground; across membranes; factory walls; and into orifices and hidden worlds of work where fantasies of containment and bodily autonomy are rehearsed and mythologized.

The film is woven together by a series of poems performed by Logan February in which borrowed language accumulates. Sourced from different fields these found poems refer to fluid dynamics, spirituality, medical history, psychoanalysis and reproductive science.

The film is commissioned and produced by New Museum New York.

Unmade, text by Elsa Richardson

Worrying at the boundary between body and environment Out of Body traces flows of biological material in and out of hum/animal bodies through sites of scientific and reproductive control. From the production of biomedical pharmaceuticals derived from urine to breeding technologies, bacteriology and waste management, the film permits us glimpses of the hidden labour that sustains an image of the body as bounded, complete, impermeable.

Early in the film we observe a drain technician monitoring a sewer robot as it scours the city’s digestive tract for cracks and signs of insect life. The poet describes leaving their rubbish out for collection, a daily act likened to the pleasure of feeling their guts unburdening themselves: “the sensation (at least for a moment) / that my body contains nothing but myself.” At the heart of this imagining of “me” as made whole by the habitual expulsion of everything “not me”—trash from the house, waste from the rectum—lies the fantasy of biological autonomy. Part of what Out of Body exposes is the effort involved in maintaining this illusion. Moving from sewer to salt mine, from medical laboratory to urine processing factory and farm, the film incorporates technologies such as microscopes, circulation tanks, and robots, all integral to the infrastructure of these hidden worlds.

In one instance, the camera descends deep into the fragile underground caverns of a former salt mine, where scientists work in a subterranean lab to develop materials capable of creeping into cracks and sealing radioactive and industrial waste encrypted within the mine’s hollowed spaces. Here, the flow rate of unique salt mixtures is measured for their ability to adhere to and integrate with the excavated salt formations. The scientists’ rehearsal of containment and leakage parallels Logan’s poem Bilirubin. Through a microscope a healer reads the law of the poet’s liver: “Across the dermis, deeper below” Logan’s bloodstream is “bright with bilirubin” a yellow pigment produced during the body’s breakdown of red blood cells. Logan’s Gilbert’s syndrome affects the liver's processing of bilirubin, leading to visible buildups of the yellow pigment that “glows like needless gold coins” in the bloodstream. This accumulation mirrors the fragile task of containment in the mine. “You would not dream to expel excrete that inherited gold pigment” the healer suggests—“your body contains your fathers ghost”. Playing with questions of waste, value and containment Logan’s poem speaks to the futural side effects of excessive retention.

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