The anamorphic cinema

The anamorphic cinema is a research/creation project that proposes new ways to engage with moving images by applying digital imaging and animation to catoptric anamorphosis, a perspectival technique from the seventeenth century that deforms pictures so they appear to re-form in the reflection of a curvilinear mirror. Culminating in Ghost in the Machine: The Inquest of Mary Gallagher, a looping fifteen- minute, site-specific video installation investigating the culpability of a working class woman in the 1879 murder and beheading of another, this project problematizes representation as re-presentation. Dramatic performances of witness testimonies and newspaper texts, layered with diverse archival images form a network of narratives that revise the case within a context of nineteenth-century spectatorship, visual culture and disciplinary discourses. Made for exhibition in the historic Montreal neighbourhood called Griffintown, the location where the events it depicts took place, Ghosts emplaces and embodies multi-perspectival views, encouraging mobile spectatorship and passive interaction. Audience members cannot alter the work directly but their experiences are dependent on their relative positions and angles of view. The anamorphic cinema literally re-presents partial perspective and situated knowledge, materializing theory into phenomenological practice.