Flesh/Flash

P. Staff shares their current work in Flesh/Flash: Scanning as Moving Image, a brief screening and open conversation at the culmination of their EMPAC residency. The artist’s research is exploring the act of scanning—as an image practice, as a mechanism of power and surveillance, and as a monitoring of bodily states.

Scanning’s capacity to produce moving images without standard film techniques is tied to its ability to orchestrate the body politic—probing the insides of things, organic as well as social. But what sort of data does this generate, really?

What is the spatial awareness that emerges from externalizing insides of various kinds, and how do imaging tools suggestive of clinical assessments generate something playful, or sinister? P. Staff explores how scanning opens us up, reflecting on the nature of carceral, disciplinary systems at work in them—but also on their potential for productive disorientation, as they pull us away from the body’s surface and open towards a queer, non-normative subjectivity.

This program features recent short films by the artist and provides a window into their current work. At EMPAC, Staff is deploying thermal cameras, Lidar, and audio techniques that register figures through non-imagistic footprints.

In conversation with project curator Katherine C. M. Adams, Staff considers how the scan forges a different sort of political aesthetics than the traditional passage of light through a filmic aperture. Their conversation is framed by a brief presentation of films and an attempt at a discursive performance of scanning the scan—exploring the stakes of taking a sensory X-ray of a locale’s subjects, and offering annotations of the techniques in Staff’s past and present work.

Featured Works

• La Nuit Américaine (2023)
• HEVN (2021)
• On Venus (2019)
• Weed Killer (2017)