Direction, Editing and Photography by Thomas Martius
Camera by Thomas Martius and Florian Thamer
Copyright: Freie Universität Berlin, 2015

Stephen Barber, has published many books on urban cultures in relation to performance, film, photography and digital art; his most recent book (2012) is on the personal archive of the moving-image pioneer Eadweard Muybridge.
The London Times called Barber’s books ‘brilliant, profound and provocative,’ and The Independent described him as a ‘writer of real distinction.’ The short video by Thomas Martius documents the work of Stephen Barber as a Fellow at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” It provides insight into his extensive primary research into Muybridge’s personal archive. With the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Barber raises questions that reconceptualize the dynamics of corporeal and urban forms. His focus is on the conjunction of performance and film within exterior spaces, the origins of cinema, and its early prefiguring of the digital world. Thomas Martius’s short video is a dense insight into this researcher’s practice as well as an artistic reflection on the contemporary visual culture itself.