This video essay offers a new and important way of looking at the intersection of technology and aesthetics. By charting the early history of image stabilization (of both Steadicam and the lesser-known Panaglide) author Katie Bird reveals how the traces of labor in early test videos make the embedded practices of looking and feeling, which soon became industry norms, more visible to us as modes of perception.

The essay is structured as a series of experiments, in which Bird poses hypothetical questions about the use of image stabilization in different contexts, and which she effectively uses different audiovisual techniques to explore. For example, she uses split screen to reveal similarities in camera choreography between a Steadicam test video and the opening shot of After Hours; she also uses this technique to show how the mechanical differences between the wheelchair shots and the walking shots in The Shining reveal affective differences between the two. More experimentally, she uses superimposition and manipulation of duration to compare the original analog version of Halloween to the digitally restored version, questioning if the restoration changes our perceptual experience. And in Days of Heaven, she slows down and loops shots, layering their opacities to create theoretical multi-takes that suggest how slight variations of camera choreography might alter our perception as well.

In this regard she makes good use of the audiovisual form to pose new kinds of scholarly questions- questions that exist in the intersection of technology, film theory, and craft practice, and that exceed the limitations of the written essay. Rather than draw a conclusive argument, Bird asks us to engage with her hypotheses through our own perceptual experience of the images she presents. This approach helps us delve more deeply into the questions she poses. It made me personally think about the embodied camera as a vehicle of both psychological and physiological perception, and the fine line that currently exists- in our 24-7 hyper-mediated world- between our own perception of the world and the camera’s. By tracing an industrial history that places the origins of image stabilization technology in the bodies of the operators themselves, thinking and playing with how to move through the world, Bird’s essay gives us a framework with which to think about the ways in which our own perceptions of the world are inevitably influenced by those of the embodied moving camera.