The Porous Body

The Porous Body is the first iteration of a larger moving image project about female mediums in the late 19th and early 20th century.

This first film focuses on materialising mediums (ie those that summoned physical materials, voices and objects to the seance room) and their brush with science. It's a tangled story of faith and rationality, the limited power that women held in a highly patriarchal society, and the obsession of the Victorians with pushing at the frontiers of scientific discovery.