Author Description

"All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film is a narrative assemblage of prose and image. At once personal, historical and theoretical, the book continues the authors' inquiry into the curious presence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science. The word 'monster', comes from the Latin 'monstrare', meaning 'to show', 'to demonstrate', 'to reveal'. Picking up on this etymology, the authors explore monsters as prisms for modes of seeing and deciphering the natural world. When treated as a perceptual apparatus, the monster also becomes a means of probing the medium of film and its relationship to indexicality, chance, corporeality, and metamorphosis. This book extends a multimedia project the authors began with their film A Demonstration (2020). The film's underlying modular formal structure is here reconfigured and brought into new relations specific to the book as a medium"--Page 4 of cover