Embodying the Image in Motion : Tattooed Skin and Cinema Archaeology

The essay analyzes the tattoos of the Lombroso archive, looking for a possible ‘incarnated’ archaeology of the moving image. She explores the idea that the human skin may be considered a primordial cinemorph, one of the earliest optical toys that became fully operational in the mid–eighteenth century, as the result of cultural hybridization and at the same time in tune with the so–called ‘frenzy of the visible’. The minimal unity of movement represented by the skin has gained new visibility nowadays in the GIF phenomenon, while many artistic and popular forms experiment with the dynamization of incarnated images through a variety of projective devices, subcutaneous implants and other interactions between skin and screen that make the histories of these two media converge in one single point.