Caught Between Slides of Screen

by: Stacey Pitsilides & Ellen Sampson , March 24, 2026

In both scientific and digital spaces, women’s bodies are divided, distributed, and re-constructed, networked, and summoned into being…

Caught Between Slides of Screen explores how ideas drawn from posthuman feminisms and new materialism can disrupt practices which commercialise immortality, and through both algorithmic selection and the proliferation of the AI gaze, flatten the social category of woman. The move towards digital/bio genealogy practices owned by large corporations has created a convergence in which DNA and personal digital data are being positioned as tools for immortality. In turning our gaze towards these practices, in which science fiction and technology corporations meet to form speculative products and patents that market or promise immortality (4:43:19 VE[1]), this position piece explores how posthuman feminism can offer alternate, if speculative, forms of immortality.

In doing so, we consider an immortality predicated on distributed personhoods, the breakdown of individual identities and a communion between our biological-visual- linguistic-data identities with the technologies that encode them, as a symbiotic collective. We explore this through Bennett’s political ecologies, asking ‘what if we loosened the tie between participation and human language use, encountering the world as a swarm of vibrant materials entering and leaving agentic assemblages?… [this] theory of democracy seeks to transform the divide between speaking subjects and mute objects’ (Bennett 2010: 107-108). When looking through the lens of a technocratic society, we are as much a mute object as we are a speaking subject. In death, this balance tips further, but what if we could overwrite ourselves and merge into each other in ways where all our vibrant materials cannot be separated and have no origin to reanimate or immortalise?

Using this feminist framing, this essay film seeks to materialise or make visible ideas of the posthuman, distribution, digital dismemberment, and ongoingness in the context of dead women’s bodies. Through an editing process of cutting, splicing, blending, and reconfiguration, the film uses archive footage[2] alongside imagery parsed through AI generators[3] to mirror the ways these distributed bodies are caught between slides of the screen. Drawing on Hayles (2000), we hope that this filmic bricolage does not ‘weave [these] discussions into a seamless web, lest [we] make the posthuman appear more unified then it is … rather, the discussions … perform like hypertext lexias, inviting … significance out of ruptures, juxtapositions, and implied links’ exploring the threads/ veins of posthuman thinking which link these disparate digital and material things. In doing so, this research takes a practice-based approach, methodologically informed by Braidotti’s call for ‘careful cartographies of the different degrees and the extent to which any one of us can be said to be “human”’ (Braidotti 2016: 15).

Divided into five sections, Cellular Bodies, Flickering Signifiers, Slides of Screen, Summoned into Being and Expansion and Rupture, our abstracted cartography explores ideas of cellular and digital immortality, seeking to make visible the ways that in both scientific and digital spaces women’s bodies are divided, distributed and re-constructed, networked and summoned into being. How, through acts of googling, the use of their images in media and advertising and the medicalisation of their bodies, women are reduced into their constituent parts and through this ‘fetishistically dehumanised and “lured into the realm of dead things”’ (Woolley 2018: 94).

Cellular Bodies takes the story of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot 2010) whose unconsented cervical tissue was taken and used to create the first immortal cells^[4] (10:08 VE) as a starting point, to consider the ways that (dead) women’s bodies may not decay but continue to grow, haunting laboratories and digital spaces that trouble the categories of human and non- human. The HeLa immortalised cell line was grown from Henrietta Lacks’ cancerous cells, extracted and preserved by doctors at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital for biomedical research in the 50s in the US. The Lacks’ family received no information about Henrietta’s cells being used, as the use of black men and women’s bodies in scientific research without their consent was common at this time, during segregation in Baltimore. The removal of these cells (among other malpractices) placed a deep wariness of scientists, medical practitioners and research in Black communities, which extends to current lawsuits, for example, from the Lacks estate stating: ‘Black suffering has fuelled innumerable medical progress and profit, without just compensation or recognition’.⁵ Although this was a common practice at the time, with many people’s cells being taken, Henrietta’s cells were unique: they doubled in volume while other cultures died out, creating the immortal cell line HeLa.

Cellular Bodies focuses on how Lacks’ cells were bought and traded, patented, and grown more than ‘50 million metric tons’. HeLa has played a central role in breakthroughs such as the Polio Vaccine (1954), understanding the HIV epidemic (1980s), clinical trials to treat cancer, and even being sent to the moon. Later in the film, during Summoned into Being, Henrietta Lacks’ image is reanimated using MyHeritage’s^[5] (4:50:24 VE). Lofland (1978) described examples of ‘media dying’, when ordinary people’s stories become highly publicised after entering the dying role. However, for Henrietta Lacks, this post-death use of her image and story, her media immortality is enforced, unstoppable and often contested by other members of the Lacks estate. Though this image of Lacks has been used by countless media outlets to de-anonymise HeLa and reclaim these scientific discoveries in her name, this violent reanimation of the faded photograph, with its rough glitch, is ethically problematic—confronting the viewer with the violence of non-consensual reanimation.

Flickering Signifiers refers to N. Katherine Hayles’ (2000) exploration of the difference between print and digital, in which representations of the body shift from floating to flickering signifiers. They flicker due to their digital malleability and the speed of re-coding. Hayles also includes human biology within this frame, where pattern meets the random genetic mutations in the DNA code. In 2023 our layers of algorithmic AI, VR, AR and ubiquitous search push this concept even further, moving society from the realms of Lacanian presence/absence to notions of pattern/randomness ‘where pattern is essentially reality [and] presence an optical illusion’ and ‘as long as the pattern endures, one has attained a kind of immortality’ (Hayles 2000: 36).

As we live our lives increasingly online, the instances of these phenomena have only intensified. The news is littered with such stories; an artist finding her private medical record photos in a popular AI training data set, or, in the case of Facebook, AI being employed to recognise the dead (Ortutay 2019). Equally, popular culture is filled with cautionary tales[6] of digital and embodied reanimation, which blend the transformation of datasets and/or biological material into alternative bodies that play into male/patriarchal fantasies of a malleable, docile yet interactive female body. In this context Slides of Screen considers the nature of media and how women’s bodies are dissected and placed within, while Summoned into Being is concerned with capitalism and consent, from the historic role of mediums in summoning the dead to Microsoft’s patent for AI resurrection, Alexa using the voices of the dead to speak through disembodiment to resurrection holograms that can be scripted to make the dead speak in ways that enforce the desires of the living. See, for example, Na-yeon, who died at age 7 and was reanimated through 3-D scanning, VR and haptic technologies.^[7] Resonant with Hoffmann’s Olympia these digital spectres sit in between the human and the non-human creating a kind of digital unheimlich, where ‘the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolises’ (Freud 1955: 244).

Finally, Expansion and Rupture examines points of resistance and subversion to identity- based immortality. It asks what a feminist gaze on immortality would be when seen from the cellular to the digital? What would happen if, instead of harvesting data in search of an elusive, commoditised individual immortality, we built one predicated on dividuals and distributed personhoods (Strathern 1988)? The mingling of pattern with randomness, visual-linguistic with genetic-encoded, creating a swarm of digital afterlives that build until they rupture—turning into rapture. Might harmonising with this flow of assemblages, fend off impersonation, re-scripting and fetishised reconstruction, and in doing so, create a rift in the colonisation of our immortal future bodies? So that although we cannot take back control of our posthumous identities, we can willingly dissolve them so they mingle, seep and flow.

This film presents the start of an ongoing conversation and collaboration that explores how speculative post-humanist feminisms can act as a counterpoint to the commodification of women’s bodies, both within and beyond the digital sphere. The film, developed for this special issue of MAI, will now move beyond the digital, reconstructed as an installation in which images from the film, developed through generative AI (see LIST, 7:16:10 VE), are made into material, crafted things with which the viewer can interact. By taking these images beyond the digital and into the material world, the installation will play with and subvert how imagery and bodies are absorbed into digital afterlives/posthuman existences without our consent. Asking the viewer to appropriate and take back elements of the collective digital and make them their own.

Notes

[1] References which include VE are aligned to time codes in the video essay.

[2] Gathered from Internet Archive, the Wellcome Trust, NASA’s Scientific Visualisation Studio, The MET and many more.

[3] Including Lynn Randolph’s iconic ‘Cyborg’ painting, which is the cover of Donna Haraway’s book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

[4] Immortalised cell lines are either tumorous cells that do not stop dividing or cells that have been artificially manipulated to proliferate indefinitely. Because immortal cells continue to divide and are genetically identical, they can be analysed repeatedly and have been widely used in scientific research.

[5] A tool that animates the faces of subjects in old family photographs, targeted at consumers who wish to collect their genealogy and heritage. Other tools include an AI Time machine and DeepStoryTM, which offers to ‘make your family photos speak.’

[6] See, for example, Black Mirror: Be Right Back (2013), Ex Machina (2014), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) or Upload (2020)

[7] VR Na-yeon participated in the documentary ‘Meeting You’ by the Korean broadcaster MBC (2020), which was viewed worldwide. A child actor of the same age was used to form Na-yeon’s avatar, and in this amalgamation of technology and mediatisation, the grieving mother was able to perform herself: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2020/02/16/industry/INTERVIEW-The-controversial- reality-of-bringing-back-a-loved-one/3073877.html (accessed 31 July 2023)

Trigger Warning 

This film flashes that may cause discomfort or trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy.