Ute Holl, Cinema, Trace and Cybernetics, trans. D. Hendrickson (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 23.
Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of California Press, 1994), 91.
Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (1965; Fordham University Press, 2008), 140.
Findlen, Possessing Nature, 394.
Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Duke University Press, 2017), 4.
Quoted in Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (Zone Books, 1998), 181.
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 182.
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 187.
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 350.
Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 134–36.
Findlen, Possessing Nature, 237.
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 51.
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 51.
Fabrizio Bigotti, “Sanctorio Sanctorius,” in Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2020).
Quoted in Findlen, Possessing Nature, 64.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; Routledge, 2005), 20, 22, 33.
Oswald Crollius, Traité des signatures 1609, quoted in Foucault, Order of Things, 31.
Walter Benjamin famously referred to filmmakers as surgeons in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood (1936; Penguin, 2008), 25.
The authors would like to thank Elvia Wilk, Daniel Mann, and Matthew Vollgraff for their close and thoughtful reading of the text and their invaluable comments that helped us find its current form. This essay is part of a body of research published in the forthcoming book All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (Sonic Acts Press).