Art Hx Speaker Series

Pulse and Projection: Visio Cordis in Practice

A film screening and conversation with artist Sophie Hamacher

Tuttle Lecture Hall, Princeton University Art Museum, April 10 4.30-6 pm

What does it mean to see the heart?

In medical imaging, the heart — at once tangible organ and enduring metaphor — becomes data, compressed into signal and rendered into image readable only by expert eyes.

The short film Visio Cordis takes this transformation as both subject and method, asking what is lost or obscured when intimate biological experience passes through the lens of technology, and what a poetic intervention reveals about who sees, who feels, and how.

This keynote presentation will include a screening of the 20-minute experimental film followed by an artist's talk and Q&A.

Register here.

Sophie Hamacher is an artist, teacher, and curator whose multidisciplinary work spans film, video, printmaking, and text. She investigates media histories, surveillance, and medical imaging through a range of forms, often drawing on archival material to examine how media shape memory, perception, and both personal and collective histories. Her work moves between independent studio practice and collaborative projects with artists, scientists, and scholars. Her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in October, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Scapegoat. She completed the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in Critical Studies (2005). With Jessica Hankey, she is editor of Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance (MIT Press, 2023) a wide-ranging anthology of art and writing exploring how surveillance impacts contemporary motherhood. Currently, she teaches at the Maine College of Art & Design in Portland, Maine and runs a micro-cinema in an old barn under the name Flying Point Projects.