Materialities of Measure

In our talk, we expand on the research behind our new film Constant (2022), which came out of our question: what happened when measurement standards shifted away from the human body as the measure of all things and became a science unto itself: metrology. We explore three moments in the history of measurement standardization: Early Modern land surveying, the Metric Revolution, and contemporary Big Science. Each of these periods reconfigured measurement standards through shifts in conceptions of materiality: from land and body to the planetary, to the physical constitution of matter. In each of these configurations, measurement mediates concepts of egalitarianism, justice, and the ever-shifting threshold between the human body and the world. In the talk, we will address these themes through the prism of the film and the processes that led to its production.