This work is part of a broader project that includes a workshop and theater piece (The Night of January 16th / A Legal Fiction) constructed around an infamous courtroom episode in the development of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood in the United States in the nineteenth century, and a lecture (available here) presenting the photographic panoramas of San Francisco executed by Eadweard Muybridge between 1877 and 1878 as genetic material in both the legal doctrine of corporate personality and the Google Maps platform.
Here Muybridge’s final 1878 panorama is projected as a large animation behind a table upon which a lecturer of corporate archives and history is presenting some of the possible uses, today, for a corporate history department as an extension of the public relations department. The use of one of Muybridge’s panoramas by the financial services corporation, Wells Fargo, is held up as an example by the lecturer of the various ways in which the past can be "put to work" by the corporation. Meanwhile, just opposite his presentation, a series of details concerning the context in which Muybridge’s panoramas were taken are presented. These are details which must be ignored if one is to follow the lecturer’s advice.
2017