THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE draws connections between zoological research related to the extinct ‘Irish Elk’, parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive’s EVP tape recordings and tactics of media preservation as explained by an archivist. Analogies are drawn between extinct deer and dying media formats which come head to head in a choreographed, exuberant species-resurrection scene.

The Flesh of Language is a research film which examines an expanded notion of archive in the age of ecological precarity. The work draws connections between three disparate subjects and looks at parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive’s 1960s investigation of anomalous voice-like sounds found on tape recordings, thought to be spirit messages and also known as electronic voice phenomena. The second is a 1985 experiment by zoologist Andrew Kitchener aimed at providing an anatomical explanation as to whether the extinct Irish Elk, Megaloceros Giganteus, used its antlers in battle, a critical question in evolutionary biology. The third involves inputs on the practicalities of media conservation. The film uses alternative forms of knowledge, such as the choreographic, to establish crossovers between human and nonhuman bodies. It investigates an expanded notion of the archive focused on material (de)composition through themes of extinction, preservation and resurrection.