The Making of Incarnation: Tom McCarthy

Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where`s our fucking airplane? What`s inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it?

Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers` movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. Did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a `perfect` movement, one that would `change everything`?

An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan across geo-political fault lines and experimental zones: places where the frontiers of potential - to cure, kill, understand or entertain - are constantly tested and refined. And all the while, work is underway on the blockbuster film Incarnation, an epic space tragedy.

Audacious and mesmeric, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual-motion machine. Tom McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying historical and symbolic structures of human experience.