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Profile picture by Darko Strajn

Activities

PhD candidate and junior lecturer in Media Studies, assigned to the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis [ASCA]'s Imagined Futures research project. Sharing iFut's concern with the critical analysis of media technologies and their functioning in society, the individual research addresses current developments within narrative cinema under the pressures of an ever-changing media landscape and rapid technological innovation. Other interests include literature, science fiction, electronic media arts, philosophy of technology, media archaeology, posthumanist theory, and questions of medium specificity. 

Imagined Futures project website

Supervisors

Prof. Dr. Thomas Elsaesser

Prof. Dr. Michael Wedel

Research outline

Project title: " Haunted by Mediation: Techno-ambivalence in Contemporary Cinema"

The period of 1997-2007 saw a proliferation of fiction films taking technological innovation and/or mediation as a direct or indirect subject through topics such as surveillance, memory distortion, artificial intelligence, biomedia, simulation, and code. These films – examples range from eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999) to Deja Vu (Tony Scott, 2006) – self-reflexively offer heterogeneous but coherent questions about technology and its representations: questions about perception, reality, and virtuality; about identity, knowledge, and belief; and ultimately, about the status of the human subject in contemporary and future Western societies. Many of the concerns symptomatically expressed in these films use technological reconfigurations such as digitization as tropes for rapid change and the unreliability, permeability, or volatility of information. Tracing these tropes throughout modernity reveals consistent patterns of technological anxiety and externalisation. By a combination of perspectives (spectatorship, pragmatism, psychoanalytical and cognitive film theories, media ecology/archaeology, posthumanist theory) this project aims to develop a method of analysis for such films, and for their constant oscillation between technophilia and technophobia. 

 Images: Off Screen [dir. Pieter Kuypers, NL 2005]

Online papers

"What Does a Scanner See? Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film". Conference paper: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberpunk and Science Fiction, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, July 1-3, 2008.

"The Trouble with Memory: Reco(r)ding the Mind in Code 46". Conference paper: Digital Memories, Salzburg, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, March 17-19, 2009.


Draft paper: "What Does a Scanner See?"

Draft paper: "The Trouble with Memory"