Aesthetic
Seminar
Fall 2015
All talks held 14.15 at Kasernen, Aarhus University,
Langelandsgade 139, Aarhus C, Building 1584, Room 124,
unless otherwise stated
Organized by Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen & Mads Anders Baggesgaard
on behalf of
The research programme Mediality, Materiality, Aesthetic meaning,
The PhD programme Art, Literature and Cultural Studies
The research unit Film Culture
Fællesæstetisk Forskergruppe, Aarhus University
17.09.2015
Lúcia Nagib: From Non-Cinema to Total Cinema: Film Beyond the Medium
Philosophy has repeatedly denied cinema in order to grant it artistic status. Adorno, for example, defined an
‘uncinematic’ element, equivalent to an emptiness of time ‘which constitutes its artistic character’. Similarly,
Lyotard has defended an ‘acinema’, which accepts what is ‘fortuitous, dirty, confused, unclear, poorly
framed, overexposed’. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou goes down the same line, by describing
cinema as an ‘impure circulation’ that subtracts the image from itself whilst incorporating ‘arts that are
wrested from their proper destination’. In this he resonates entirely with Bazin and his defence of ‘impure
cinema’. But Bazin is also the thinker of the ‘myth of total cinema’; i. e. the impossible human dream of
obtaining a complete illusion of reality. This talk will investigate the impurities of cinema that endow it, on
the one hand, with artistic value, and, on the other, with the reality of life. I will focus on the radical political
experiment of This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi), whose existence depends on its impossibility, going on to
address the recourse to theatre and painting in Delicate Crime (Beto Brant) - and I will include the return of
the myth of total cinema in contemporary production of landscape films. The latter form of an immersive
cinema requires large screens and dark rooms, in opposition to the short films made for the mini-screens of
mobile phones. Threatened by exploitative colonialism, property expansion or merely natural erosion, these
landscapes have become the last bastion of an art cinema whose ambition is to become, in Bazin’s words,
‘complete realism’.
24.09.2015
At AIAS Auditorium, Building 1632, Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B, 8000 Aarhus C
W.J.T. Mitchell: Screening Nature (and the Nature of the Screen)
As the title suggests, screening nature is not confined to contemporary screen cultures or screen
technologies, but offers a larger panorama of screen practices that go back to pre-modern cultures, and
perhaps even into the animal kingdom. My idea is to place the contemporary emphasis on an “archaeology
of the screen” (following Foucault) within the framework of a “paleontology of the screen,” one that tries to
establish a fundamental ontology of the screen alongside some elementary concepts for describing and
understanding the variety of screen practices.
29.10.2015
Patricia Pisters: The Filmmaker as Metallurgist: The Aesthetics of Radical Contingency
Contemporary film, television series and visual arts have a particular temporal and narrative aesthetics that
show how the future, always speculative and multiple, has become the dominant time for thinking. I propose
to call this aesthetic mode of the digital age ‘the neuro-image’. Following Gilles Deleuze’s movementimages and time-images, neuro-images increasingly present us time as multiple feedback loops from possible
futures, parallel worlds and complex narrations where subtle differences can cause a world of (micropolitical) variations, different pasts for different futures. This lecture will look at the ways in which contemporary
artists and filmmakers are committed to the radical contingency of the audio-visual archive, and reveal hidden dimensions of history and/in our collective audio-visual archive to revive new perspectives and reveal
new versions of the past that seem necessary for the future of ‘a people to come.’ Filmmakers become ‘metallurgists’ following the matter-flows in the archive, bending it in concrete forms that can escape from the
mnemonic depths and get a new life, an afterlife. Politics and cinema aesthetics as a never ending story of
‘trying again, failing again, failing better’ with a radical commitment to the contingencies of history. This
lecture is part of a work in progress on metallurgy, media and minds that I have started recently and hope to
develop in the next two years.
12.11.2015
Janet Harbord: Did cinema create the individual? An archaeological approach
In recent philosophical accounts, the term ‘posthuman’ has been used to speculatively re-imagine the human
from a vantage that embraces partiality, de-centredness and hybridity. But does the critique of the human
also embrace a critique of the individual? This paper explores how the idea of the individual as an ontological category was profoundly consolidated by early photography, medical imaging and latterly, cinema. At the
turn of the twentieth century, it is argued, the individual was being anchored in an enigmatic interiority, an
inside that was at once opaque and impermeable. Cinema, it is suggested, became ostensibly a tool for the
illumination of human interiority, and in the process, an apparatus that manufactured the individual as a
discrete unit. This presentation draws on the archaeological method of Giorgio Agamben and his critique of
the human-animal in The Open, bringing this into dialogue with media archaeologists Siegfried Zielinski and
Jussi Parikka, and critical theorist Jodi Dean.
19.11.2015
19:00-22:00 at Kunsthal Aarhus, J. M. Mørks Gade 13, Aarhus, with a screening of Convoy
Jacob Lillemose: Friheden som evig horisont. Drømme og vold i amerikansk filmkultur
Frihedsforestillinger ligger dybt i den amerikanske ånd. Fra løsrivelsen fra det britiske imperie og nybyggernes rejse vestover har det at være fri til at leve sit eget liv været det evige mål for millioner og atter millioner
af mennesker i “the land of the free”. Men forestillingen om friheden står ikke altid mål med realiteterne og
historien om det frihedsdyrkende amerikanske folk er også historien om kampen for friheden. Med udgangspunkt i filmen Convoy vil dette foredrag se på denne kamp i forhold til den omfattende trucker- og bil-genre
som opstår i 1960ernes film, men også trække forbinelser tilbage til Walt Whitman, Thoreau og cowboykulturen og frem til the UNA-bomber og survivalism.
03.12.2015
Andrew Murphie: Framing degree zero: virtual realities and the world as medium
Chris Milk’s interactive music video clips and virtual reality works aim “to tell stories in different ways”.
For Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” (2010), he used html5, Google Streetview and Google Maps
to produce an experience across multiple browser windows. This moved some people to tears. Indeed, Milk
wants to create the “ultimate empathy machine”. In Clouds Over Sidra (2015), made with the United Nations, he made a virtual reality work in a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, attempting to use what is often seen
as a cold medium to invoke compassion. Milk’s technical passion is for getting beyond the constraints of
what he calls “the rectangle” of film—“I don’t want you in the frame. I don’t want you in the window. I want
you through the window, on the other side, in the world, inhabiting the world”. Milk’s work is exemplary of
the contemporary condition of the relation between images and world. Departing from Milk and others’ work
with images, I will discuss: the new multiplicity of the frame/screen, along with their disappearance in a kind
of frame/screen degree zero; the breakdown of the divide between world and medium—the world itself as
medium (Whitehead); and new relations between world and image, and new modulations of experience.
How might given media (such as film) and concepts of mediation (such as, for example, the "cinematic apparatus") fold back into what I will suggest is the ontological multiplicity of the world as medium.
Janet Harbord
Professor of Film at Queen Mary, University of London. Her work spans the disciplines of film studies, philosophy, anthropology and fine art in an attempt to understand the materiality of visual culture as it moves through cycles of the new, the redundant and the re-purposed. She has written about the changing nature of moving images
in a digital age in The Evolution of Film (2007), a study of Chris Marker’s La Jetée
(2009), has co-edited a Phaidon Monograph of the artist Simon Starling (2012), and
has recently finished a book about Giorgio Agamben and film archaeology, entitled Excentric Cinema (2015).
Jacob Lillemose
Ph.d. Leder og kurator på projektet X AND BEYOND, som tematiserer det nutidige
katastrofesamfund. Har sammen med Karsten Wind Meyhoff skrevet en række artikler
om amerikansk genrefilm i 1970erne og seneste udgivet bogen En engel af sten. Charles Bronsons vision på forlaget Space Poetry.
W.J.T Mitchell
Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the
University of Chicago. Editor of Critical Inquiry since 1978. Author of a long list of
books on visual culture, recent titles include Critical Terms in Media Studies (2010;
with Mark Hansen), Seeing Through Race (2012), and his collaborative book, Occupy:
Three Essays in Disobedience, co-authored with Michael Taussig and Bernard Harcourt (2013). His newest book is Image Science: Iconology, Media Aesthetics, and
Visual Culture, forthcoming in 2015. He is currently working on a book entitled Seeing
Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture.
Andrew Murphie
Associate Professor at UNSW in Sydney. Founding editor of the Fibreculture Journal,
and the Fibreculture Book Series (most recent publication is Digital Light). His own
research is on: differential intensity in media and communications; digital and networked media; and generative process in media arts and philosophy. Recent publications
include ‘Hacking the aesthetic: David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s new ecologies of
signal’, 'Convolving Signal: Thinking the Performance of Computational Processes'
and 'Making sense: the transformation of documentary by digital and networked media’.
Lúcia Nagib
Professor of Film and Director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures at the
University of Reading. Her research covers polycentric approaches to world cinema,
new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. Recent publications include World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema
Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007), and the edited volumes Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013) and Theorizing
World Cinema (with Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, 2011).
Patricia Pisters
Professor of film studies at the department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media
Studies. She is programme director of the research group Neuraesthetics and Neurocultures and co-director (with Josef Fruchtl) of the research group Film and Philosophy at
ASCA (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis). Publications include The Matrix of
Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press,
2003). Her latest book is The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital
Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012). See also: www.patriciapisters.com