Jonathan Beller hat eine vielbeachtete Studie zur kritischen Analyse des digitalen und globalen Kapitalismus vorgelegt, die auch dessen racialization in den Blick nimmt. Beller hat neue Begriffe wie „Weltcomputer” und „Foto-Kapital” geprägt, die derzeit kontrovers diskutiert werden. Wir lesen und diskutieren das Buch.

Das Kolloquium bietet den Teilnehmer:innen die Möglichkeit, Themen und Fragestellungen für die Master-Abschlussarbeit zu entwickeln, bereits laufende Arbeiten vorzustellen und zu diskutieren. Vermittelt wird, wie man ein Thema findet und eingrenzt, eine präzise Fragestellung formuliert, den theoretischen Rahmen absteckt, die Vorgehensweise und die Untersuchungsmethode(n) festlegt, wie man recherchiert, den Stoff gliedert, eine Argumentation aufbaut, Quellen sinnvoll nutzt, Thesen entwickelt und dabei zwischen Theorie, Beschreibung und Analyse vermittelt. Die Techniken wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens werden aufgefrischt und das Schreiben und Redigieren an eigenen und fremden Texten geübt. Die Übung wendet sich an Master-Studierende in der Abschlussphase, ist aber geöffnet für weitere Interessenten, die an Ideen, Konzepten und Texten feilen wollen.

Computerspiele sind populäre und komplexe Medienphänomene. Sie können auf vielen Ebenen beschrieben und analysiert werden. Wir diskutieren diese Ebenen entlang der Gliederung, die eine bekannte Einführung in die Game Studies vorschlägt.

We are going through an exciting time in television: in today’s TV series, representations of women are more diverse, deep, and complex than ever. Not only is the typology of female characters expanding, the expectations associated with stereotypes such as the housewife, romantic partner, the working woman/girl or the “bad girl” are increasingly explored, questioned, and contested. Yet, those stereotypes remain alive and well. This seminar will examine the production, reproduction, and redefinition of gender expectations in popular TV series, with a focus on shows widely available on Netflix, such as (but not limited to) Self Made, Mad Men, Glow, Gilmore Girls, or Sex Education. The goal is to develop a sensibility for the ways in which representations of gender types and stereotypes in popular culture shape the imagination of female possibilities, as well as the expectations toward women and girls in neoliberal societies. What types of women, parents, partners, workers, criminals, investigators, politicians, and students does television represent? Who is left out? How are viewers affected by these representations? How far do “feminist” TV shows really go in deconstructing or challenging normative expectations of women in neoliberal societies? And can the audience have an impact on the diversity represented on streaming platforms? With the help of theoretical texts and discussions, students will (1) familiarize themselves with feminist approaches to media theory and television studies and (2) train to critically understand, analyze, and discuss established notions of race, gender, and class as represented in selected TV shows.

The recent history and developments of video and digital media arts have been marked by a series of so-called turns. While the beginning of the 21st century witnessed a ”documentary turn,” the second decade gave rise to a ”temporal turn.” More recently, an environmental turn seems to have taken hold of contemporary art, including video and digital media arts. This seminar will explore these artistic and discursive waves and engage with the theories that inform them with the objective of understanding how the mediality of art illuminate our cultural and historical present. Thematically structured, the seminar will address, in particular, the following topics: human-nonhuman interrelation; the aesthetic of the sublime; archive and the temporal turn; documentary art; participation; surveillance; artificial intelligence; ecology, and more. 

The main goals of the seminar are 

to map the main themes and turns relevant to contemporary video and digital media arts in the 21stcentury,
to situate relevant concepts and themes within larger discussions in the humanities, and
to reflect critically on subject areas in the field of video and digital media arts. 
Mandatory weekly readings will serve as the basis for discussions. Students are expected to come prepared for exploring, questioning, and analyzing together the relation between texts, images, and artworks.

There is no denying that in the digital age our lives are increasingly mediated by images. From print to social media, from billboards to online advertisements, from smart home to virtual interfaces, visual media saturate both our online and offline existences with images. Visual culture, however, ”is not simply the total amount of what has been made to be seen” (Mirzoeff, 2016:10); rather, it is an assemblage between what is visible and what is invisible. Visual culture is both socially determined and politically contested; marketed and debated; subjected to norms and productive of resistances. While exploring a wide range of visual media, including painting, photography, advertising, online videos and film, the seminar will focus on the production and reception of visual culture in the late modern and contemporary society. The first half of the seminar will examine the production of visuality through visual media and techniques (as diverse as photojournalism, selfies, and painting), while the second half will be concerned with the ”construction of visuality as a social field” (Mitchell, 1995:211). Key themes and concepts we will address in the course include:

Mechanical and digital reproduction of images
Self-representation, from portraits to selfies
The (art) history of vision
Image Icons
Spectatorship and the gaze
Critique of Mass Culture
Image and power
Intolerable/unwatchable images
The main goals of the seminar are

to gain an understanding of visual culture as both an object and a field of study in its own right,
to develop a critical perspective toward the visual culture of the late modern and contemporary society, and
to sharpen the vocabulary and analytical tools to discuss and analyze images.
There will be mandatory weekly readings including seminal theoretical texts from the fields of philosophy, media theory and art history, as well as excerpts from introductions and readers of visual culture. Videos and visual content will also be discussed and analyzed in class. 

Komplexe Systeme begegnen uns überall im Alltag – eine chaotische Straßenkreuzung mit Autos, Fahrrädern und Fußgängern; ein Vogelschwarm, ein Gemeinschaftsgarten, politische Verhandlungen über ein neues Gesetz, ein Produktionsnetzwerk mit verschiedenen Firmen verteilt über verschiedene Länder… all das sind Beispiele von Systemen mit vielen individuellen Akteuren die miteinander und mit der Umwelt interagieren und sich gegenseitig beeinflussen. Auf den ersten Blick erscheinen diese Systeme chaotisch und es ist nicht unbedingt ersichtlich, wie sie funktionieren, denn, wie schon Aristoteles sagte: „Das Ganze ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile“. Zeitverzögertes Verhalten, Feedbackschleifen und eingeschränktes Wissen der Individuen sind nur ein paar der Merkmale, die diese komplexen adaptiven Systeme gemein haben und die eine Analyse der Funktionsweise erschweren. Agentenbasierte Modellierung (agent-based modelling - ABM) ist eine Methode mit der solche Systeme simuliert und ihr Verhalten studiert werden können. In dem Seminar werden wir uns damit beschäftigen, was komplexe adaptive Systeme und emergentes Verhalten sind und welchen Beitrag Computersimulationen in ihrer Erforschung leisten können. Wir werden uns verschiedene kleine Modelle anschauen, erste Erfahrungen im Programmieren mit Netlogo sammeln und eine eigene kleine Simulation selbst programmieren. Netlogo ist eine open-source Software, die einen einfachen Einstieg in die Erstellung von agentenbasierten Systemen ermöglicht. Für das Seminar sind keine Programmier-Vorkenntnisse nötig.

In 2000, Paul J. Crutzen, recipient of the Nobel prize for chemistry and the biologist Eugene Stoermer have published ”The ”Anthropocene,” an article now famous for its theorization and dissemination of the notion of the same name. The term designates the current geological epoch, one in which human activities have taken a central role in geology and ecology. The success of the notion is both a symptom of a nonhuman Turn in the humanities and a driving force behind it: in media studies, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies or art history, the acknowledgment of the human impact on the planetary equilibrium has ignited an interest for nonhuman perspectives, spurring research into the agency of nonhumans, such as elements, trees, insects, mushrooms or ice. But what exactly are ”nonhuman media” (Peters)? What does an expression such as ”nonhuman cinema” refer to (Stine)? How can we attune to the semiotics of forests (Kohn)? In familiarizing ourselves with theories of nonhuman agency, we begin to grasp a cultural shift in the way Western societies, in particular, perceive and understand the world under the unprecedented pressure of global warming. In this seminar, we will examine the impact that the nonhuman Turn has had and can still have in the way we define and understand both media and mediality more broadly. To do so, we will read theoretical texts, discuss the important concepts that this Turn has inspired, and watch films and video artworks that echo and manifest them.