In my current media-theoretical project I study the continuation of literary formats and theoretical problematizations with visual means in the film and text works of Harun Farocki, Laura Mulvey/Peter Wollen, Trinh Minh-ha, Hito Steyerl, Philipp Scheffner, and others. Up to now, these filmmakers have primarily been perceived as artists, which ignores their extensive textual work with and on literary and theoretical texts. The project attempts to identify systematically the text-based practices of reading and writing in their visual works, and their transposition into media specific procedures of inquiry, which have remained largely implicit in their globally received films. Through this…

How are the years 1938–45 represented in fiction from the immediate postwar era? Was it even possible to tell a “true” war story in German, when catastrophic nationalism had tainted the very fundamentals of the language? This presentation looks to Austrian writers who retooled the Zeitroman, a socially and politically engaged genre, by destabilizing the boundaries between historical documentary, fiction, and autobiography. At a time when literary representation was little match for lived experience, largely neglected female authors—including Ilse Aichinger, Marie Frischauf-Pappenheim, and Mela Hartwig—refused silence and escapism, instead bearing witness to the ruinous bequest of World War II. In…

For as long as the concept of utopia has existed, it has been a site of contradiction: both a good place and a non-place, a call to action and an escapist fantasy, the promise of liberation and the threat of totalitarianism. Within the history of socialism, the utopian concern with gender and sexuality is typically construed as a premature phase surpassed by the science of Marxism. This talk draws out the utopian currents that persisted alongside scientific socialism, arguing that utopianism has provided the means for thinking queerness and revolution together since the nineteenth century. Building on the renewed interest…

This talk examines the concept of perfection against the backdrop of today’s digital mediascape, where the latest screen technologies promise sharp, pristine images with lossless compression. While, in Hito Steyerl’s account, the circulation of “poor” or “imperfect” images can disrupt hegemonic media logics, I demonstrate that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in German modernity. Intervening in contemporary debates about “rich” and “poor” images, and “high” and “low” definition, my lecture offers a differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a limit concept in German film and media theory. I argue that moving images…

The talk focuses on Christoph Schlingensief’s 2000 performance Bitte liebt Österreich/Ausländer raus! (Please Love Austria/Foreigners Out!) – a six-day event with complex mediatic structure designed as a political critique against the Freedom Party of Austria’s inclusion into the Austrian government (marking the first time since World War II that a far-right anti-immigration party had been incorporated into a European governing coalition). Schlingensief’s artistic intervention consisted of erecting a container camp in Vienna’s Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz for six days, housing twelve asylum seekers. Ausländer raus! was staged as a game show based on the Big Brother television format, inviting the Austrian public to…

The relationship between text and image has been a longstanding concern of aesthetic theory. On the one hand, it has invited strong formalist calls for their separation as entirely distinct media whose aesthetic integrity requires that they be kept separate; on the other hand, such dreams of purity have been rebuked as misguided because “there are no visual media” (W.J.T. Mitchell). This talk proposes that state-of-the-art instances of “multimodal AI” both complicate the relationship between text and image and help us to rethink it. Multimodal AI – particularly text-to-image machine learning systems like Dall-E 2 or Stable Diffusion – collapses…