Abstract

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.

W.J.T. Mitchell

Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, IL, USA. 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.

Read more about the speaker and his research:
http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell

Participation

The seminar is open to all and registration to the event is not necessary. Refreshments will be served after the lecture.

Organisers

• The Aesthetics Seminar Series
  Jacob Lund, jacoblund@dac.au.dk
  Department of Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University
• Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies