Bewegungsbilder 2.0: Videoaktivismus zwischen Social Media und Social Movements (2016-2018), in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Jens Eder and Prof. Dr. Britta Hartmann, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
Eyewitness and expose videos, online documentaries and campaign films - the research project is dedicated to the new political video activism in Web 2.0 between online and offline publics, social media and social movements. The aim is to systematically review the spectrum of forms and practices of activist net videos and to develop a typology of their aesthetic and rhetorical practices as well as their media and sociocultural environments.
The accompanying book by Jens Eder, Britta Hartmann and Chris Tedjasukmana is available from Bertz + Fischer: Bewegungsbilder
Perspektivische Übergänge in Experimentalfilm und Postkinematografie (2009–2014), in cooperation with Dr. Lisa Åkervall, Subproject in Collaborative Research Center 626: Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste, Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
The project investigates perspective as a core element of cinematic articulations at individual film-historical points in time - from early cinema to art installations - and from concrete aesthetic configurations - from experimental film to entertainment cinema. The dual focus is on questions of the cinema dispositif and alternative playback spaces such as museums on the one hand, and digital recording and projection techniques on the other.
The starting point is the idea that the cinematic moving image, montage, and variable audience positioning initiate spatial dynamics that challenge the problem of perspective vis-à-vis other arts. With a view to post-cinema, the question is which new forms of spatial and narrative perspectivization accompany digital production and projection techniques.
Mechanische Verlebendigung: Ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino (2006–2012), dissertation project at Internationales Graduiertenkolleg InterArt, Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
The project reconstructs the modern topos of liveness and develops from it a theory of aesthetic experience in cinema. This experience is conceived as a mechanical vivification of history in the image - a process that takes place between film apparatus and spectator bodies. Using selected films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Hito Steyerl, Todd Haynes, and others, Mechanische Verlebendigung outlines cinema as an aesthetic and everyday form of life. The book combines vitalist and phenomenological philosophies (e.g. Bergson, Merleau-Ponty) with critical theories of history (Foucault, Benjamin, Kracauer, etc.).