Kathrin Fahlenbrach

Overcoming the Digital With the Analogue. Transmedial Image Interference as Post-digital Stereotype

Starting with the observation of a difference between analog and digital visual cultures, this paper will analyze aesthetic strategies and codes of authentication of digital images through the simulation of analog image interference. Its focus will lie on transmedia strategies and codes that, in an age of media convergence, wander through photography, cinema, television, internet and other media, materializing and validating the unspecific digital images with the simulation of analog corporality. Analog aesthetics of interference have since long congealed into transmedia stereotypes the authenticating gesture of which is rapidly losing its efficacy in the post-digital age. The more they become part of a common visual practice of ‘digital natives’, the less they are connected to the mechanics and materiality of analogue image media. Instead they solidify as image effects without any reference to analog visuality, although, these effects still may be attributed new post-digital meanings in the future.

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CV  Kathrin Fahlenbrach studied German, Theater, Romance and Literature in Berlin and Siegen. From 1996 to 1998 she was an assistant researcher in the DFG project “The system of literature in the GDR” at the Institute of Media and Communication Studies at the Martin-Luther-University Halle. In 2001 she received a doctorate in Media and Communication Studies for her work on “Stating Protest. Visual Communication and Collective Identity in Protest Movements”. From 2000 to 20009 she worked as an assistant researcher at the Institute of Media and Communication Studies at the Martin-Luther-University Halle. 2008 she habilitated about “Audiovisual Metaphors. Corporal and Affective Aesthetics in Cinema and Television”. From 2006 to 2010 Kathrin Fahlenbrach was co-leader of the EU-funded research network “European Protest Movements since the Cold War: The Rise of a (Trans-)national Civil Society and the Transformation of the Public Sphere”. Since April 2011 she is professor of media studies with focus on film at the Institute of Media and Communication at the University of Hamburg.