Verena Kuni

After film is before film. F (ANALOGITAL)

As already Marshall McLuhan pointed out media usually don’t just replace each other but rather merge to influence and augment each other. This is not only true for their technical, but first and foremost for their cultural use – two uses which are hard to separate, but certainly are not the same. What does this mean for film, or better: for what we still call ‘film’ – even, if the imaging technology completely or partly does without support or storage material? In what sense and how do the parameters survive that have determined the medium film and film culture before the rise of digital technology? What kind of transfers and transformations can be observed? Or, if we ask with McLuhan: what about the “furious release of energy and change” bred by these “hybrid unions”? Which kinds of bastards are set free?

To answer these questions, it might be fruitful to enlarge the perspective and to analyze the actual situation of so called ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ media technologies and cultures.

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CV  Verena Kuni is scholar in the field of history and theory of art and media cultures and professor for visual culture at the Goethe University, Frankfurt Main. Since 1996 she is lecturing, researching and teaching at universities and art academies in Europe and beyond. Her curatorial work is dedicated to interdisciplinary projects and programs at the intersections of theory and practice. From 1995 to 1999, she co-curated the video section of Kasseler Dokumentarfilm and Video Festival, where since 1999 she is director of the yearly interfiction summit for art, media, and network cultures. Her research focuses a. o. on transfers between material and media cultures; media of imagination and technologies of transformation; alternate realities and times; urban biotopes; DIY and prosumer cultures; games, play and toys as tools. She has published widely (print & online) on contemporary arts & media, their histories and futures.
www.kuniver.se – www.under-construction.cc – www.visuelle-kultur.info