Postdoc project: Liveness as a Category of Medial Partaking
This project takes Karin van Es‘ notion of liveness as a sociotechnical construction, „that acknowledges that institutions, technologies, and users all play a part in constructing it“ (Van Es 2016, 18). In its phenomenal form as images that are perceived as simultaneously produced, distributed and received, medial liveness therefore takes on many forms.
The projects‘ focus is aimed at contemporary live images as they are situated in postdigital media environments, in which an epistemological difference between analogue and digital no longer holds true (Berry/Dieter 2015; Rieger/Tuschling/Schäfer 2021).
Observing postdigital live images, a particular dependence on medial partaking (Ochsner 2023) becomes apparent which acts as the focal point of this project: In how far are the joint media practices of a multitude of social and technical actors constitutive for current live images?
PhD project: Töten zeigen
Using Mieke Bal’s notion of cultural analysis (Bal 2020), this project looks at depictions of intentional killings produced by perpetrators. These images evoke a documentary reading (Odin 2022) through their aesthetics, positioning within medial publics and subsequent paratextual information. The combination of intentional violence and direct reference to non-fictionality makes these images transgressive, ethically charged and publicly rejectable.
Still, images of intentional killings have not only been around since the dawn of audiovisual filming – upon a closer look, we can also see that censorship and deletion rarely keep them unavailable. In four case studies, this project seeks to understand why and where they still persist in media publics, how they are reframed, used, curated and how these (re-)positionings actually offer deep insights into the functional logics of media publics of the 20th and 21st century.
The book will be published at transcript, you can see a preview here.
„Julia Willms gelingt es, etwas eigentlich Unerträglichem – der absichtlichen Darstellung des Tötens – sowohl affektiv als auch diskursiv gerecht zu werden, ohne etwas daran zu beschönigen. Vorzüglich geschrieben, entwickelt die Studie anhand von vier Fällen, die historisch und kontextuell weit ausgreifen, einen medienökologischen Zugang zu den dunkelsten Bildmedien des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Ein nicht nur relevantes, sondern notwendiges Buch.“
– Prof. Dr. Anna Tuschling, Ruhr University Bochum
Dr. Julia Willms 