Asbjørn Grønstad (University of Bergen)

"Figuring Opacity"

STS Conference Room (SSH Building 1246)

"In this talk I will introduce my ongoing research project on the subject of opacity in visual culture. Comprising a set of case studies from Ernie Gehr to John Akomfrah, Matt Saunders, Zach Blas and Trevor Paglen, the study attempts to provide a theory of the opaque image anchored in ethics and sensitive to its historical and aesthetic contexts. The part presented here traces the predilection for low definition from classical film theory to the digital era."

Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, where he is also founding director of The Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture. The author/editor of nine books, his most recent publications are Film and the Ethical Imagination (Palgrave, 2016) and Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing (Routledge, 2016, co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson & Øyvind Vågnes). He is currently a Fulbright Fellow and visiting professor in the Film and Media Department at UC Berkeley. His current work-in-progress book project is tentatively entitled For an Ethics of the Opaque Image.