Open lecture: Splitscreen as a Symbolic Form

Malte Hagener is professor of Media Studies at Marburg University, Germany, guest professor at the Culture Studies Group (KuFo), and the recipient of the 2016 Humboldt/RJ grant. This lecture, entitled "Splitscreen as a Symbolic Form", is open to faculty, students, and the public.

12 December, 15.15-17

Fryxellsalen 1B306

Splitscreen as a Symbolic Form

In 1927 Erwin Panofsky published his influential essay “Perspective as a Symbolic Form” in which he argues for perspective as a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. The idea behind the one-point perspective as the dominant image form since the Renaissance and well into the 20th Century is the framed view, as if through a window: safe and distanced, fixed and to be contemplated, as well as unified unto its own.

My talk wants to investigate the question whether one could see the splitscreen, the internally divided image which we typically encounter on smartphones and computer screens, on urban facades and tablets, but also increasingly on television and in the cinema as a new, culturally dominant symbolic form. Despite their seeming novelty, splitscreens and multiplied images have a long and rich history which not only goes as far back as the late 19th Century, but this model of a multi-focal interest can also be traced to literature (multifocal storytelling in modernism: Joyce, Dos Passos, Döblin etc, but also before: Tristram Shandy etc), to art history (again modernism, but also paintings within paintings), to religious studies (altar pieces, mixtures of architecture and painting, as in baroque churches), to alternative theatre forms and festivities. Seeing the splitscreen as a symbolic form allows for a rethinking of such core concepts of the humanities as concentration and distraction, interaction and immersion in a wider context, both historically and conceptually.

Händelsen är öppen för allmänheten.

Medverkande

• Professor Malte Hagener, Marburg University, Germany
   

Upplysningar

• Maria Holmgren Troy
  Telefon: 054-700 1418
  E-post: maria.holmgren.troy@kau.se