U. Meurer

Ulrich Meurer

Visiting Fellow, Fall 2018

Affiliation
University of Vienna
Research Project
Gold Ground / Silver Screen: The Byzantine Form of (Post-) Cinema
Contact Info

Ulrich Meurer teaches film & media studies at the University of Vienna. After receiving his Ph.D. in Film and American Studies from the University of Konstanz, Germany, in 2005, he became Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Leipzig. Since 2009, he has been Visiting as well as Associate Professor at the Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies tfm at Vienna, the Ruhr-University Bochum (Department of Media Studies) and the Visual Studies Platform at Central European University CEU, Budapest. His main fields of research are film and media philosophy, cinema and political theory, contemporary Greek and US-American film cultures, and (pre‑)cinematic media history and archaeology. His publications include Translation and Film: Cinema as Rendering (ed., 2012, German), Topographies: Concepts of Space in Postmodern Literature and Film (2007, German) as well as numerous articles, among them "Short Voyages to the Land of Gregarious Animals: On Political Aesthesia in Sto Lyko and Sweetgrass" (2017), "Laboratory Athens: On Austerity Politics and Small Gauge Film" (2018) and the upcoming publication "The Shards of Zadar: On the Rationale of Cinema Archaeology" (fall 2018).

About the Research Project
Gold Ground / Silver Screen: The Byzantine Form of (Post-) Cinema

The project ‘Gold Ground / Silver Screen’ explores the potential of ‘Byzantium’, both as an aesthetic reference point and a figure of thought, for contemporary media & film studies. As pre/cinema is mostly correlated with Western Renaissance (monocularity, linearity, subjectivity) ‘Byzantium’ outlines a vision that has been neglected in the history and theory of moving images. In this context, research at Princeton and the exchange with scholars in Art History, Media Theory and Cultural Studies laid the groundwork for exploring the conceptual, formal, and technological traits of Byzantine visuality (gold ground / mosaic / luminosity / tactility / faciality) and transferring them to a wide range of contemporary photographic or pixilated digital images – where the Byzantine mode becomes an operator in the shifting sphere of screen media at the closure of the cinematographic era.