Januar 2022–Dezember 2022

The Visual Afterlife of Theory – Harun Farocki’s Procedures

This media-theoretical project studies the continuation of literary formats and theoretical problematizations with visual means in the film and text works of Harun Farocki (1944–2014). Up to now, Farocki has primarily been perceived as a filmmaker and artist, which ignores his extensive textual work with and on literary and theoretical texts. The project attempts to identify systematically the text-based practices of reading and writing in Farocki’s visual works, and their transposition into media specific procedures of inquiry, which have remained largely implicit in his globally received films. Through this approach, Farocki‘s film, video, and installation works will not only become readable as explicitly multimodal genres of narrative inquiry and visual forms of theory, but can also be analyzed as precedents for digital medium specificity and collective authorship, as older text-based practices are today increasingly being replaced by digital desktop narration, artistic research, or the visual public humanities.

He is currently also developing a project entitled Self-Augmentation: An Archaeology of the Personal Device, which investigates the mutual dependence between notions of personhood and linguistic personal devices in early modernity.

Florian Fuchs is currently a visiting Postdoc in the SFB 980 “Episteme in Bewegung” at Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Against Rhetoric: Civic Storytelling and the RIse of Short Forms (forthcoming from Zone Books 2022) and the co-editor and co-translator of History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader (Cornell UP 2020). From 2018–2021 he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. In 2017 he received his PhD with distinction from Yale University. He has also studied at Stanford University, at Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), and the École Normal Superiéure Paris.

Website: https://www.fuchsflorian.com/
Kontakt: ffuchs@zedat.fu-berlin.de