About the Journal

Focus and Scope

mediaesthetics is an online open access journal for film and media studies, published by a group of film scholars at Freie Universität Berlin. It is bilungual (German/Englisch) and appears once every year (for the time being).

We conceive this journal to be a platform for testing out new, multimodal, and genuinely digital ways of publishing about audiovisual movement images.

The project is founded upon a basic concept in media studies: We assume that the multimodal dynamics of audiovisual forms shape and change the conditions of our everyday perception, meaning making and imagination. Moreover we take the dimension of embodiment to be central for experiencing and understanding films and other audiovisual media. Considering this we assume that cinematic images in a strict sense are not identical to the moving images as objects and artifacts but that they are themselves the product of a poiesis of viewing films.

From this perspective, the step towards digital online publications as a field for experimentation is inevitable for several reasons:

Most obviously it is a means to make the film itself quotable in a scholarly text. But the real benefits are beyond that simple gain: a multimodally edited scholarly analysis of audiovisual movement images can reveal the temporal and spatial, the affective and cognitive dynamics of its object of study in a way that is inaccessible to the written text.

 mediaesthetics’ purpose is to provide a platform for film and media scholars to experiment with strategies to pause the object of their analysis and to keep it accessible at the same time in its temporal, fleeting dynamics that is only realized in the act of perception. Only on that basis can the cinematic image itself become an element of testable, comprehensible scholarly argumentation. Hypotheses on the quality and dynamics of audiovisual forms of staging from film theory and film history can be subject to new dimensions of evidence.

Our aim is to provide descriptive and qualitative analyses of media aesthetics as a basis for research questions coming from the fields of sociology, psychology, history and political theory. But even beyond the questions of the presentation of analytical studies and interdisciplinary research, we hope for new methodological and theoretical groundwork to emerge from a hitherto unattainable mimesis of thinking about film, thinking with film and the thought of films.

 

Published by Cinepoetic – Center for Advanced Film Studies and its Directors:

Prof. Dr. Hermann Kappelhoff

Prof. Dr. Michael Wedel

 

Editorial Team:

Jan-Hendrik Bakels

Regina Brückner

Danny Gronmaier

Matthias Grotkopp

Cilli Pogodda

Eileen Rositzka†

Thomas Scherer

Christina Schmitt

Michael Ufer

Hannes Wesselkämper

Open Access Policy

mediaestehtics is committed to real and immediate open access for academic work.