Birk Weiberg

During the last two decades our awareness that photographic images – still and moving – are not only imprints of the world but also assembled worlds of their own has been fostered through the rise of digital image technologies. A rst phase of conceiving these techniques as a signicant break in regard to the representational character of photographic images was meanwhile superseded by a media archaeological perspective that focuses on similarities across dišerent periods instead. 

In my talk I want to take a closer look at the emergence of image compositing in Hollywood’s studio system. The technologies and practices that the studios developed primarily in the 1920s and 1930s have led to specic types of images and aesthetics that pregure digital image/world constructions in their refusal to represent actual sites. The lmic process of assemblage has traditionally been analyzed as a combination of images in time but not as a synthesis of distinct locations and times within images. The latter not only reference locations of the diegesis but also the studio space as a mediatic non-site of globalization. From this point I want to ask the question whether such images that combine dišfferent parts of the world and are then distributed globally have to be understood as a build-up for globalized infrastructures and economies.

Birk Weiberg studied Art History, Media Arts, and Philosophy at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Since 2008 he has been Research Associate and Lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts. In 2014 he gained a doctorate from the University of Zurich with a dissertation on the history of optical ešects in Hollywood. He was Visiting Scholar at the California Institute of the Arts in 2012 and Junior Fellow at the International Center for Cultural Techniques Research and Media Philosophy (IKKM) in Weimar (2015). His research foci are the history and theory of photographic images, contemporary and media arts.