Date: Tuesday, October 12, 2021 | 18.30-20.00 (CET)

Across literature, film, radio, television, and computational media, seriality and serialization have been important formal and narrative strategies for popular media cultures from the nineteenth century onward. Series mark out temporal trajectories that invite long-term integration into our lives, providing opportunities for ongoing identification/disidentification and accompanying our own biographical development over time. However, the temporal dimension shifts radically when we move from a cinematic media regime, based in the recording of past events, to a digital or post-cinematic one, where predictive algorithms and related computational processes actively anticipate future developments, including our own desires and identifications. In such a media environment, individual and collective identities and differences (including those of gender and race, among others) are much more actively and minutely at stake. This presentation looks at several relevant examples and develops a theory of seriality for the post-cinematic age.


If you are interested in learning more about Prof. Denson’s research, we recommend his most recent book, Discorrelated Images (Duke Press, 2020) as well as a recent essay he wrote for the Pandemic Media project.

Reach out to morgane.ghilardi@es.uzh.ch to register for the event (access to the virtual event will be given ahead of time).