Fellow Lecture von Dr. Nicholas Baer (Fellow des Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskollegs)

The concept of perfection has enormous currency in today’s digital economy. The latest models of the smartphone, tablet, laptop, and television promise sharp, pristine images with lossless compression and a maximal likeness to reality. While Hito Steyerl has defended the “poor” or “imperfect” image as an antidote to hegemonic media structures, I will demonstrate that the concept of perfection itself is anything but stable or unequivocal in its meanings. Intervening in contemporary debates about “rich” and “poor” images, and “high” and “low” definition, my lecture will offer a more differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a key concept in global film and media theory. The lecture will establish the aesthetic category of perfection as a vital site of theoretical inquiry in the present age of digital technologies and pervasive neoliberal logics.

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Groningen and Junior Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study in Greifswald. He is author of the forthcoming monograph, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism, and co-editor of two volumes of film and media theory: the award-winning The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016) and Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019). Baer has published on film and media, critical theory, and intellectual history in journals such as Film Quarterly, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, Los Angeles Review of Books, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Public Seminar, and October, and his writings have been translated into six languages.

Moderation: Professor Dr. Eckhard Schumacher