Materials and technologies are closely entwined with the aesthetic practices, meanings, and values of experimental film. In fiction films and documentaries, materials and technologies mostly serve to represent things, produce images, and tell stories. In experimental film, on the other hand, they are integrated into artistic practices and the process of creating aesthetic, political, and social meaning. For a long time, analog, photochemical film has played an important role in such practices, and it remains central, even at a time of rapid technological change, for the identity of experimental film culture. This is particularly evident in attempts by filmmakers to create abstract, non-representational, or non-objective imagery. The first part of this paper traces how analog film and filmic abstraction were entangled across changing media historical environments. I will argue that in films by John and James Whitney, Hy Hirsh, Harry Smith, and Stan Brakhage engagement with the material properties of analog film simultaneously evokes imaginaries of the digital, undermining rigid distinctions between the two fields. In the second part of my presentation I will focus on recent analog abstractions by filmmakers such as Jennifer Reeves and Tomonari Nishikawa to consider the role of the analog in the present digital culture. This includes reviewing questions of technological obsolescence and innovation, material agency, and the importance of analog film for eco-critical cinema within traditions of filmic abstraction.

Henning Engelke teaches art history at the University of Arts in Linz, Austria. He is the author of Metaphors of Another Film History (Schüren 2018, in German) on American experimental film in the 1940s and 1950s. Engelke has written on topics including experimental film history, microanalysis and social interaction films, and film and video activism. Recent articles include “Sol Worth, Film Theory, and the Politics of the Bio-Documentary,” in Grey Room 89 (Fall 2022).

Participation via Zoom link

Code: 366701

ID: 656 3202 5609

Part of the International Lecture Series 

Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary

From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.

Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series “Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary” is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.

Further Program

November 18, 2025
Till A. Heilmann (Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum): “Sharpness Abstracted”

November 25, 2025
Isabel Wünsche (Art History, Constructor University Bremen): “Beyond Western Avant-garde Approaches: Abstraction in a Global Cross-Cultural Dialogue”

December 2, 2025
Sabine Eckmann (Director and Chief Curator, Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis): “Abstraction, Sensation and the Digital”

December 9, 2025
Sven Lütticken (Art History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University): “Lethal Abstraction and Alter-Abstractions”

December 16, 2025
Kim Albrecht (Information Design, Folkwang University Essen): “Data Visualization as Abstract Realism”

January 13, 2026
Birgit Schneider (Media Studies, University of Potsdam): “Making Climate Data Graspable through Visualization and Sonification in Art and Science”

January 20, 2026
Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths London): “A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision”

January 27, 2026:
Crystal Z. Campbell (Art, University of Buffalo): “Abstraction, Pareidolia, and the Underloved”

For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1 

Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).

With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.