The workshop addresses the ‘media elemental’ underpinnings of cinematic atmospheres. Atmosphere is here both to be understood in the ordinary aesthetic sense of an affectively charged environment, with cinema arguably being the medium par excellence of mass-produced, artificial atmospheres exhibiting an anthropocentric desire for environmental control. However, the notion of atmosphere also serves a rethinking of the medium of cinema within a broader environmental, post-Aristotelian legacy of this concept in its evocation of the capacity of diaphanous substances like air, vapor, smoke, clouds, water, crystal, and glass to actively shape – through their varying consistencies and degrees of transparency and opacity – the environment in which our sensory experiences unfold.

Detailed program to follow.

A joint event of the ERC StG Project CATNEMI – Cinematic Atmospheres: Towards a New Ecology of the Moving Image and the ZeM – Brandenburg Center for Media Studies.