Birgit Schneider is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Potsdam. She studied art history, media theory, and media art in Karlsruhe, London, and Berlin. Her research focuses on images and perceptions of climate at the intersection of science, politics, art, and media; ecological images, and questions concerning media and nature aesthetics in experiences reaching from forests to computer games. Among her recent publications are Global Forest Visualization: From Green Marbles to Storyworlds, together with Lynda C. Olman (2024), Der Anfang einer neuen Welt. Wie wir uns den Klimawandel erzählen, ohne zu verstummen (2023) and Klimabilder. Eine Genealogie globaler Bildpolitiken von Klima und Klimawandel (2018).

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

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.