Research

My research is titled Media Dispositives: Technology, Spectators and Texts and focusses on a systematic and historical research into the way old and new media construct and position spectators, users and/or visitors. My research combines Semiotics and semiotic inspired Media Theory with notions of Science and Technology Studies (in particular Post-phenomenology and Actor Network Theory).

My main research topics are:

– Technological Engagement

The publication of the bundle From countergaming to counterplay: subversive practices in computer games with Jan Simons (UVA) a round up of the research project Technological Engagement (part of the NWO-research program Transformations in Perception and Participation: Digital Games).

– Digital Textualities

I’m developing a new research project on the field of what I call digital textualities with a special focus on the role of typographical design and digital typography. The digital revolution has changed the way we produce, write, read, print, distribute and store text profoundly. The writing or reading support has changed, text is stored differently, we access text on screens instead of paper, which not only has changed the definition of text but also its sensory experience. Text is not anymore stored as visual or carved traces on a physical support such as paper, stone or wood but has become a data file which is processed on a par with other data files and with the same computer programs. The consequence thereof is that designers (or users) are able to mix any number of visual, auditive and even tactile elements regardless of the media in which they originated. Moreover, digital text can be spoken, visualised (statically or dynamically) or turned into a three dimensional objects and be mixed and remixed with all sorts of other media. Techniques such as sampling, quoting, appropriation, which were central to twentieth century historical avant-garde or post-modern design, have now become standardised and industrialised practices. The term digital textualities points to the fact that we cannot speak anymore about text in the traditional sense of the word, that is typographical text as a ordered series of type or words. Text has merged with other media. Actually we could even state that the digital technologies restored the original meaning of word the Latin textura which means weaving, web, texture, structure. Digital text is a texture, a weaving of the interactions between the different semiotic systems of the sound, speech, moving images, fixed images, writings, tactile surfaces. It is therefore better not to speak about digital text but about digital textualities.

– Neo-baroque aesthetics

I’m interested in how baroque-like dispositives are used in the (new) media by for instance filmmakers, typographers or painters to position and influence the spectators and readers. I’ve finished an article on the use of baroque devices in melodramatic film. Further I’m working on an article on the 19th century Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz who used baroque techniques in his ‘high art’ paintings which were actually characteristic for the emerging (low) 19th century mass culture. In addition, together with Karel Vanhaesebrouck and Maaike Meier (promotor), I’m supervising the PhD-project of Christophe Van Eecke on Ken Russell’s Artist Biographies as Baroque Performance of the Self.