Eyewitness videos, documentaries, and campaign trailers with millions of clicks: since the inception of Web 2.0, a kind of video activism rooted in civil society has taken shape between online and offline public spheres, social media, and social movements. This research project explores such new movements on the Internet and discusses their effects on the public sphere.

In the past, videos had to be filmed, edited, and distributed in a time- and cost-intensive process. But today, HD cameras, editing software, social media platforms such as YouTube, and live-streaming apps enable the swift and far-reaching circulation of images and contribute measurably to a transformation of the political public sphere. This project sketches the affective strategies and aesthetics of activist videos. With reference to media and political theory and to film history, and by implementing methods of image analysis, Chris Tedjasukmana explores the consequences of such footage for the increasingly networked and affectively charged public spheres of the present.

Chris Tedjasukmana, Dr. phil., studied Theater, Film, and Media Studies, as well as Philosophy and Political Science in Frankfurt/M., Berlin, New York City, and Copenhagen. In the winter semester 2017-18 he is the Guest of the Director at the IFK. He directs the Volkswagen Foundation-funded research project Moving Images 2.0: Video Activism between Social Media and Social Movements at the Free University Berlin and is co-editor of the journal Montage AV – Zeitschrift für Theorie und Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation. In 2016-17 he was Visiting Professor of Media Theories at the University of Art and Design Linz. His areas of research include media theory, philosophical aesthetics, political theory, New German Cinema, cultures of memory, gender and queer studies. His monograph Mechanische Verlebendigung. Ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino was published by Fink in the series Film Denken in 2014. In 2014 he was awarded the Karsten Witte Prize for best article in film studies.