Elisa Linseisen is Professor of digital and audiovisual media at the University of Hamburg. In the past, she was a Visiting Professor at the Theatre, Film and Media Studies Department of the University of Vienna and held positions at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Paderborn University, and Bauhaus University Weimar. Furthermore, she serves on the Editorial Board of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft.

Linseisen’s research foci include format theory, the Episteme of the Digital, as well as queer computing. She discusses them in publications  such as High Definition. Medienphilosophisches Image Processing (meson press, 2020) and Mi(s)mesis, rassifizierende Apophänie und Black (W)holes. Vom Produzieren digitaler Ähnlichkeiten, published in the anthology Mimesis expanded. Die Ausweitung der mimetischen Zone (Fink, 2022), which she edited. She also dedicates some of her work to the idea of Post Cinema, such as Epistemological Zoomings into Post-Digital Reality, or How to Deal with Digital Images? Mimesis as a Methodological Approach, which she wrote for Re-/Dissolving Mimesis (Fink, 2020), a book she also co-released.

Three Quick Questions:

In a few words, can you tell us about your current research interest?

My project investigates the everyday use of online video streaming. My thesis is that videos have an edifying function in the lives of their 'users'. I am interested in receiving online videos as a way of practicing self-care, as Foucauldian technologies of the self. 

How do you relate the term poiesis to your work?
I'd like to propose what I call video virtues. These virtues acknowledge an embodied, affective and epistemological relationship between media and the people who use them, and they must always be thought of in their digital condition: video virtues are linked to virtual video use. Use can then be understood as a creative category, use as poiesis.

Which film or other audiovisual format has resonated with you lately and why?
Something I am very interested in is the FitArt app, a free downloadable app that offers 30-second videos by artists in two series. The works explore embodiment, sexual identity, gender, decolonial healing and representation. I find it interesting that the artistic works in the app are curated as 'workouts'. The artists' works are meant to be applied, like physical exercises. Fitness apps, which the FitArt app addresses, are seen as protomedia for biopolitical regimes of post-digital self-optimisation and self-tracking. In other words, two kinds of exercises that the artists challenge in their exercises for the intended sexist, racist and ableist notions of trimming, improving and working on the body. I am interested in how these audiovisual artworks, through the format of the app, introduce aesthetic experiences as everyday routines, as short physical exercises, and what political potential is involved.