Background
Liv Hausken is a Professor of Media Aesthetics and Textual Theory and Analysis. She holds a doctoral degree (Dr. art.) in Media Studies from the University of Bergen, where she defended her doctoral thesis on the modern experience of temporality, studied through narrative theory, photography theory, and slide-motion film (1999). She has contributed to the development of the interdisciplinary field of Media Aesthetics and has been particularly concerned with exploring the relationships between technology, aesthetics (perception), and (technical and cultural) mediation. She works with photography, technical images, biometrics, and the relationship between photographic and AI-generated images. She seeks to engage the arts and the humanities in studies of everyday technologies and their significance in the production of knowledge and power. She is a member of the board of the Aesthetic Seminar, an open and interdisciplinary seminar at the University of Oslo's (UiO) Humanistic Faculty. Hausken is also a member of the Humanities-based AI hub "HumAIn" at the University of Oslo, the "AI Media" Research Network at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and the Scandinavian AI network "AIsthesis: network for research on the aesthetics of AI imagery" at Aarhus University.
Special fields
Liv Hausken's areas of research, teaching, and supervision include photography, AI imagery, scientific imaging, biometrics, surveillance, aesthetics, narrative theory, textual theory, and film.
Current PhD-candidates
Rose Maria Korol is working on a doctoral dissertation entitled Comics Journalism in the New York Times.
Former PhD-candidates
Ragnhild Tronstad, Interpretation, Performance, Play, & Seduction: Textual Adventures in Tubmud, Oslo: Unipub (submitted and defended 2003).
Eivind Røssaak, Negotiating Immobility: The Moving Image and the Arts in Andy & Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix, Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, and Bill Viola’s The Passions, Oslo: Unipub. (submitted 2007, defended 2008)
Margrethe Bruun Vaage, Seeing is Feeling: The Function of Empathy for the Spectator of Fiction Film, Oslo: Unipub. (submitted and defended 2008).
Susanne Østby Sæther, The Aesthetics of Sampling: Engaging the media in recent video art (submitted 2008, defended 2009)
Johanne Kielland Servoll, Den norske auteuren.
En begrepshistorisk analyse (submitted and defended 2014)
Gry Cecilie Rustad, Contemplating Telephilia: A study of Mad Men, The Wire, Luck and Treme (submitted and defended 2014)
Sara R. Yazdani,
Synne Tollerud Bull, Proxistant Vision
Trine Krigsvoll Haagensen, Bildet som paradigme : en analyse av forholdet mellom bilder og vitenskapelig kunnskap i astronomien (submitted and defended 2020, biveileder, hovedveileder Henning Laugerud, UiB)
Andreas Nilsen Ervik,
Jon Inge Faldalen, Stillmoving (submitted 2021, defended 2022).
Ståle Bjørlykke Grut. "Visual Open Source Investigative Journalism: Premises, Practices, and Prospects" (submitted 2025, defended 2026).
Ongoing research projects
Media Seas of the High North Atlantic
PHOTOFAKE – Visual Disinformation, the Digital Economy and the Epistemology of the Camera Image:
PHOTOFAKE – Visual Disinformation, the Digital Economy and the Epistemology of the Camera Image is a project funded by the Research Council of Norway for 2021-2024. It is coordinated by the School of Economics, Innovation, and Technology, Kristiania University College. The Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, is a partner in the project.
PHOTOFAKE investigates visual aspects of the current crisis of disinformation, a crisis which is exacerbated by AI-altered and generated material that perceptually appears to be camera-derived. The purview of the project involves a multitude of seemingly camera-derived materials that can be employed for manipulation – from the most rudimentary to the AI-enhanced videos of tomorrow. Media organizations struggle to get a handle on such material and the threat it poses by developing manuals and practices for fact-checking visual materials.
PHOTOFAKE offers research-based guidelines for the optimization of such fact-checking manuals and practices. The research is mainly organized in three work packages, WP1, 2 & 3.
WP1 explores how contemporary manuals for detecting audiovisual disinformation may be optimized by drawing on the history and theory of film and photography. This involves a critical reassessment of the vocabulary and the implicit media theoretical assumptions underpinning the manuals.
WP2 explores how actual practices of fact-checking audio-visual material in news media may be optimized given internal constraints as well as external pressures from a global digital media ecology largely outside their control. This involves exploring the institutional practices in which the manuals are embedded, including the procedural and technological tools involved.
WP3 explores what new alteration technologies and camera practices with deceptive potential are now evolving, in visual cultures online, in VFX, and in photographic art. This, in order to improve the understanding of the material the manuals and practices must be ready to guard against.
Beyond this, PHOTOFAKE critically interrogates how parts of the vocabulary used for discussing visual deception may nurture misconceptions. As part of its conceptual work, it also reexamines the productivity of a notion of post-photographic for a world in which images that perceptually appear to be photographic more than ever before need not be camera-derived.