Upcoming seminars @ Boardroom Lucy Smiths Hus
November
November 6 2026 13:00-16:00
Catherine Wheatley (King's College London): "On banter and the matter of (not) meaning it"
The social phenomenon of "banter" occupies a culturally resonant and often precarious space, threading a fine line between the warmth of playfulness and the sting of abuse. Philosophically, it can be understood as a genre of communication rooted in shared intimacy, mutual understanding and an implicit agreement to suspend the usual seriousness of discourse, facilitating bonding through the playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks. Yet, the inherent subjectivity and power dynamics involved make this space ethically volatile, with the crucial factor often being the communicative element of tone, although questions of context and intent also play a decisive role.
Inspired by Stanley Cavell’s explorations of ordinary language philosophy, particularly his attention to the ways we contest reality and self-expression, during the workshop I will show several examples of screened banter, paying particular attention to the ways in which gesture and body language are constitutive of tone. Through discussion with the group – and maybe some banter of our own! - I hope to bring to light the complex, multi-faceted and ambivalent uses of this mode of conversation.
Catherine Wheatley is Professor of Film and Visual Culture at King’s College London. She has published widely on questions pertaining to film, ethics and aesthetics. Catherine also writes regularly for Sight & Sound magazine, is a member of the London Critics’ Circle and a convenor of the BFI’s Philosophical Screens series.
Final 2026 workshop
November 27 2026 13:00-15:00
Cathrine Grimsgaard (VID) and Elisabeth Fransson (VID): "What Looks Back at Us: Traces from Youth Prisons in Norway"
What happens when we take young people’s expressions within prisons such as drawings, tagging and cell crushing seriously, not just as illustrations to a text, but as knowledge about the experience of being imprisoned? What may such expressions tell us about the prison as an emotional landscape and what different rooms in a prison feels like? What kind of ethical questions are asked back to us as society? In the seminar we will present photos from one of the Norwegian child prisons and in particular we hope to discuss one of the pictures made by a young boy sitting in custody. The presentation is inspired by the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (1953).
Cathrine Grimsgaard is ass. professor at VID university College, and the leader of the work packet “Children and young people in and across Institutional Spaces” within the Research Centre PATHWAYS, financed by the Norwegian Research Council. She has published widely on phenomenology, ethics and children’s citizenship.
Elisabeth Fransson is professor at VID university College, and leader of the Research Centre PATHWAYS Pathways - vid.no. Her research activities are within the fields of prison research and prison architecture with a particular focus on children and youths. She is one of the editors of “Prison, Architecture and Humans” and “Barn, unge og straffegjennomføring” Barn, unge og straffegjennomføring (Cappelen Damm).
Previous seminars
October
October 9 2026 13:00-15:00
Maria Fosheim Lund (UiO) and Ingrid S. Holtar (National Library of Norway): "Visualizing the Costume Designer"
Women have always worked in Norwegian cinema, but their contributions are often missing from film historical accounts. In the anthology ‘How Film Histories Were Made’, editors Malte Hagener and Yvonne Zimmermann state that “the constitution of film history itself has rarely been systematically addressed and studied in-depth” (2023, 14). The archival turn in film studies has highlighted the fundamental role of the film archives and film heritage institutions in determining what is included – or not – in film histoires. However, the archival absence of women professionals presents a challenge. An estimate presented at the 2023 FIAF Symposium panel in Mexico City cites the share of works by female (-identifying) filmmakers in the collections of the 99 FIAF film heritage institutions (Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film) to be at one percent. We propose that filmographies are an often-overlooked part of the discussion of what constitutes film history. To explore this issue, we will use methods (data visualization) and concepts from the digital humanities to investigate how costume designers are present and presented in the Norwegian filmographies. From this specific occupational category, we will draw out insights and questions that address the wider topic of women and film historiography.
Ingrid S. Holtar is a senior researcher in the section for Visual Media and Conservation, Department of Research and Collections, at the National Library of Norway. She holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with the doctoral thesis “Feminism on Screen: Feminist filmmaking in Norway in the 1970s” (2022), and is one of the editors of the book Women's Film Histories in Scandinavia: Historiography, Screenwriting and Costume (2026).
Maria Fosheim Lund is a research fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, currently on leave from her position as a researcher at the National Library of Norway. She defended her thesis focusing on the work of actress-producer Aud Egede-Nissen in the early European film industries in June 2026. She has co-edited the books Small Country, Long Journeys: Norwegian Expedition Films (2017) and Silent Ibsen: Transnational Film Adaptation in the 1910s and 1920s (2022).
June
June 5 2026 13:00-16:00
Timotheus Vermeulen (UiO): Book Launch Plastic Time: Gestures on Screen (SUNY Press)
Plastic Time radically rethinks how we experience time in screen media—not through plot or montage but through performance. The book explores how actors shape time through the movements and manipulations of their bodies: a quick glance, a recurrent shrug, an awkward embrace. Drawing on examples ranging from Duck Soup to This Is America and from Father Knows Best to Friday Night Lights, it shows how bodily gestures and facial expressions sculpt history and contemporaneity, age, rhythm, and tense. Combining media theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Plastic Time argues that performance doesn't merely represent time—it actively figures it, stretching here and contracting there, now folding together, then tearing apart. Time in film, TV, and video is not fixed but elastic, not given but constantly made and remade, molded anew; it is as plastic as the actors' bodies that enact it.
Timotheus Vermeulen is Professor of Media, Culture, and Society at the University of Oslo. He has published widely on critical theory, aesthetics, and screen media. His previous books include ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater, coedited with Kim Wilkins, and Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television.
May
May 8 2026: 13:00-16:00
Eugenie Brinkema (MIT, USA): "Difference and the Work of Light"
This paper is part of a larger study of the aesthetics of color and its relationship to the philosophical problem of difference. Focusing here on the way in which Sean Baker's film Anora uses lens flares to make light scatter and streak, forming circles, lines, and halos, the paper explores how film can formalize an abstract conception of difference and distinction. Following on Deleuze's imperative that "Difference must be shown to be differing," the paper considers how an ethics of emergent differentiation takes place through an aesthetic that manipulates color variation and distinction in order to open up broader critical questions about particularity, labor, identity, and type—the overt narrative concerns of the film. In place of the oft-attributed humanism of Baker's investment in those marginalized by late-stage capitalism, I argue that his film aesthetically proposes a luminism, one that reapproaches differentiation as a political project via the aesthetic problem of color.
Bio
Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, status-only Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and affiliated faculty at the University of Amsterdam. Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics. In dialogue with critical theory and continental philosophy, she argues for the speculative value of formalist readings in texts ranging from horror films to works of the new European extremism, from gonzo pornography to contemporary photography. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, Discourse, film-philosophy, Genre, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, LIT, New Literary History, qui parle, and World Picture. She is also a frequent contributor to artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, and Art in America. Her books include The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both published with Duke University Press. She is currently working on a book about color.
April
Friday April 24th, 13:00-15:00
Bernard Geoghegan (IMK, UiO): "Annotation Fever"
In his well-known essay on mechanical reproducibility, Walter Benjamin writes: "Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history." Since November 2024, media theorist Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan and conceptual photographers Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt have investigated this thesis in the context of generative AI pattern recognition and how it enters into emerging modes of human perception. Towards that end, this workshop presents a hands-on, practical workshop inquiring into the possibility of developing democratic approaches to annotating and labeling machine training data. These experiments serve as a testbed for the organizers' ongoing efforts to conceptualize and launch a large-scale digital humanities project in building and training models for generative AI.
Bio
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of technology, as well as an associate professor of media and communications at the University of Oslo. He has taught in universities including in Paris, New Haven, London and is the co-editor of the journal Grey Room.
March
Friday March 13th, 13:00-16:00
Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University, USA): "Color and the color line: Du Bois and Chromatic Media at the Paris Exposition"
As a means of centering Black intervention into chromatic media, this chapter examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s data charts about African American life at the Paris Exposition (1900). Centering on the chart’s use of color, the argument situates Du Bois in Paris and speculatively imagines his interactions with chromatic media at the fair, in particular the moving image exhibitions and dance performances (by Loïe Fuller and Sadayacco) that occurred just next door to the Exhibit of American Negroes. It uses this experience to track the expanding internationalism of Du Bois’s thinking, and to theorize a radical mode of racial solidarity through color and the moving image. It frames this work through Theaster Gates’s “But To Be A Poor Race” exhibition (2017).
Bio
Joshua Yumibe’s research focuses on the aesthetic and technological history of cinema, specifically related to color. He also has expertise in avant-garde and experimental cinemas, nineteenth and early twentieth century visual culture, Frankfurt school theory, and archival theories and practices. He is an editor of Screen and of the Contemporary Film Directors Series at the University of Illinois Press.
Yumibe is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), which received honorable mention for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies first book award. He is co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), with Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, and Jonathon Rosen, and foreword by Martin Scorsese. The book was shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. With Sarah Street (University of Bristol), Yumibe is also co-author of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (Columbia University Press, 2019), which was supported by the Leverhulme Trust and won both the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award (2020) and the IAMHIST-Michael Nelson Prize, International Association for Media and History (2021).
He has also co-edited five books, including most recently Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury (2024) with Sarah Street.Yumibe is currently working on a book, provisionally titled Chromatic Blackness: Color, Race, and the Moving Image. It examines the relation of color as a material and technical hue with the use of color for delineating race, as in people of color. The core of the research focuses on color in the moving image within African and African diasporic cinemas, from the late 1960s through contemporary media while also framing this material comparatively in relation to broader currents in film and cultural history.
Since 2003, Yumibe has been collaborating with Paolo Cherchi Usai on the archival collection, Davide Turconi Project. In 2011, they launched the project online to provide access to the collection as part of the 30th anniversary of the Giornate del Cinema. In 2018, Yumibe curated the related exhibit “Dreaming in Color: The Davide Turconi Collection of Early Cinema” at the George Eastman Museum. He has also curated, programmed, and collaborated on other exhibitions and screenings at institutions including the National Gallery of Art, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, EYE Filmmuseum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Giornate del Cinema Muto, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
February
Friday February 6
Erin Kathleen Small Capistrano (ILOS, UiO):Staging Violence and Media Critique in the Living Newspapers"
The living newspaper was a form of drama that aimed to stage “the news” for theatre audiences, exploring current events as well as larger political and social issues. My thesis project focuses on the living newspapers as they developed in the US and UK during the 1930-50s, fusing experimental Soviet and European agitprop techniques with popular American and British performance forms and news media. As Morris Watson, left-wing newspaperman and producer of the “New York Living Newspaper Unit”, described it, these plays sought to “combine the newspaper and the theatre, and to hell with the traditions of both!” The thesis explores, in particular, the ways in which violence shaped the plays, as they both borrowed and rejected traditional theatrical and journalistic approaches to representing and reproducing violent stories.
While all living newspapers contain an element of media critique, my current chapter focuses specifically on a comparative study of how the news media was portrayed in American and British living newspapers, specifically with regards to their use of violent sensationalism as both a distraction (from “serious” news) and a soporific (as propaganda to redirect/deflect anxiety and political/social critique). These plays, I argue, critique sensationalized violence in both the tabloids and more mainstream press (while also indulging in some violent sensationalism themselves). How did the plays replicate or resist the "roles" played by violence in media narratives? For the workshop, I will focus on 1935, a living newspaper developed by the Federal Theatre Project in 1936, which is structured as a kind of review of the major news stories from the previous year. I will present a short section from my chapter in progress, as well as some archival materials (script excerpts, theatre reviews, production photos and set designs) that I use to analyze how the play staged violent news stories.
Previous years
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