CFP: Phenomenology and Media: Mapping the Structures of Post-Cinematic Experience

In the wake of profound technological and cultural transformations, cinema no longer names a stable medium but rather a shifting constellation of practices, dispositifs, and experiential forms. The proliferation of streaming platforms, algorithmically curated feeds, immersive installations, AI-generated imagery, VR and AR environments, conversational agents, and multi-screen ecologies compels us to rethink the very structures of our lived experience. Under the still-contested but heuristically productive concept of “post-cinema,” recent scholarship in film and media studies has sought to come to grips with this transformed media landscape in ways that are still waiting to be fully appropriated by phenomenological reflection.

The present conference invites contributions that bring phenomenology into sustained dialogue with contemporary media theory in order to interrogate the manifold facets of our current post-cinematic situation and map the experiential, affective, embodied, and critical structures that characterize our current media ecology.

Building primarily on traditions of film phenomenology associated with Vivian Sobchack and Jean-Pierre Meunier, and drawing on the philosophical resources of, among others, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other, Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology, Don Ihde’s post-phenomenology of technology, or Mark Coeckelbergh’s phenomenologically informed ethics of human-robot interaction, we aim to extend phenomenological inquiry beyond the classical cinematic dispositif toward emerging “families of images”: algorithmic visuals, deepfakes, TikTok feeds, immersive environments, AI image synthesis, and hybrid human-machine interfaces.

By bringing together philosophers, film and media scholars, as well as artists, we aim to foster a rigorous interdisciplinary conversation about how phenomenology can illuminate, and be transformed by, the evolving media landscape.