Ute Holl - We've all had the experience of watching a film and feeling like we've been in a trance. This book takes that experience seriously, explaining cinema as a cultural technique of trance, one that unconsciously transforms our perceptions

Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, Amsterdam University Press, 2017.




We've all had the experience of watching a film and feeling like we've been in a trance. This book takes that experience seriously, explaining cinema as a cultural technique of trance, one that unconsciously transforms our perceptions. Ute Holl moves from anthropological and experimental cinema through nineteenth-century psychological laboratories, which she shows developed techniques for testing, measuring, and classifying the mind that can be seen as a prehistory of cinema, one that allows us to see the links among cinema, anthropology, psychology, and cybernetics.


Ute Holl had worked as filmmaker and commissioning editor in Hamburg, Germany, before writing her dissertation on cinematic perception, anthropological filmmaking and cybernetics as critical epistemology, a book published as Kino, Trance und Kybernetik, Berlin 2002. An English translation was published by Amsterdam University Press (Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, 2017). She has then written on music, electro-acoustics and politics (Moses-Komplex, Zürich 2014) and held commissioned professorships in Weimar and Cologne. Since 2009 Ute Holl is professor for Media Aesthetics at the University of Basel. Focus of research: History of perception in the 19th and 20th century; Science and technology studies of audiovisual media; media history of acoustics and electro-acoustics as well as radio theory; experimental and ethnographic cinema. 

Links

• http://bildevidenz.de/en/fellows/ute-holl/
• Dialogue with Holl by Elisabeth Schimana
• Academia.edu