Timotheus Vermeulen

Timotheus Vermeulen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, where he co-directs the media aesthetics research group. He has authored and edited numerous books and articles on post-postmodern culture as well as on contemporary aesthetics, in particular film and TV. His latest book, Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism, co-edited with Robin van den Akker and Alison Gibbons, is due to be be published with Rowman and Littlefield in 2017. Vermeulen is currently working on a book project on the “as-if” in contemporary art.

Talk: Knock Knock - Who’s There?

Track: Where Are We Now?
Date: Day 1 – 16:00
Location: Neufert-Mansion, Gelmeroda

Our current cultural condition, with its return of modernist tropes in postmodern practices, can be described as metamodernism. The talk will discuss this concept by taking a closer look at the most postmodern of all metaphors: a shopping mall with no windows, hermetically closed off from the outside world, in other words, a simulacrum. It will be argued that art and culture intervene in the mall’s ecology by painting windows on the mall’s walls which depict an outside they are not sure, and cannot be sure, exists.