Research and teaching projects

Provenance and Collection Research Digital (ProSaDi) (since 2025)

ProSaDi (Provenance and Collection Research Digital) is an interdisciplinary research project of various universities in Lower Saxony for the digitally supported research and presentation of cultural artefacts that were appropriated in colonial contexts and are now in German museums. The term 'collection' is critically scrutinised as an expression of the Western order of knowledge.

In our sub-project, we are investigating historical attributions of meaning, contexts of use and changes in the meaning of cowries. In co-operation with experts from the Global South and with the help of AI methods and 3D techniques, we are contextualising cowrie artefacts in the holdings of the Landesmuseum Natur und Mensch in Oldenburg. From a media studies perspective, we analyse media circulations and re-mediatisations of cowries - for example in photographs, digital copies, artistic works or 3D models - and the role of visual representations for decolonial knowledge practices.

Digital curating (since 2025)

This student project examines colonial photographs from the holdings of the Landesmuseum Natur und Mensch (LMNM) in Oldenburg, which were taken at the beginning of the 20th century in the former German colony of Togo and have not yet been researched. It is trialling decolonial methods of remediation and is currently developing a digital exhibition in co-operation with researchers from the Republic of Togo.

Guest lectures in teaching (since 2023)

External academics, artists and guests are regularly invited to the media studies courses.

Lecture: Michael Klipphahn-Karge

No pictures? Material burdens of immaterial phenomena

The climate emergency makes itself felt visually in many ways in the digital image. The lecture reveals the ecological circumstances of digital image economies and asks whether renouncing images really makes sense or is mere retrotopia in the face of a fully technologised society.

Organised by Petra Löffler

As part of the seminar "Image Ecology - Ecology of Images

Further information here

IMAGE INTERFERENCE

Documentary film as critical practice

"Image Interference" deals with documentary film in its function as a critical practice; documentary film has never been merely a sober representation of reality, but today it intervenes with new vehemence in socio-political discourses and opens up an independent, aesthetic space for reflection with moving images, sounds and language...

Organisation: Jakob Claus & Felix Hasebrink

12.11.2024. // 03.12.2024. // 10.12.2024.

Further information here

POWER - PLAY - GAZE

The lecture series explores current perspectives and interdisciplinary theories on visual power relations. In the winter semester 2023/24, Linda Hentschel, Lisa Deml and Anja Dreschke are invited to present and discuss their research and work on questions of visual language, gaze regimes and power relations in contemporary media contexts.

Organisation: Marie Sophie Beckmann, Jakob Claus, Friederike Nastold

Further information here

Researching Media Materialities. Infrastructures, subsurface, sediments (2022-2025)

The research project comprised three interdisciplinary workshops examining the material, ecological, and symbolic traces of the Anthropocene from media theory, artistic, and historical perspectives. The focus was on how infrastructures, sediments, and submerged forms of knowledge bear witness to human-made climate change and ecological crises.

With regard to infrastructures, the first workshop "Records of Disaster" (2022) discussed the fragility of, and the political dimension to, global supply networks, which are increasingly being called into question by environmental disasters, while discussing artistic and scientific strategies for making them not only visible but affectively comprehensible. Focusing on "submerged modes," the second workshop "Sub(e)merging" (2023) explored resistant forms of life and knowledge that counter extractive regimes and offer alternative aesthetic, political, and media perspectives. And with the concept of sedimentation and the dynamics of deposits, the third workshop "From Debris to Sediment" (2025) reflected on the geologic impact of recent media cultures and cycles of metals, minerals and plastics.

Through the three workshops and resulting publications, funded by MWK and UGO, the project articulated a critical and practice-oriented interest in the material legacies and structural conditions of a world in transition. It explored how art, media and science can respond to, make visible and help shape complex ecological and social processes.

Sub(e)merging: Experiences, Practices and Politics from Belowedited by Marie Sophie Beckmann and Petra Löffler, Zurich: Diaphanes, 2025.

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