What effects do designs of possible futures have on the revision of contemporary social conditions? What role do audio-visual patterns play in terms of drafting and discarding different forms of world-making in this context? In this research project we start from the premise that the interventionist quality of feature films, documentaries, and web videos on anthropogenic climate change consists in combining the dissemination of facts and political positions with affective strategies, the formation of participation, the development of future scenarios and spatial schemata of planetary ecology. Our hypothesis is that this modulation of perceptual scenarios takes place via transfers between different formats of audio-visual image production, between science, journalism, entertainment, and activism. SP 1 will attempt to reconstruct these mutual processes of appropriation in the field of activist documentaries and genres of entertainment cinema, while SP 2 will seek to do the same in the context of polarising conflict in social media. SP 3 will examine shifts in the poetic logics of nature documentaries. A digitally supported method of analysing expressive movement patterns based on systematised annotations and their visualisations will be applied.

Head of Project

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Matthias Grotkopp (SP 1)

Doctoral Researcher

Lars Dolkemeyer (SP 2)

Yvonne Pfeilschifter (SP 3)

Leona Schleicher (until September 30, 2024)

Student Assistant

Pablo Trujillo Tobaria