Forschung / research
Current research
My current research project is entitled Radical Desire and the Posthuman Queer and engages the issue of posthumanism trying to obtain for itself a truly alternative agenda, one that acknowledges its potential for disruption and for building and affirming new and unexpected linkages: to other psychic or somatic modes, other species and collectives, other sexualities and agencies. Exploring a variety of different sources, visual and textual, it probes the different ways in which the posthuman works across technological, ethical and epistemological boundaries and uses hyperbole, the grotesque and the farcical to suspend the humanist narrative and bring into play a disorienting 'lie' or fable disrupting normative or biased formulae and thought-processes. This form of rhetorical violence in which a quite natural propensity of ‘queer posthumanism’ to magnify and inflate exposes itself has already deposited sediments in past discourses and let a variety of interventionist projects take root gradually, eliciting radically alternative possibilities of meaning and being. Minion or man (Despicable Me), cyborg or alien (Alien 1), monster or mutant (Frankenstein, Splice), genetic hybrid or zombie (The Walking Dead) — they all figure as perspectival signifiers for the queer in its most exaggerated and excessive modes of appearance, open up thought forms to novel expressions that evoke unexpected experiences and mobilisations. To make such a claim I examine the path of desire as preordained by hyperbole and ex-centric representation in the field of the posthuman, the curve of the unrelenting grotesque and quirky, never fixed or stable, mapping multiple sexual identities, proliferating critical vocabularies, hyperbolic combinations of bodies and objects for what they are: statements in the art of the posthuman as virtual and liminal design, amalgams of the illegitimate and the weird, embodiments of alternative longing that create curiosity for the unknown and the untried.
Media Semiotics
Further research interests involve the analysis of media effects and media content, photography and the music video. Particular emphases in my work include the semiotics of internet phenomena such as memes, fake news, etc. A selection of papers can be found here:
Audiovisual Aesthetics and Semiotic Excess in the Music Video: Nick Cave's "Jubilee Street"
