The lecture presents ongoing research that aims to mobilize the concept of the postdigital to better understand contemporary media culture. While postdigital aesthetics could generally be conceptualized as any and all aesthetics emerging under postdigital conditions, the lecture focuses on a more specific kind of aesthetic transfer process that is defined by digital media forms remediating, simulating, or evoking the mediality, materiality, and aesthetics of nondigital media forms in various ways. Salient examples of this specific kind of postdigital aesthetics range from digital photography apps such as Instagram offering their users filters aimed at recreating the aesthetics of analogue photographs and digital films such as Planet Terror using postproduction effects to evoke the aesthetics of damaged non-digital film material to computer-animated films such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse referring to the aesthetics of non-digital comics and video games such as Cuphead simulating the aesthetics of non-digital cel animation. Last but not least, the lecture will also explore how and why machine learning-based image generation programs such as DALL·E allow their users to easily reproduce this kind of postdigital aesthetics.

Jan-Noël Thon is Professor and Chair of Media Studies and Media Education at Osnabrück University, Germany. Recent books include From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (co-edited with Daniel Stein, De Gruyter 2013/²2015), Storyworlds across Media (co-edited with Marie-Laure Ryan, University of Nebraska Press 2014), Game Studies (co-edited with Klaus Sachs-Hombach, von Halem 2015), Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (University of Nebraska Press 2016/²2018), Subjectivity across Media (co-edited with Maike Sarah Reinerth, Routledge 2017/²2019), Comicanalyse (co-authored with Stephan Packard, Andreas Rauscher, Véronique Sina, Lukas R.A. Wilde, and Janina Wildfeuer, Metzler 2019), Comics and Videogames (co-edited with Andreas Rauscher and Daniel Stein, Routledge 2021), Comics and Agency (co-edited with Vanessa Ossa and Lukas R.A. Wilde, De Gruyter 2022), and Bildmedien (co-edited with Frauke Berndt, De Gruyter 2023).

• Aesthetic Seminar F-2023 Program
• Aesthetic Seminar F-2023 Poster

Aesthetic Seminar F-2023 is organised by Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen and Morten Kyndrup on behalf of School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.