Dr. Martha Blassnigg,
Transtechnology Research
Portland Square Room B323
Drake Circus
Plymouth, Devon
PL4 8AA
martha.blassnigg@gmail.com
martha.blassnigg@plymouth.ac.uk
Dr. Martha Blassnigg CV (click to download pdf)
Martha Blassnigg is trained in Cultural Anthropology and Philosophy, and subsequently in Film and Cinema Studies, with a theoretical focus on the body-mind correlation and issues of time, memory and consciousness. She conducts qualitative research into the perceptual processes during enhanced or amplified situations such as experiences of spiritual practices and audio-visual environments. She combines empirical research (anthropology) with historical and philosophical studies of issues concerned with epistemology, agency and free will, aesthetic intuition and holistic approaches to the body-mind correlation.
She is Associate Editor for Leonardo Reviews and a member of the Leonardo review panel. She has completed two documentary films and has previously worked as film restorer at the Netherlands Filmmuseum.
Qualifications:
Doctor of Philosophy – (The Cinema and its Spectatorship: The Spiritual Dimension of the ‘Human Apparatus’), University of Wales, 2007.
Cultural Anthropology (MA), Film and Cinema Studies (MA) and Philosophy – Universities of Vienna, Cologne and Amsterdam. (‘Seeing Angels and the Spiritual in Film: An Interdisciplinary Study of a Sensuous Experience’ including the documentary film ‘Shapes of Light’, VHS, col. 35mins, 2000)
Practice in the application of audio-visual media for empirical research practice (in fieldwork, interviews, reporting and documentation, e.g. photography and documentary film-making), with a background in film-restoration, archiving (Netherlands Filmmuseum Amsterdam) and film-projection.
She has been Associate Lecturer at the University of Plymouth (Digital Art and Technology) and University of Wales, Newport (Film and Video, Documentary Film). She has also been Senior Teaching Fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen (Oct 08 – Feb 09; http://gcsc.uni-giessen.de), where she contributed to the research strands of Memory Cultures, Visual Culture and Culture and Narration. In this she drew on her research around issues of time, memory and the audience’s share in audio-visual media productions and the conceptualisation of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne idea as a method to reconsider the uses of audio-visual materials in archives as well as other disciplinary contexts.
Research
Blassnigg is undertaking philosophical and historical research in order to situate the metaphysical dimensions of technology and art within the processes of human perception and consciousness. In this she focuses on the perceptual experience of audio-visual media in both a historical and contemporary context in relation to issues of time, memory, intuition and affection.
Current Research:
She is currently co-investigating a 3-year international research project funded by HERA/ESF, which she co-wrote in collaboration with Michael Punt. The project is entitled “Technology, Exchange and Flow: Artistic Media Practices and Commercial Application” (more information under “research projects”). In this she works on the implications of aesthetic intuition on memory processes, consciousness and affection. She explores specifically the agency of the beholders and the involved cognitive processes and interpretive frameworks with an attempt to develop a philosophical/anthropological conception of intuition as a heuristic for the aesthetic immersion and epistemology for affective knowledge and experience transfer. She applies Bergson’s understanding of memory and the affect as a crucial constituent of the underlying internalised processes to the experience of the beholder in audio-visual environments during and after the mediated event and contextualises this in current discussions of memory, consciousness and affection in the fields of psychology, consciousness studies and philosophy.
Recent outcomes of her research have been published as Time, Memory, Consciousness and the Cinema Experience: Revisiting Ideas on Matter and Spirit, published by Rodopi (Amsterdam, 2009); chapters and articles have appeared in Leonardo, Convergence, Technoetic Arts and in the anthology Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World edited by R. Pepperell and M. Punt (Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2006).
In the book Time, Memory, Consciousness and the Cinema Experience she applies Henri Bergson’s philosophy to an ontology of the cinema spectatorship and opens a discussion on the issues of time, movement and esprit (mind) in a broad interdisciplinary context of the late 19th, early 20th century with a focus on the oeuvre of Etienne-Jules Marey. It revisits his work in a dialogue with Bergson’s thinking and emphasises the connections with art in his own commentaries as well as in relation to Aby Warburg’s method of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Through a “thick” reading of the intersections between science, technology, art and popular culture in relation to the emerging cinema, it resituates the dimension of the mind (l’esprit) in the spectators’ cognitive processes. It draws on the insights of Bergson in an application to a contemporary understanding of the spectatorship in audio-visual environments and discusses the cinema as philosophical dispositif.
Research background:
The scope of her research background includes:
- Film and cinema theory (focus on discourses around ontology, immanence, affect and senses), history and philosophy
- “Early cinema” film archives and restoration: methods and practice in relation to digital technologies and media arts.
- Film- and media philosophy with focus on H. Bergson, and his reception in contemporary film- and media studies. Subject areas: the problem of time; conceptions of the image, consciousness, memory; aesthetic intuition; subject-object relationship, the so called “spiritual” dimension of cinema and media technology; philosophy of the mind.
- Cinema spectatorship and processes of perception of audio-visual media (cognition, memory, intuition, affect, consciousness; synaesthesia, clairvoyance)
- Documentary film in relation to contemporary media; ethnographic film/visual anthropology, early non-fiction film/archival footage; aesthetic and realism, shared consciousness, time and the “other”.
- Convergence of science, art and technology: theory, methods and epistemology, historical (19th century: “early cinema”) and contemporary: interrelationship between media, mediation and technology.
- Human agency in relation to the imagination, production and interpretation of technology: Spiritual/metaphysical dimensions of technology: processes of perception, consciousness, cosmology and mythology; focus on cinema and expanded audio-visual environments and multi-sensory experiences in audio-visual environments (anthropology of the senses).
As an anthropologist she has specifically been trained in the management of different cultural and disciplinary environments to function as mediator and connector to negotiate knowledge transfer and exchanges on practical, theoretical as well as interpersonal levels to move between different constituencies, discourses and knowledge practices.
Previous Research:
Her PhD thesis entitled ‘ The Cinema and its Spectatorship: The Spiritual Dimension of the ‘Human Apparatus” dealt with the cognitive dimensions of the cinema spectatorship through the philosophy of Henri Bergson situated within the wider intellectual discourse of the late 19th century in relation to our current understanding of the emerging cinema.
In her Masters thesis at the University of Amsterdam ‘Seeing Angels and the Spiritual in Film: An Interdisciplinary Study of a Sensuous Experience’ (2000) for the studies of Film-theory and Cultural Anthropology (Visual Anthropology) she has compared cinema technology with the phenomenon of spiritual apparitions. Her to this research related documentary film ‘Shapes of Light’ (2000) presents four Austrian artists who express their belief in angels and mediate their own clairvoyant sensitivity in their artworks.
In her practice-based research project on the artist Lotte Hahn’s artistic and personal life, she treats the subject of personal and shared memory in its relation to time and space in the reinterpretation of archival materials.