Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr. Pasi Väliaho

My work cuts across the areas of early and pre-cinema, film theory and philosophy, digital culture, and media and technology. In the past I have mostly concentrated on the emergence of cinema at the turn of the twentieth century, pursuing the question as to how moving images have shaped our experience and thinking of the world and ourselves. In mapping the implications of the medium in new ways of seeing and saying as manifest in the arts, science and philosophy of the era, my attempt has been to refocus and redefine the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity.

I am currently completing a manuscript on 'Biopolitical Screens' that maps the visual culture of the neoliberal era and investigates the ways in which moving image media today – from game consoles and virtual realities to video installation art – feed into processes of biopolitical subjectification and shape the conditions of agency and experience. A second, more long-term research project is on the image, action, and the science of gestures.

I am the convenor of the MA in Film and Screen Studies.

Areas of supervision

Early and pre-cinema and the intellectual history of modernity; film theory and philosophy; contemporary screen cultures and new moving image technologies

Selected publications

Single-authored book

(2010) Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900. Film Culture in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

 
Articles (a selection)

(forthcoming) 'Spellbound: Early Cinema's Transformational Spaces', Space & Culture.

(in press) 'Cinema's Memoro-Politics: Hypnotic Images, Contingent Pasts, Forgetting', Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 33:3.

(2012) 'Affectivity, Biopolitics and the Virtual Reality of War', Theory, Culture and Society 29:2: 63-83.

(2012) 'Capturing Imagination: Cinema's Future Anterior'. In Alessandro Bordina et al., ed., The Archive. Udine: Forum, 171-174.

(2008) 'Bodies Outside In: On Cinematic Organ Projection'. Parallax 47, 14:2: 7–19.

(2008) 'Salama ja hetki – ajatella kuvin'. In Olli-Jukka Jokisaari, Jussi Parikka & Pasi Väliaho, ed., In medias res: hakuja mediafilosofiaan. Turku: Eetos, 72–94. [Lightning and instant: thinking in images]

(2007) 'The White Screen circa 1900 – On the Moving Image as Potentiality of Thought'. Symplokê 15:1–2: 40–65.

(2006) 'Biovalta – elämän paljastavat teknologiat'. In Seija Ridell, Pasi Väliaho & Tanja Sihvonen, ed., Mediaa käsittämässä. Tampere: Vastapaino, 27–45. [Bio-power: technologies of bare life]

(2005) 'Diafanes – kuva, tapahtuma, totuus'. Tiede & edistys 30:3: 229–242. [Diaphanes – the image, the event, truth]

(2005) 'Simulation, Automata, Cinema: A Critique of Gestures'. Theory & Event 8:2.

(2004) 'Audiovisuaalisen median ja kontrollin neuroestetiikasta'. In Teemu Taira & Pasi Väliaho, ed., Vastarintaa nykyisyydelle: näkökulmia Gilles Deleuzen ajatteluun. Turku: Eetos, 113–138. [The neuroaesthetics of audiovisual media and control]

Edited collections

(2008) In Medias Res. Hakuja mediafilosofiaan (with Olli-Jukka Jokisaari & Jussi Parikka). Turku: Eetos. [In medias res: approaches to media philosophy]

(2006) Mediaa käsittämässä (with Seija Ridell & Tanja Sihvonen). Tampere: Vastapaino. [Understanding media]

(2004) Vastarintaa nykyisyydelle. Näkökulmia Gilles Deleuzen ajatteluun (with Teemu Taira). Turku: Eetos. [Resistance to the present: perspectives on Gilles Deleuze]