Pasi Väliaho

My work cuts across the areas of early and pre-cinema, film theory and philosophy, visual studies, and media and technology.

In Mapping the Moving Image (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), I focused 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 charting 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 was to refocus and redefine the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity.

In Biopolitical Screens (MIT Press, 2014), I concentrated on the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-century capitalism. I looked into the role screen media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies – the ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual reality technologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into arrangements of finance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. I describe the project in more detail in this interview.

My current long-term research project, ‘Kingdoms of Shadows’, investigates the politics and archaeology of the projected image in modernity.

I am also Docent (Adjunct Professor) in Media History and Theory at Department of Media Studies, University of Turku, Finland.