Robin Curtis

Robin Curtis is a Canadian film and media scholar and cultural critic who is based in Germany. She currently holds the chair in Media and Cultural Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, where she also chairs the department of Media and Cultural Studies (Medienkulturwissenschaft - which combines German Media studies with perspectives on humans, animals and things as well as culture, audiences, everyday life and aesthetic experience familiar from Cultural Studies and Film Studies). Her writings have appeared in both German and English. In recent years she has contributed in particular to the development of the theory of immersion as well the link between empathy, empathy aesthetics (or Einfühlung) and the capacity of audio-visual media to destabilize the subject via atmospheric qualities or mimetic processes. Further contributions focus on the manner in which the audio-visual medium requires a distinct approach to autobiography and other forms of "reports" on or documents of the self and its situation within time and space. She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Pop: Kultur und Kritik and Jahrbuch immersiver Medien. Her work as an independent curator includes her collaboration in 2001 with Laura U. Marks commissioned by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen entitled "Out of Time: Bodies of Temporality." In this section consisting of 19 90-minute-programmes, which included contributions by guest curators Jeremy Rigsby, Johan Grimonprez, Victor Masayesva Jr., Rick Prelinger and Herbert Schwarze, Patricia R. Zimmermann, Jan-Christopher Horak, Grahame Weinbren, and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Curtis and Marks took up the topic of temporal perception in the present. Curtis has also curated programmes for Arsenal: Institut für Film- und Videokunst e.V. in Berlin, for the Goethe Institut in Palestine and Israel.