The Transformative Power of Visual Encounters

In films, on TV, in computer games and increasingly also on the internet we are caught by others we want to associate with, and connected with this we sometimes experience moments of rupture in our ideological and mythical world views that provoke a re-formation of such views and consequently a re-adaptation of our social lives. Such processes of ideological and mythical re-formation resemble those we encounter when leaving one religious framework and committing to another one and contemporarily they are increasingly assuming politicised tones.
The session explores a variety of processes of mimicry and ideological and mythical “conversion” and how they connect with visual media. Here especially the “glocal” (global-local), often transnational dimension of such processes of self-(re-)formation is an issue, as well as the role played in them by media compounds such as internet-video-mobile-phone-live-performance. Examples of transnational community (and also family) formation, postmodern creative self-cultures and “momentary network-communities” may be discussed alongside conflicts emerging in the course of such media-based social processes. But more theoretical approaches concerning the social, ideological and aesthetic dimension of the re-constitution of communities and of self cultures and of the politicisation of religion are also welcome.