Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures

Axel Volmar is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” (SFB 1187 Medien der Kooperation) at the University of Siegen. His research interests include the history and theory of digital media, infrastructures, and cultures, sound studies, digital temporalities and cooperative media.

Alexandra Schneider is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz and Principal Investigator at the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Configurations of Cinema.”

Erika Balsom is­ a ­senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, specializing in experimental cinema, moving image art, documentary, and film and media theory. Her book, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video in Circulation,­was published by Columbia University Press in 2017.

Oliver Fahle is Professor of Film Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum with a­research focus on the aesthetics and theory of film and audiovisual media, and Deputy Speaker of the German Research Foundation graduate collective “Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation.”

Florian Hoof is­ a ­research associate at MECS, Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation, Leuphana University Lüneburg. His fields of research include digital cultures, organizational media, film and media history, non-theatrical film, and media industries. His book Angels of Efficiency: A Media History of Consulting is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2020.

Elisa Linseisen is ­a ­postdoctoral Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Media Studies at Paderborn University. Her doctoral dissertation engages with an aesthetic theory of high definition images with­a­mediaphilosophical focus.

Ramon Lobato is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. His research interests include video­markets,­piracy, and informal media economies.

Roland Meyer is­a­postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in art history at the Faculty for Architecture, Civil Engineering and City Planning of the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg. His research focuses on the history and theory of technical images, the visual culture of modernity and the history of art, design and architecture after 1945. His latest book, Operative Porträts: Eine Bildgeschichte der Identifizierbarkeit von Lavater bis Facebook,­was published by Konstanz University Press in 2019.

Kalani Michell is Assistant Professor of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Her primary research interests include film studies, media theory and historiography, installation and performance art, and print culture.

Antonio Somaini is Professor in Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. His works deals with the history of film and media theories (W. Benjamin, S.M. Eisenstein, L. Moholy-Nagy, D. Vertov) and with­key­issues in contemporary visual and media culture, such as the implications of high and low definition, and the new forms of machine vision. He is currently working on­a­book entitled Medium Archaeology (University of Minnesota Press) and on an exhibition entitled Time Machine. Cinematic Temporalities (Parma, Italy, January-May 2020).

Markus Stauff works at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. His main research areas are television and digital media, governmentality studies, and media sports. For publications see: https:// www.uva.nl/profiel/s/t/m.stauff/m.stauff.html.

Wanda Strauven teaches Film and Media Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. Her research focuses on early cinema, touchbased media and screen practices of post-cinema from interactive media installations to creative media hacking by today’s children.

Julian Thomas is Professor of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is interested in the histories of new communications technologies and informal media economies.