Media and Digital Culture

She has gained international recognition in recent years and is one of Germany’s most celebrated female actors. In just one year, she embodied three radically different characters on screen and is now nominated for an Oscar for her role in Anatomy of a Fall.

Through novels, films, and television series robots have been capturing public imagination through a variety of media. While many popular examples draw from the twentieth century, the current fascination with robots and machines has a longer history.

A German picture picked up four gold statuettes at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony. And with that, Edward Berger’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (Im Westen nichts Neues) has made film history.

Monika Treut is considered to be one of the pioneers of Queer Cinema. In this interview the film director and producer talks about positive developments in western societies, repressive trends and things that aren’t quite running as they should. 

A young generation of directors is taking German cinema in a new direction with intercultural perspectives, unusual narratives, and novel aesthetic approaches.

Formats like virtual reality, the metaverse, or 3D animation can allow people with disabilities to walk, express themselves, or move. Uruguayan artist Fabián Barros experiments with virtual environments and talks about how technology can fuel inclusion.

In the worst case, targeted disinformation can become a real and present threat to our democracy. A number of initiatives in Germany have responded by taking on the mission of fact checking information on the net. 

It isn’t just the big international tech corporations who are holding heated discussions about staff returning to the office in summer 2022. Plenty of employees would like to remain at home in Germany too: what makes the home office so attractive?
 

Who is responsible in an accident involving a self-driving car? A research centre at the University of Würzburg deals with precisely such techno-legal questions.

How do you completely eliminate bias in recruiting situations? With robots - claims software developer Vanja Tufvesson. She has founded an NGO, which organizes Coding Camps for women-identifying people, and has worked on the development on the world’s first unbiased robot.

Humanoid robots, whether compliant or anarchic, are products of our pop culture: Metropolis, Star Wars, Jane Fonda and Missy Elliot, all of them design the futurisms of new technology and their aesthetics. Nowadays, they predict the look of the future dialectically with robotics.