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Oscar Mealia

Oscar Mealia

  • I am an artist, filmmaker and researcher. In 2023 I completed an Phd in Film (audio-visual) at the University of Birmingham, England entitled ‘Inhuman, all too Inhuman: Lyotard, Nihilism and Film’. This research was an exploration of film vis-à-vis Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the inhuman, digital aesthetics and immaterial technologies crucially through the medium of film. Centred on investigations into Lyotard’s largely neglected notion of acinema and the constellation of anamnesis, the figural, immateriality, nihilism and te... moreedit
This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic project set in motion after the Holocaust is indissociable from thinking Utopia, with Adorno intuiting an emancipatory potential within the artwork. To do so, I explicate in detail... more
This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic project set in motion after the Holocaust is indissociable from thinking Utopia, with Adorno intuiting an emancipatory potential within the artwork. To do so, I explicate in detail Adorno's "negative dialectics", a dialectic driven by impossibility which structures his thinking, from his "Categorical imperative", to his conceptions of the artwork and Utopia. Moreover, this paper elucidates the relation between Adorno's materialist Bilderverbot, "autonomous art" and Utopia, culminating in a critical engagement with the work of Anselm Kiefer and Andrei Tarkovsky.