Markos Hadjioannou

Markos Hadjioannou

Associate Professor of Literature – Duke University

BrainCultures Lab, co-director

Markos Hadjioannou is a film scholar working in the fields of Cinema and Media Theory and Cinema and Media Philosophy. His work is dedicated to thinking about cinema as a heterochronic composite, or a multiplicity—one that entwines various cultural structures of intermediations and also different and differing modes of philosophical thinking-becoming.

On the BrainCultures Lab

Over the course of cinema’s history, the medium has been interpreted by many thinkers inspired by scientific developments of their time, through which they make claims about the particular ways in which cinema is thought of, perceived, seen, felt, and experienced. Most notable amongst them has been Gilles Deleuze, whose two philosophical treatises on cinema— Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, and Cinema 2: The Time-Image—have set the tone for the current direction around film’s philosophical theorization (what has been called “film philosophy”). While much of this work focuses on the abstractions of many of Deleuze’s concepts—particularly those related to temporal configurations that abound in post-WWII cinema—few have paid attention to the way in which Deleuze proposes a “philosophy of science” model for considering how cinema is, in itself, a thinking machine—i.e. a “brain.” As Deleuze is so central to the origination of contemporary film philosophy, it is of utmost importance to think not simply of the particular concepts his work offers (the movement-image, the time-image, and their subcategories), but rather that his cinema books are philosophical books of science studies, with the body-brain-cinema entwinement as the foundational formation from which to understand cinema’s world of images, and the world as image. My particular interest in participating in the BrainCultures Lab is to re-read Deleuze’s contributions to film philosophy in this light, and to use this model as a means through which to consider new insights in our understanding of our contemporary audiovisual media landscape (one which also includes other medial forms like videogames, VR, AR, surveillance media, and social media). Questions that arise from such an approach would be: “what brain-image does VR introduce in the way that it configures space as a dynamically embodied reality?”; or “if surveillance drones are considered rational thinkers, can we imagine there being an irrational mode of drone thinking?”

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