Prof. Dr. Ulf Otto

Sprechstunde im Semester, Dienstags 14-15 Uhr, Georgenstraße 11, R. 107, Anmeldung per Mail medien.twm@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

Online-Sprechstunde, ganzjährig, Donnerstags 14-15 Uhr, Anmeldung über Zoom

Lehrveranstaltungen im LSF

Forschung

Arbeitsgebiete
Zeitgenössisches Theater, Dramaturgie, Theaterästhetik und Medientheorie, Theater- und Kulturgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Technikgeschichte und Technikphilosophie, Performativität digitaler Kulturen, Production Studies, Fachgeschichte, Digital Humanities

Projekte

• Energien des Spektakels (VolkswagenStiftung)

Publikationen

• Publikationsliste auf Open Access LMU

Profile

I am a theater studies scholar with an affinity for media and cultural studies, a special interest in the relationship between aesthetics and technology, and a focus on the nineteenth century and digital cultures. My work has been informed by several years as a theater practitioner and by my background in computer science. Lately, it has been increasingly influenced by science and technology studies (STS, ANT), especially the feminist streak (Haraway, etc.)

My earlier academic work examined the theatricality of early internet culture and developed categories for describing performative practices online, resulting in my first monograph and a continued interest in performance within digital cultures. Lately, this interest has shifted towards questions of algorithmicity and the organization of theater (Alexander, TDR).

However, for the past few years I was primarily working on a project called Energies of Spectacle, generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, that explored the electrification of theatre and the entanglement of science and culture in the late nineteenth century from a historiographical perspective. Concluding this project, two German-language monographs will be released this year by Metzler. Supplementing some preliminary findings (Centaurus), several English-language articles are currently being submitted to journals.

I am also pursuing two ongoing side projects, “gestures of reenactment” (Transcript) and “aesthetics of interventions” (Kammerspiele), both addressing the interplay and interdependencies between politics and the arts.

Methodologically, I have recently been exploring ethnographic and digital humanities approaches. One interest is in practices of sharing (semantically annotated) research, but I have also been pursuing a “symmetrical perspective” (Bloor, Latour) and an “empirical philosophy” (Mol) that reconsider the relationship between theory and practice and the epistemological foundations of the discipline. This is resulting in additional work on the history of the discipline.

At present I am in the early stages of developing two projects that are continuing existing research interests but developing a methodically more refined approach. VarietyActs examines alliances between performers and machines as an intersection of technoscience and politics of the body, while investigating the position of popular culture within the discourse of humanities. ProductionCultures will be exploring the transversal ensemble of theater and its yields by combining ethnographical and historiographical approaches.

I am a member of the German Society for Theater Studies (GTW) and the equivalent organization for Media Studies (GfM), as well as the International Federation of Theater Research (IFTR) and Performance Studies International (PSI).

You can find a bibliography of my publications, including some open-access full-text articles, by following this link.

Stand: Oktober 2023