Audiovisual culture in all its facets is the focus of research at the Chair of Audiovisual Media, Film and Television. In the last few years, we have concentrated on three main fields of research, namely colour, animation and science communication. We are currently extending our focus to other fields such as virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). The chair specializes in humanities-based media theory and research, informed by cultural studies, art history and hermeneutics as well as film history, cognitive science, media psychology, semiotics and media ethics.
In the field of colour research, we have been publishing the interdisciplinary open-acces journal Colour Turn since 2018, whose articles are peer-reviewed by an international panel. In doing so, it is important for us to have an interaction with other humanities disciplines, especially with art history, musicology, philosophy and languages, but also with media practice and not least with education science, the natural sciences and computer science. Such an exchange found a big forum at the conference Colour in Mind – From Perception to Art held in Tübingen in 2016. When designing research projects, we can draw on a multitude of long-established interdisciplinary and international collaborations.
The Center for Animation Research was established in 2013 and has since been very active in organising events and publishing articles and books. The integration of research, practice and teaching has been realised through projects such as the documentary film Tanz der Schatten (2012) about the pioneer of silhouette animation Lotte Reiniger. With animation research, we address a few striking lacunae in media studies and thus try to further strengthen the image of Tübingen as a centre of research and the image of Baden-Württemberg as a centre of animation production. Several of our PhD projects contribute fundamentally to the theory and practice of animation and of artificial intelligence. The habilitation theses that are written at the chair also deal with relevant topics relating to science communication, to emotion research and to animation studies.
Science communication has been firmly established at the chair for many years as a focal point that combines research, practice and teaching. CampusTV develops innovative forms of science communication on current university research topics via live broadcasts, social media platforms and homepages, including multimedia stories, explainer videos and animations. Current research projects include HD Campus, a research lab on social media within HD-CampusTV, and GLOBUS, an EU-funded project at universities in Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe that analyses the European contribution to global justice. In the interculturally-oriented research project BGM vital, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), through an interdisciplinary approach we developed communication strategies to undertake health communication in small and medium-sized enterprises. The project partners were Institute of Occupational Medicine, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin; Institute of Clinical Epidemiology and Applied Biometry, University Hospital Tübingen; Institute for Sportsmedicine, Univeryity of Tübingen; Institute of Response Media Experience (REMEX), Stuttgart Media University; Centre for Media Competence (ZFM), University of Tübingen.
