Vita
Bogna Konior is the Media and Technology editor at the Hong Kong Review of Books, the editor of Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, and a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In 2016, she was a visiting researcher in Media and Culture at the ICON Center for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht. She publishes widely across academic and popular venues, on the subjects of media, climate change, technology-oriented feminism, contemporary philosophy, as well as post-globalist cultures. Her recent work is published in Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture and in Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture. Her collaborative works exploring theory in the Anthropocene has been exhibited internationally, including at Tuning Speculations in Toronto and First Draft in Sydney. She collaborated with film festivals internationally as a curator and a producer, including the Five Flavour Film Festival in Warsaw and the ReVersed: Poetry-film Festival in Amsterdam. She holds a BA in Film Studies (Theory and Practice), a RMa in Media Studies, a PhD in Cultural Analysis and was previously teaching classes in media and culture at the Lingnan University and the Hong Kong Baptist University.
Dated from 2019
IKKM Research Project
Post-Cinematic Realism in Digital Climate-Fictions
From VR ‘documentaries’ such as‘ The Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience’ to simulated climate maps, digital images mediate the imperceptible reality of climate change. In a society defined by pervasive mediation, the invisibility of the climate crisis is unnerving. A crisis that eludes human eyes, cognition and memory poses a representational challenge. Originating in literature, climate-fiction has recently moved to virtual and augmented reality narratives, where fabulation and speculation often tend towards the educational or the apocalyptic. Could we understand cli-fi not as a genre but as an all-encompassing media phenomenon symptomatic of an ontological transition in imagining the relationship between modern technology and the environment, as well as the changing dynamics between nature and culture, or indeed, between reality and fiction?
While this phenomenon can be approached from various standpoints, my time at IKKM will be spent investigating this ostensible paradox: how can climate realism exist as a mediated fiction? Putting digital cli-fi in dialogue with increasingly influential realist philosophies (Kolozova; Laruelle; Meillassoux), I seek to investigate their interrelated emergence, looking for common threads between political dilemmas that currently surround the category of ‘truth,’ and the philosophical attempts that aim to modify the descriptions of what counts as ‘real’ and ‘fictional.’
At the same time, this project is firmly situated in media studies. Although literary studies produced ample criticism of modern realism, noting that it is ill-prepared to portray the inhuman reality of climate change, cli-fi is still to be theorised from a media-philosophical, rather than simply cultural, standpoint. I draw on the framework of post-cinema to focus on how ‘new formal strategies and radically changed conditions of viewing’ inhabit this turbulent cultural moment’ (Denson and Leyda, 21-Century Film, 1). Referring also to the work of science scholar Sheila Jasanoff, who points out that climate change, in itself invisible, can only be apprehended through mediation, I aim to situate the problem of digital climate realism within contemporary philosophical frameworks.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
Konior, Bogna. “Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the Political,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 2018, vol. 18 (1-2), 166-185.
Konior, Bogna. “Generic Humanity: Interspecies Technologies, Climate Change and Non-standard Animism," Transformations Journal: Media, Culture and Technology, 2017, (30), 109-121.
Konior, Bogna. “Contemporary Malaysian Horror: Relational Politics of Animism and James Lee’s Histeria,’” Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, vol. 12 (2), 2015, 83-109.
Book Chapters
Konior, Bogna. “Apocalyptic Memes for the Anthropocene God: Internet of Crisis and Meme Politics,” Post-Memes, ed. Alfie Bown and Daniel Bristow (New York: Punctum Press). [forthcoming winter 2018]
Konior, Bogna. “Towards Nonhuman Personhood: Jean Epstein’s Cinema Essays,” Filmmakers’ Theory: Contributions to Cinema Theory, ed. Manuela Penafria, Andre Rui Graca, Denize Araujo, Eduardo Baggio. Labcom Books, IFP Research Center, 2016, 117-138.
Book Reviews
Konior, Bogna. “Automate the Womb: Xenofeminism and the Politics of Counter- extinction,” (Xenofeminism by Helen Hester, Polity Press, 2018), Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, (29). [forthcoming winter 2018]
Konior, Bogna. "For Whom the Real Turns: Feminism and the Speculative Turn" (After the Speculative Turn: Realism, Philosophy and Feminism, ed. Katerina Kolozova and Eileen Joy, Punctum Books, 2016), Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy Journal, 2017, online.
Peer-reviewed Conference Proceedings
Konior, Bogna. “Alien Aesthetics: Xenofeminism and Nonhuman Animals,” International Symposium on Electronic Arts Proceedings, 2016, 88-92.
Invited Publications
Konior, Bogna. “Yes and No.” A dictionary entry on queer cinema. Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide, ed. Mary Ainslie and Katarzyna Ancuta, I.B. Tauris, 2018.
Konior, Bogna. “Mediating Crisis: Filming geo-social collapse in Hong Kong.” Forthcoming publication of the Five Flavours Asian Film Festival, Warsaw, Poland, November 2018. (Polish)
Konior, Bogna. “Ancestral Cyberspace: On the Technics of Secrecy.” Catalogue entry for Yvette Granata’s solo show, #d8e0ea: post-cyberfeminist datum, 2018, Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, New York, USA.
Konior, Bogna. “The Colonizers Always Win? Southeast Asian Cinema at the Crossroads,” Silent Explosion: Cinemas of East and Southeast Asia, ed. Jagoda Murczynska, Warsaw: Korporacja Ha!Art, 2016, 120-134. Official publication of the Five Flavours Asian Film Festival. (Polish)
Konior, Bogna. “The Dreamlike Languor of the Supernatural: An Interview with Filipino Filmmaker Dodo Dayao,” Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, vol. 12 (2), 2015, 200-209.
Konior, Bogna. “Surface over Depth: Pagan Interspecies Art,” The Grid, 2015, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Online.
Edited Publications
Konior, Bogna, Sanders, Michael and Smith, Jeremy. “Editorial.” Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, inaugural issue on “The End Times.” [forthcoming 2019]