The project pursues its aim of understanding terrorism from the perspective of critical media aesthetics by focusing on the “face” of terror — a term that goes to the core of the communicative and mediated aspects of terrorism: The face is a primary site of contact with fellow human beings and a contested marker of identity, whilst in a broader sense it is also a cultural interface that distributes and redistributes visibility and power. Taking the mediated face as its entry-point, the project investigates the identity work that goes into acts of terrorism, as well as into the cultural responses to them.
Gjelsvik will provide an overview of the project plan, as well as pursue some of the case-studies to be conducted by the project members.