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Margaret Morse

Professor Emerita, Film & Digital Media
Digital and electronic media theory and criticism, media art, media history, technology and culture, film history and theory, German cinema, documentary and science fiction.
Research Interests: 

Margaret Morse studies cultural change through media in a shifting focus from film to television and video to new media and digital culture. The cultural forms she has addressed range from television news, graphics and sports to video aerobics, malls and freeways, what food cyborgs eat and the meaning of home in the age of privatized mobility. Her hundred plus publications in books and essays include criticism on a wide range of work by contemporary media artists in the United States and Europe as well as theoretical essays on particular media art forms such as installation and closed-circuit video as well on the meaning of interactivity and immersion in the digital arts. She is currently writing a monograph on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as well as researching a book that will update her book Virtualities. It will address shifts in cultural forms, including emerging virtual collective forms since the late 1990’s.

Selected Publications: 

Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture (Indiana UP 1998). Hardware, Software, Artware (Cantz & ZKM, 1997). “Sunshine and Shroud: Cyborg Bodies and the Collective and Personal Self” in: Cyborg Bodies, eds. Jennifer John and Yvonne Volkart, ZKM, MedienKunstNetz www.mediaartnet.org/ 2005. “The Poetics of Interactivity in: Women, Art and Technology, ed. Judy Malloy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 16-33. “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam” in: Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (NY: AFI & Routledge, 1999), 63-74. “Artemis Aging: The Female Body on Video Cassette,” Discourse (Winter 1987-88), 20-53. “Sport on Television: Replay and Display” in: Regarding Television, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (AFI: 1983), 44-66.

Education and Training: 
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
M.A., University of California, Berkeley
B.A., Humboldt State, Arcata, and Freie Universität Berlin
Teaching Interests: 

Play, Art and Games, Technology and Culture, Media Art, Digital Media, Documentary Media, German Cinema.