Bent Fausing

Primary fields of research

Aesthetics and visual communications in modern media - and everything that this involves of human relations, interactions, fascinations, affects and media. In continuation of this, I am very interested in everyday interactions and the many symbols and images, which are included in our daily life and create a world of - often-overlooked - great importance.

Current research

Research project with the title "Screen Society", where four essential screens from the first industrial, mechanical to the second industrial, digital century are analyzed and theorized. These screens are: (a) the photograph - with an eye to previous screens: the typed (book)page, painting and especially the mirror, (b) TV screen exemplified by TV advertising especially for mobile phones, (c) the computer screen - websites, social media and selfies - and (d) mobile phone display . The project is the center around analysis and conceptualization and specifically aimed at examining the visual side of the screens. This emerging another important project: to identify the question 'What is an Image?' and especially in the screen age and the modern digital media.

Fields of interest

The education of the senses; images analysis and theory, visual communications,  the-pre-language, the language and the post-language; the language and the images and the images of the language; mixed media, especially tv and internet; the cross-cultural and cross-aesthetic society; media symbiosis; synesthesia, interaction through media and especially images and in reality; the connection between internal (mental) and external (media) images; images and globalization; sight and senses, affect and fascination especially in connection with images, the self and the selfies, selfie-iamges.

CV

Education and employments

2007: Associate Professor WSQ (with special qualifications) 

1980: Associate Professor in aesthetics and visual communications at Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. I have at several occasions - 1993, 1997, 2014 - been visiting professor at universites in USA (Columbia, UCSB).

1978: Postdoc at Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics/Film and Media Department, University of Copenhagen

1975: Research Associate at Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics/Film and Media Department, University of Copenhagen

Master degree in Northern Language and Literatur, Film and Media, Psychology. PhD with a thesis about Forms of Fascinations.

Knowledge of languages

Danish, Scandinavian, English, German, French; a little Russian, a little Ukrainian and a little more Italian.

Teaching

We pick up the world and form it through the images we shape and seek out. We go out into the world with our images and the world enters us through its images. The body is the meeting point and intermediate link for the images, which come to and from us. We are not only sensing subjects; we are constantly symbolizing and getting hold of our sense datum through images. To see and sense is in itself a way of formulating. It is a need so great that we cannot stop it. The images must come out – in dreams, in concrete images, constructed or not, in phantasms, in sound images, in the metaphors and symbols of words, in bodily expressions, in sensations of textures, and in synesthetic sensing. The world is perceived from the inside through the body, and we have the possibility to look at it from the outside through the images, which are made from this material. This forms the basis of my teaching and supervising interests, which then, depending on the medium, the specific communication situation and recipients can be varied. The whole thing can be assembled in the simple and complex questions: What is an image today, and where and how are the images expressed?

Introductory remarks on publicationslist

The publications list includes due to technical reasons only publications from 1990 onwards. Moreover, it also lack information about communication mediation in the period after 1990, exhibitons for example. Those interested in my publications before 1990 and my mediation after 1990 can apply directly to me: [email protected]

Short presentation

- Director of the international research project Sensoric Image Science.

- Head of the research group Digi-Comm at INSS.

- Editorial member oof the international crossmedia journal IJIM, International Journal of Interactive Multimedia.

- Peer-reviewer at the International Journal of Communication (IJOC).

- Peer-reviewer ved Nordicom News.