Francesco Casetti – Screening Fear. On Protective Media

2. 10. 2024

Francesco Casetti, Screening Fear. On Protective Media, Zone Books, New York: 2023

Towards the end of 2023, leading media studies theorist Francesco Casetti released a new book, in which he presents a provocative hypothesis: What if modern media, as we know them, trap us in their grasp instead of providing protection? What if, in their effort to keep reality under control, they use the same methods of violence as those they try to resist? Through historical events such as the 18th-century presentation of Phantasmagoria or the picture palaces of the golden age of cinema, he reaches the recent era of video conferencing that we all experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these, he observes the principle of how the ways of mediating information in the world we live in have changed.

Text: Anežka Januschka Kořínková

#47 Make Voices Be Heard

“Let everyone be heard” is another way of putting the message of this issue tied to this year’s Fotograf Festival of the same name, the guest curators of which are Noemi Smolik and Adam Vačkář. Its motivation is to give space to voices that primarily come from the eastern part of the old continent, which, in our experience, tend to go unheard.