A Tale of One City
Timotheus Vermeulen

Taking cue from Ali Smith’s recent adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Timotheus Vermeulen confronts the extent to which our present moment, political-economic as well as cultural, is at once defined by a sense of epistemological hermeticity, permanent closeness, and performative – and radical – openness: one global city that is simultaneously, or still, increasingly imagined as multiple, a node in a network of other nonexistent but invoked cities. He approaches this in addressing algorithms and altergorithms, post-truth and speculation (or simulation or risk society), flatness and depthness, postmodernism and metamodernism.

Timotheus Vermeulen is associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, where he co-directs the media aesthetics research group. He has authored and edited numerous books and articles on post-postmodern culture as well as on contemporary aesthetics, in particular film and TV. His latest book, Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism, co-edited with Robin van den Akker and Alison Gibbons, is due to be published with Rowman and Littlefield in 2017. Vermeulen is currently working on a book project on the ‘as-if’ in contemporary art.