Christian Olesen

Christian Olesen

Assistant Professor Digital Media & Cultural Heritage , University of Amsterdam • Media Suite Teaching & Training Officer, CLARIAH NL

Disciplines
  • Media Studies
  • Music, theater, performing arts and media

Christian Gosvig Olesen is Assistant Professor Digital Media and Cultural Heritage at the University of Amsterdam. He teaches courses in film and media studies and in moving image archiving and presentation. His research interests include moving image archiving theory and history, film and media historiography, digital methods, found footage, remixing and practice-based research, the latter with a special interest in critical practices of digital (film) sampling in experimental and popular music.

Currently, he is also Teaching & Training Officer for the CLARIAH Media Suite, where he coordinates and develops the Media Suite Learn initiative. In this capacity he helps integrating the Media Suite's collections and tools into curricula and research projects at Dutch universities, while researching the historical emergence of multimedia scholarship and digital research environments in media studies. This research focus also feeds into his current book project Remaking Film History: A Critical Introduction to Digital Historiographies, Methods and Approaches (working title).

Previously he has carried out research on digital methods and artistic research for audiovisual archives in various projects. As researcher and project manager in the project The Sensory Moving Image Archive: Boosting Creative Reuse for Artistic Practice and Research (2017-2019), led by Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture and Chief Curator at EYE Filmmuseum Giovanna Fossati, he contributed to developing an environment for browsing moving images from EYE and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision based on visual features and relations. In 2017-2018 he was Principal Investigator of the NWO CLARIAH project MIMEHIST: Annotating EYE's Jean Desmet Collection. The project embedded Eye Filmmuseum's Jean Desmet Collection in the Media Suite and made it possible to research the collection using video annotation tools. In 2017-2018, he was invited as the inaugural Scholar-in-residence at the EYE Filmmuseum in the museum's new artist and scholar in residence program. During his residency he researched the role played by compilation films in the museum's early acquisition and programming policies, focussing primarily on Nicole Vedres's Paris 1900 (1947).