Text, Image, Sound, Space (TBLR).
Text, Image, Sound, Space (TBLR)
The National Research School Text, Image, Sound, Space (TBLR) – Interpretation and Exchange of Theory was established in 2004 as a national network-based research school in the aesthetic disciplines, with the University of Bergen, NTNU, the University of Agder, the University of Oslo, Nord University, and UiT The Arctic University of Norway as partners. The school organizes a national doctoral training seminar at least once a year, featuring international guest lecturers. Invitations are sent to PhD candidates in the aesthetic disciplines at all of the member universities. At the same time, the school is both cross-aesthetic and discipline-oriented.
At least once a year, TBLR invites PhD-.students from the participating institutions to a one week PhD training seminar in literary and aesthetic studies with prominent international guest lecturers. TBLR also organizes shorter seminars on selected subjects relevant to a PhD study, such as “academic writing”, “supervision”, “transferable skills”, and specific methodological issues.
There is no tuition fee and TBLR covers the participants' board and lodging for the duration of the seminars (although the participants are usually requested to cover their own travel expenses).
TBLR cooperate with a number of other training schools such as Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies (CDS), European Summer School for Cultural Studies (ESSCS). PhD students from the consortium’s partner universities may apply for participation in any course organized by these schools (relevant information will be posted on TBLR’s home page).
As of 2025, the TBLR board consists of: Professor Knut Ove Eliassen (NTNU, chair), Professor Charles Ivan Armstrong (UiA), Professor Linda Nesby (UiT), Professor Ina Blom (UiO), Professor Pasi Väliaho (UiO), Professor Svein Halvard Jørgensen (Nord University), and Associate Professor Peter Svare Valeur (UiB).
The World, the Text, and the Machine
PhD and Training Seminar, October 7-9, 2026, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin
Texts, images, and sounds are carriers of meaning. They mediate content, and they interest us because they reveal something about the world we live in and how we inhabit it. As media, however, they are not merely about the world; they are of the world – sensate matter to be read and decoded with whatever abilities we can muster – as well as from the world, imbued with the tensions and the urgencies that made them come into being in the first place. In a seminal text from the 1980s, “The World, the Text, and the Critic”, Edward Said argued that understanding a text – or any other aesthetic medium – is never only a matter of grasping its message but also to engage with its “sensuous particularity” and its “historical contingency” as “infrangible parts” of its capacity to convey and produce meaning. Always situated, mediations merge the worldly situations and modalities of its creation and its reception.
If this stance reflects how scholars of art and literature work, we are now facing a situation where the production, distribution and reception of texts and visual/auditive aesthetic objects is rapidly becoming the domain of the procedures of Artificial General Intelligence. Computational analysis, mapping, and encoding turn texts, images, and sounds into bits of information – the ghostly and commodifiable derivatives of originary sensual imprints. In the information economy’s algorithmic parsing of archives, the immediate and imperative relevance of experiences of historical contingency and expressive urgency disappears.
AI confronts us with a machinic rationality that despite the blunt materiality of its apparatuses is incorporeal. This forces the question of what will happen at the intersection of the living body and the machine, and their different and even conflicting temporalities. If aesthetics springs from our experience of the ways we live in the world and is thus oriented towards the openness of what is yet to come, the calculus of the logical machine necessarily anticipates the future based on what has passed – abstractions lifted from the archives of the past.
Key-note speakers
Wolfgang Ernst, Professor für Medientheorien, Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Medienwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Tbc: Orit Halperin, Professur für Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden
Application information
General information and application form
General information and application form
Program: The program will consist of plenary key-note lectures (60-minute presentation, 30-minute discussion) and group work. Participant papers will be presented in a conventional conference setting (20-minute presentation, 20-minute discussion). In addition, there will be text reading sessions. Participants can choose between presenting their own work or a theoretical text from the reading list for a text session.
Those who would like to attend should fill in the application form and submit a short draft of their paper by the 4th of September at the latest (roughly 300 words).
Working language: English.
Credits (TBLR students): 2/5 ECTS. Participation and presentation will result in 2 ECTS, working over and submitting an edited version of the presentation (10-12 pages) after the seminar, will yield an additional 3 ECTS. Signed and authorized course diplomas will upon request be bestowed upon each PhD student participant having completed the course.
Credits (IKK students): Participation and presentation will result in ca. 3 ECTS
Hotel: Hotel reservations will be made by the participants themselves. Up to four nights will be reimbursed (up to 120 Euros per night) for students from the institutions participating in TBLR. A reasonable option is the Humboldt University’s guesthouse: https://www.ta.hu-berlin.de/guesthouse
Meals: Lunch every day, and dinner Thursday night.
Travel: PhD students are expected to cover their own travel expenses.
Texts: Reading materials will be made available one month before the seminar.
Deadline for application: 4th of September.
Any questions should be directed to Knut Ove Eliassen (knut.eliassen@ntnu.no).
Previous seminars
See our Norwegian TBLR website