10:30 Registration

11:00 Heinz Drügh (Goethe University), Andrey Logutov (Goethe University). Introductory Remarks

11:15 Onur Sesigür (Kadir Has University, Turkey). Personal Playlisting: Curating Repetition

Streaming platforms have vast catalogues which necessitate some form of filtering and a process of choice for any personalised consumption. Whether or not these filters are automated, and recommender algorithms influence the choices in effect, the resulting subsets of "everything" are how we interact with and consume media content. In contemporary music consumption practices, personal playlists can be considered a form of these subsets that highlight human agency. Listeners can take refuge in personally curated playlists that function as private pools of songs, separated from the constant flow of content on music streaming platforms. These pools provide ease and safety in choice as well as in repetition. As a transformation and remediation of mixtapes (if they are heavily curated) or record collections (if they are more aggregated), playlists are often created to be looped and experienced more than once. Looking at how these loops were constructed and how they functioned in a historical continuum from physical containers to digital ones and finally to streaming platforms provides an opportunity to think about how we choose, manage, experience, and re-experience the music we like.

12:00 Andrey Logutov (Goethe University). “A Magical Piece of Code”: A Note on the Sentimental / Sedimental Condition of Contemporary Repetition 

The reads John Cale’s recent track There Will Be No River as a media message that, if listened to repeatedly, reveals itself as a commentary on the symbiotic assemblage of music makers, media technologies, AI-driven recommender systems, and listening subjects. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes analyzes photography through the binary of code (studium) and non-code (punctum), even as he destabilizes that very distinction. In my view, this approach—both productive and destructive—offers a powerful lens for understanding how media constitute subjects and generate the sentimental landscapes that moved Barthes to think of punctum in the first place. The relation between code and non-code has been repeatedly renegotiated in the twentieth century: in the redefinition of life through the informational model of DNA, and in the triumph of digital (code-based) technologies over analog (mimesis-based) ones. Reinterpreting Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” I propose that any sufficiently vast quantity of data or code becomes indistinguishable from non-code. Media forms such as songs have long served as interfaces that modulate and negotiate this boundary and witnessed successive technological transformations. As we enter an age that may sublate the digital/analog divide, these forms can help us imagine new ways of inhabiting both our technological and organic dimensions allowing us to think of “the magical piece of code” as a shared condition of humans and AI alike. Repetition, in this context, is the conditio sine qua non of both exposure and understanding, with AI and non-AI selves facing each other as sedimental residue of accumulated repetitions.

12:45 Lunch

14:00 Gregory Lambert (Siracuse University, US). Streaming “Difference and Repetition” Today

What subjectivities are produced and embodied by the increasingly automated and algorithm-driven forms of repetitive media consumption? Are contemporary media consumers still meaningfully distinct as ‘listeners,’ ‘viewers,’ or ‘readers,’ or are they better understood as generalized ‘users’ who navigate content flows?

15:00 Yves Citton (Paris 8, France). Dynamics of Repetition and Curiosity from AI Videos to Musical Familiarization 

It could be argued that events only make sense when they kind-of-repeat-themselves. Cognition is always re-cognition. The evolution of our tastes and attention would then follow a dynamics of repetition and curiosity, which takes various forms depending on the type of Gestalts afforded by each media. A brief comparison between music and film will illustrate this, but the central question will address the scales of the units considered. The developments of generative AI are based on repetitions of subperceptive proximities in a latent field. One of our challenges is to better understand the threshold-effects that generate recognition, familiarization and, ultimately, meaning.

16:00 Coffee

17:00 Roundtable: Experiences of Repetition

The roundtable will be structured around three student essays selected through a student essay competition, the results of which will be announced on November 1, 2025. The three winners will be incorporated into the program with their respective papers.

18:00 End

19:00 Dinner

10:00 Andrey Logutov (Goethe University), Boris Podoroga (University of Lille, France). Introductory Remarks

10:15 Susana Tosca (University of Southern Denmark). Endless Scrolling: the pleasures of revisiting and recycling in Teen TikTok Use

Based on a qualitative study with Danish teenagers, this presentation examines why and how users engage in the repetitive act of scrolling through TikTok, considering how trends, genres, and fragmented media forms structure their everyday entertainment. Building on my previous work with the book Repetition and Sameness in Contemporary Media Culture, it expands on how TikTok fosters both repetitive engagement and creative recombination.

11:15 Boris Podoroga (Lille University, France). Repetition as Trance: Flicker Films in the American and European Avant-Garde

In my talk, I would like to describe the experience of avant-garde film viewing, namely the so-called flicker films, as a state of trance. In these films, the central role is played by the phenomenon of flicker, or the stroboscopic effect, which is one of the key elements of the cinematic apparatus. While in feature films flicker usually functions as a means of supporting the story, plot, or fabula - the central motor of the viewer’s attention - in avant-garde cinema the flicker itself becomes the very force that governs and directs perception of the spectator. 

In my analysis, I will focus on works such as Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer, and Gaspar Noé’s Climax, showing how these films extend and develop the principles of Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine. The repetitive patterns of light and sound flicker in these films induce so-called closed eye or entoptic vision, placing the spectator in a state of trance and opening up his hypnagogic imagination. This quality aligns these films not so much with the tradition of cinema as with the culture of the rave.

12:00 Felix Hitzel (Goethe University). Eat Sleep Watch Swipe Repeat. Function of Repetition in Short Form Videos 

When it comes to contemporary digital cultures, one relatively new form stands out: the Reel, TikTok, Short, or, more broadly, the short-form video. It seems necessary to look closely and define what these platform-based aesthetic forms of text, film, music, and image (or thumbnail) have in common; or, more precisely, to clarify what distinguishes a short web video from a short form. These distinctions arise from fundamental media differences in how such videos interact with the human body and mind. In doing so, they depend on, or activate, patterns of repetition that are already known or subconsciously present.

12:45 Lunch

14:00 Elizabeth Margulis (Princeton, USA). Music and Repetition: The View from Psychology 

This talk provides an overview of empirical research on musical repetition. It summarizes the key questions and methods that animate this area of research, and speculates about what might or should come next. It highlights in particular the points of convergence and friction between this work and broader humanistic approaches. 

15:00 Tomáš Dvořák (Charles University, Czechia). Repetition and / as Modulation

Repetition implies some (understanding of) identity of that, which is repeated. Social and cultural, legal and economic conventions tolerate a certain measure of variability, irreducible not only regarding the conditions of reception but also the very material constitution of the work. An artefact, a musical phrase, a video or a theatrical performance are always fields of variables constituted by more or less different versions of themselves. Our sensitivity and measure of in/attention to these differences are historically and technically conditioned. Before recording media, any object was thought of as being a token of a type. Nineteenth-century media of indexical writing (photography, phonography, kymography, cinematography…) brought about a new cultural logic of seriality (proceeding from the ideals of scientific reproducibility and industrial engineering). It is often understood as the production of identical copies in potentially infinite numbers. Yet variability doesn’t disappear as much as it is transformed into a new regime of modulation. Artefacts are standardised and streamlined by new cultural techniques of machine operation that emerge first as mechanical control knobs and levers. For example, in early phonographs one could select from a variety of needles (for soft, medium or loud tone) and adjust the speed and volume. Film projectors offered the articulation of and control over image magnification, speed and illumination. Any recording could be replayed in multiple ways and modulated by the operator of the apparatus. A piece of music or of a moving image is a metastable, dynamic entity that can appear in distinct instantiations through parametric tuning. The techniques of modulation are becoming increasingly automatised and black boxed but can still be found in most of our devices as “settings” of audio or image quality, often in the form of predefined formats and filters (e.g., in music streaming platforms, one can control the equaliser but also the audio quality based on internet bandwidth – or, more typically, let their device auto adjust). The variable attributes (such as brightness, contrast, colour, loudness, tone, speed, size or resolution…) are usually perceived as only secondary properties of recordings but they are rather their very constituting elements. Current synthetic media are then fully based on modulation, understood broadly as a more than human regulation of countless infinitesimal parameters.

16:00 Coffee 

16:30 Beer Albers (Frankfurt University). How (Not) to Kill the Unrepeated. Singularity, Repetition, and the Ethos of Philology

Philology is commonly thought of as an endeavor to understand texts as singularities: A philologist should primarily focus on the uniqueness of texts instead of aiming to subsume them under general concepts. Textual scholarship, however, often takes part in creating these singularities in the first place: With ancient texts, the ‘authentic’ text first has to be established by means of semi-poetic scholarly operations commonly known as textual criticism.  Both in textual understanding and in textual criticism, philology relies on what could be called a ‘methodological repetitivism’: Philologists presuppose an inherent iterability of any linguistic sign and will therefore both tend to explain the meaning of a word with respect to other instances of that word and prefer ‘common’ (i. e.: frequently repeated) words over lexical singularities when it comes to emending texts that have been partly lost in the process of their transmission. In other words: philologists tend to presuppose a generality that is inherent in the singularities they focus their attention on. How can such a structure be presupposed without running the risk of eliminating the text in its unrepeated singularity? The talk discusses the tension between singularity and generality as an antinomy inherent in philological practice and its consequences for the philologists ethos (or habitus).

17:15 Ondřej Váša (Charles University, Czechia). “This Has Never Happened Before, and Now It’s Happening Again”: A Note on Prayer as a Singular Repetition 

In the Christian ecosystem, prayer is above all a matter of repetition: from the Psalms to the Rosary to the Lord's Prayer, which is not only the subject of recitation in regular cycles but also of word-for-word iteration; after all, we are supposed to repeat it after Christ himself. Certainly, “petitionary” prayers in particular arise from a sudden desire or distress and as such are subject to personal invention as much as to urgent spontaneous verbalization that does not look behind its linguistic shoulder, which in a way is true of the personal dimension of all prayers, from adoration to cries for help. But even these prayers tend to repeat themselves, at least in their appeal for hearing. However, the same ecosystem produces a paradox: to the same extent that prayer is subject to repetition – in the name of focus, humility, but also the sacrifice of time – it also represents a speech that can only be uttered once. If, together with Jacques Derrida, we conceive of “pure prayer” as a type of linguistic act that “demands only that the other hear it, receive it, be present to it, be the other as such, a gift, call, and even cause of prayer” (Derrida 1992), then we necessarily arrive at a prayer – whether traditional or perhaps in the form of a reappropriated song by Mark Lanegan – that represents a type of unprecedented and at the same time singular repetition. Singular because both the “other” and the Lord are unlikely to be reminded in the manner of “I already told you... So where’s the problem?” unless prayer is to be turned into coercion, command, persuasion or power strategy. Repetition because the other precedes each such prayer as someone who hears it as something he might have already heard. Derrida’s claim can thus be put another way: prayer represents a linguistic act that translates the structural repeatability of words into a regime of singular expression: into sentences that have only one chance, again and again.

18:00 Discussion and Closing Remarks