Aurora Hoel

A. S. Aurora Hoel (aka Aud Sissel Hoel) is Professor of Media Studies and Visual Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She received her PhD in media studies from the Faculty of Humanities at NTNU in 2005 for her dissertation on the formative powers of pictures. Her research interests revolve around science images and technologies of vision, and branch out to topics such as photography, measuring instruments, symbolic notation, visual thinking, medical imaging, and computer vision. Hoel is co-PI of the research project Face of Terror: Understanding Terrorism from the Perspective of Critical Media Aesthetics (Research Council of Norway, 2016-2020). During fall 2020, she a Novo Nordic Foundation Visiting Professor in Art & Art History at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. In the period 2015-2017, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Image Knowledge Gestaltung cluster at the Humboldt University of Berlin, undertaking a project called Styles of Objectivity: Agency, Alignment and Automation in Image-Guided Surgery (European Commission). Before that she was the PI of the interdisciplinary research project Picturing the Brain: Perspectives on Neuroimaging (Research Council of Norway, 2010-2014). She has also conducted a project on photography used for identification and control, resulting in an exhibition and an authored book/catalogue (Maktens bilder/Disciplinary Images, 2007). An overarching aim that cuts across Hoel’s various projects is to develop an operational account of images, and of mediating apparatuses more generally.