The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Maria Serafini

October’s Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar will be led by Maria Serafini (University of Milan) who will talk about “At the Limits of Mediation: Eulogy, Digital Afterlife and the Media of Finitude”. This will be an online session and will be held on 28 October 2026, at 15:00 WET, via Microsoft Teams. Click here for registration.

Abstract

What happens when an image no longer marks the distance between the living and the dead, but promises to overcome it? Taking the Black Mirror episode “Eulogy” (2025) as its starting point, this seminar reflects on the image as a limit between presence and absence, memory and simulation. If Roland Barthes read the photograph as the trace of an irretrievable that-has-been, “Eulogy” imagines its transformation into an immersive, inhabitable environment — a technology that allows the mourner to enter the photograph and move through memory itself. The episode is approached from two intersecting perspectives. First, in relation to contemporary digital mourning: what happens to the eulogy when the work of remembrance is mediated through AI, immersive archives and posthumous data? Second, as a philosophical reflection on the limits of mediation: the technology promises co-presence, yet gaps, omissions and inaccessible memories continually re-emerge within the reconstructed image. Finitude therefore manifests itself on two levels: in human existence, shaped by mortality, loss and forgetting, and in media themselves, which glitch, degrade and become obsolete. To enter the image, in the end, is not to overcome death, but to confront the persistence of finitude within mediation itself.

Bio

Maria Serafini, PhD, is a researcher in aesthetics and visual culture who collaborates with the Coordinated Research Centre on Extended Reality (CRC EXT) at the University of Milan. Her work lies at the intersection of aesthetics, media studies and anthropology, with a focus on mourning, images and digital afterlife. She was a doctoral researcher within the ERC Advanced Grant project AN-ICON (2022–2025) and a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Warburg Institute, London (2024, 2025). She completed her PhD in Philosophy and Human Sciences in 2026 with a dissertation on lamentation from ritual to the digital, in dialogue with Ernesto de Martino and Aby Warburg. Her current research focuses on generative AI and technologies of remembrance, exploring both the digital survival of mourning gestures and the production of posthumous presence.