DFG Priority Program: The Digital Image
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| Permit | 2018 |
| begin | 2019 |
| Estimated end | 2025 |
| coordination | Hubertus Coal (LMU) Hubert Locher (Photo Archive Photo Marburg) Hanni Geiger (LMU) Julian Stalter (LMU) Leonie Groblewski (Photo Archive Photo Marburg) |
| Website | https://www.digitalesbild.gwi.uni-muenchen.de |
The priority program (SPP) "The digital image" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) brings together exemplary projects from a multi-perspective perspective and addresses the central role that the image plays in the complex process of digitizing knowledge in theory and practice.
The SPP consists of 12 projects at various German universities. These projects within the program each pursue their own questions in relation to the topic. The aim of the overarching program, however, is - despite the individual research projects - to develop new perspectives and approaches in exchange with one another and to find joint access to this complex topic.
Overarching research project
The SPP pursues a critical thematization and reflection of the dimension of the "digital image" as a profound epistemological upheaval. This can only take place in an extremely transdisciplinary exchange and with special involvement of information sciences: Firstly, projects were included in the SPP that reflect the role of the image in the digitization process in order to contribute to a theory of the digital image in its use in art, science, and culture and secondly, the phenomenon of describing and interpreting the manifestations and practices of the digital turn in its visual dimension. Third, they target the practice of digital image technologies, e.g. B. the development of innovative forms of using the digital image as a knowledge medium in a scientific environment. The weighting of these three aspects can be fundamentally different within a project. Under the umbrella of the SPP, they should be fruitfully connected with one another. One focus of the SPP is to be in the field of practice, and in doing so it should address the examination and reflection of technological instruments and social infrastructures.
Speakers of the program are Hubertus Kohlen from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and Hubert Locher from the Philipps University in Marburg and director of the Photo Archive Photo Marburg . The project will be coordinated for the first three years at the Institute for Art History at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.
History of the SPP
The initiative for the project was received by the DFG as an application text back in 2017. Hubertus coal , Hubert Locher , Harald Klinke, Björn Ommer and Heidrun Stein-Kecks were involved in the program committee . The approval was granted in March 2018 by an expert committee. In April 2018, applicants for the first three-year funding period of the program were invited through an official call for proposals from the DFG.
Sub-projects of the SPP
Adaptive images. Technique and aesthetics of situational imaging
Due to the recent development of technology, digital images are increasingly being integrated into portable, sensor-controlled and augmenting visualization systems that operate depending on their environment. As so-called virtual or augmented reality applications have now arrived in the consumer sector, they promise comprehensive usability in professional contexts, for example in industrial production.
In fields such as medical practice, however, the far-reaching consequences of technological upgrading are also becoming clear. Operations are supported by automated real-time visualizations to such an extent that screen displays take the place of real bodies as the primary reference objects. These are clamped into comprehensive multimedia and multimodal image devices, which are continuously expanded through interfaces, mechatronic and logistical elements. Interfaces and algorithms anticipate decisions and narrow actions.
One consequence of this permanent spatiotemporal interlocking of visualizations, objects and actions are new possibilities for diagnosis and therapy, but also new challenges with regard to the perception, interpretation and design of images that guide action and even become life-critical. The demand for increased closeness to reality results in a specific intangibility for adaptive images that are only experienced individually.
The transition from the digital to the adaptive image is therefore the focus of the investigation. Using application-related case studies, the special aesthetic, technical and operational aspects of adaptive imagery and the associated problems of representation will be explored. The investigation promises not only a fundamental contribution to image criticism, but also to the mechanisms of digital imagery.
Architecture Transformed - architecture processes in digital image space
The project aims to investigate procedural relationships in architecture in the phase of transition from analog to digital planning and presentation methods between the 1980s and 2000s. The aim is to test the assumption of a media-specific character of architecture through the digital design and representation methods on the material and to determine how the digital image changes the concept and production of architecture.
Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic perspectives on the affordances of digital images in the context of museums and cultural heritage
The project combines the perspectives of Museum & Heritage Studies with those of Media & Digital Anthropology and Information Science. Two ethnographic studies are dedicated to the digital curating practices of everyday actors and are additionally enriched by eye-tracking methods. The focus of the studies is firstly on the multi-layered ways of dealing with digital image platforms and virtual museums, and secondly on the digital image practices of museum visitors.
Pictorial image criticism in social media. Explicit and implicit theorizing of the digital image
Using a practical theoretical approach, the project examines digital images that criticize other images in social media. The pictorial image criticism is thought of as a “materialized practice” that provides explicit and implicit media knowledge about the digital image. From this knowledge a theory of the digital image from the perspective of digital images should finally be drawn.
Image synthesis as a method of gaining knowledge about art history
Digital images enable us to bring works of art together virtually, to group them and rearrange them as desired. The potentially very complex connections, similarities and differences within such data sets can be analyzed by computers. However, this makes an understanding of the basic representations learned by the computer imperative for the scientific knowledge process. With the help of generative processes from the field of deep learning, a new methodology for the development and visualization of image concepts is to be established, which is based on the analysis of these representations, whereby the synthetic, digital image becomes an important instrument in the interpretation process as well as the art-historical knowledge gain.
From the mid-1990s, artists began programming alternative Internet browsers that display the content of the WWW differently than the standardized page metaphor would suggest. In order to analyze and compare these interactive, software-based image machines, not only the screen surface but also the program mechanics are examined. What kind of theory can be derived from this for the digital image, which methodological steps have to be added to the rest of the art historical repertoire?
The processed image. Image processing in the age of Photoshop
The aim of the project is a concept of digital images with regard to their specific quality as processed images. To this end, the project will conduct a software study on Adobe Photoshop, the preferred technical tool for digital image processing, and develop a theoretical framework for reflecting on the significance of digital image processing for our visual culture and for theories of digital media.
Digital past. Facticity and fiction in the visualization of history
The project asks what part digital image processes have in the understanding and imagination of past events and epochs. The focus is on those reconstructions that are ascribed a documentary, fact-based character (film documentaries, use of virtual reality in historical museums). The focus is on the question of which new forms of reception of history can be observed in the field of digital reconstruction and simulation - for example through the promise of a new immediacy made possible by immersive immersion in simulated pasts. The aim of the project is to develop criteria for a genuine visual history and theory of digital reconstruction, a critique of historical imagination under the changed conditions of digitization.
Behind the digital image. Photographs on community platforms and on Twitter as repositories for machine learning and journalistic publications
Legal, ethical and social issues of digital photo sharing are the subject of the research project. The interplay of image sharing, the intrinsic logic of internet platforms and (journalistic) rights of use both for images that are attributable to citizen journalism and for images that are used as crowdsourced images raises a number of research questions, including status the photographer and the digital image, the media practice of the users, and an ethic of the digital image.
Jameson 2.0. Cognitive mapping in contemporary art
Digital images are based on a twofold presentation crisis: On the one hand, digital data is not visual and visual representations are not their necessary form of appearance. On the other hand, in a data-driven world it seems impossible for the human observer to gain an insight into or an overview of the way data is generated and information processing that determines today's world. The project draws on exemplary procedures from art and visual culture, which develop alternative forms of representation and experience through data structuring, information generation and interpretation. These works and practices should be conceptualized under the term of cognitive mapping.
Japanese lateral roles and digital explorations: materiality, practices and locality
This project examines the specific problems and challenges in the re / presentation of Japanese narrative, illuminated transverse scrolls (emaki), which, horizontally aligned, represent a long format with sometimes more than twenty meters. This applies to book publications and museum spaces, as well as website interfaces and computer screens. On the one hand, the aim is to use a case study to analyze how the current digital tools (not) can (not) represent the special materiality, the practices and localities of the emaki with “high fidelity”. On the other hand, the project discusses the potential of future digitization strategies that should improve or enable various forms of reception and virtual handling of lateral roles.
Schemes. 3D classification procedures and archaeological criteria using the example of ancient terracotta statuettes
The case study would like to develop methods of automated corpus formation through 3D pattern recognition as well as reflect the associated schematizations and their scientific benefits for computer science and image sciences. Based on 200 terracottas from the late 4th and 3rd centuries. v. Chr., Which are quite similar to each other, a classification system is to be worked out using digital methods that is able to do justice to the complexity of the pictorial works. For this purpose, methods of object mining in 3D data are to be further developed in such a way that they can support the search for a suitable classification and categorization of the images. In close cooperation between computer science and archeology, this experimental process leads to a fundamental examination of the concept of pattern recognition as a humanities category.
The discussion of the different concepts and methods should be carried out in two complementary dissertations, the “Classifications and categorizations with digital methods. Constancy of form and form variance of female terracottas of Hellenism ”and“ 3D pattern recognition of ancient terracottas. Contributions to automated object mining ”on the topic.
Web links
- SPP website
- SPP blog
- Twitter channel of the SPP
- Announcement of the SPP on arthistoricum.net
- "The digital image" on the website of the Institute for Art History Munich
Individual evidence
- ↑ DFG - GEPRIS - SPP 2172: The digital image. Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
- ↑ DFG - German Research Foundation - Priority Program “The Digital Image” (SPP 2172). Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
- ↑ Funding approval from the DFG priority program "The digital image". Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
- ↑ DFG project: Chair of Architecture and Visualization. Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
- ↑ site CARMAH Berlin. Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
- ↑ Pictorial image criticism in social media. Explicit and implicit theorizing of the digital image. In: The digital image. Accessed April 4, 2020 (German).
- ↑ FAU Erlangen website. Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
- ↑ Browser art. Navigate in style. In: The digital image. Accessed April 4, 2020 (German).
- ↑ Dr. Till A. Heilmann: »The processed image. Image processing in the age of Photoshop ", German Research Foundation (DFG) Own position within the scope of the SPP" The digital image ", duration: 3 years - Institute for Linguistics, Media and Musicology. Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
- ↑ Digital past. Facticity and fiction in the visualization of history. In: The digital image. Accessed April 4, 2020 (German).
- ↑ Behind the digital image. Photographs on community platforms and on Twitter as repositories for machine learning and journalistic publications. In: The digital image. Accessed April 4, 2020 (German).
- ↑ Jameson 2.0. Cognitive mapping in contemporary art. In: The digital image. Accessed April 4, 2020 (German).
- ↑ Japanese lateral scrolls and digital explorations: materiality, practices and locality. In: The digital image. Accessed April 4, 2020 (German).
- ↑ Schemes. 3D classification and categorization of the ancient terracotta figures. In: The digital image. Accessed April 4, 2020 (German).