Es freut mich sehr, an der Konferenz "Das digitale Bild – Die soziale Dimension, politische Perspektiven und ökonomische Zwänge" (28-30.04) eine Keynotezu halten. Die Konferenz wird im Rahmen des DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm: „Das digitale Bild“ ausgerichtet.

Composite Images. On the transformation of visual truth claims.

Forensic Architecture and the Invisible Institute, still from Six Durations of a Split Second: The Killing of Harith Augustus (2019).

Abstract:

It has been a peculiarity of Western modernity – the cultural constellation that extended, roughly, from the mid 15th to the mid 20th century – to assume that images represent the world as it is, in an objective, optical sense and that which can be seen is what counts. Contemporary digital technologies of image-making are, on the surface, extending this claim by creating ever more ‘realistically’ detailed images (HD, UltraHD, 4K, 8K, Gigapixel etc), yet, more importantly, they are fundamentally undermining it, by moving from the representation of an external reality to the generative production of images. At the same time, what constitutes reality is becoming ever more complex and distributed, eroding the value of representational images to make sense of it. With that, we need a new way of understanding images, as composites rather than indexes, and the role they play in the production of truth claims.