FOR 1627:  Evidence of Images: History and Aesthetics

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2011 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 187396174

The Research Unit takes up one of the oldest and most fundamental questions concerning images, namely those pertaining to pictorial evidence and to the structures and procedures through which it is generated. Our point of departure is the premise that the generation of pictorial evidence as a basic aesthetic category involves the representation of an objective external reality, but at the same time engenders forms of genuine visual presence, which exists nowhere outside of the picture. This double definition of the image - as representation and as presence - is fundamental, for the central significance and function of images can only be adequately characterised through the dialectical mediation of these two modalities. It is our aim to investigate the various historic and systematic forms assumed by such processes of mediation.
Such an undertaking is both challenging and exigent, in view of the current situation in which cultural, visual and image studies seek to define the significance of images through apparently antagonistic approaches. Prevailing, on the one hand, is a wide-ranging scepticism concerning the status of evidence, which is provided by images in regard to nature and society, politics and history; according to this model, images are regarded as a kind of language, as analogous to legible systems of signs, which lack any inherent dynamism and which are exhausted, so to speak, once their messages have been decoded.
On the other hand, it is claimed that images generate autonomous and purely self-referential meanings, which, as a consequence, are wholly detached from any external reality, presumably achieving their aesthetic effectiveness solely by virtue of such isolation and distinctiveness. In contrast to these current trends, in the framework of our project it is precisely the referential valence of images to which particular attention shall be turned, repositioning categorically the aesthetic issue inherent to the generation of pictorial evidence.
The assumption that images precisely through aesthetic means embody reflexive potencies and thereby equal a discursive status is essential to the question of how they generate evidence. For this assumption opens up the possibility of deriving the binding criteria governing aesthetic forms from the images themselves - criteria, which are in turn bound up with their own histories.
In this way, the project of restoring historic depth to the category of evidence aims at a conflation of historical interpretation and aesthetic approach, of concept and percept, and consequently at a conceptual reintegration of the image¿s reference to reality and its own reality as a physical object. Only such a dynamic conception of image and evidence is able to overcome the virulent tendency toward an antagonistic confrontation between image and text and between visual and textual competence, thereby opening up new fields of research in transdisciplinary perspectives.

• DFG Programme: Advanced Studies Centres in SSH

Projects

• Evidence of Images: History and Aesthetics (Applicants Geimer, Peter ;  Krüger, Klaus )
• Evidence of Images: History and Aesthetics - Coordination project (Applicant Krüger, Klaus )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Klaus Krüger
• Project Head: Professor Dr. Peter Geimer