Designing habits. The digital image as application

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias Bruhn
• Subject Area: Art History ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 421644670

The digital image has become an application. In an age of smartphone-based image production and consumption, the technologies built into mobile devices allow for an unprecedented simplicity and speed in the production, editing, and sharing of images, and turn them into quasi-verbal means of communication. The aesthetics they exhibit are, above all, an expression of a fundamentally changed way of dealing with the image that is ubiquitously available and recontextualizable. As such, it is simultaneously looked at and used. After the previous project, under the term of “adaptivity”, has dealt with the increased ability of imaging processes to respond in real time to changing situations, perspectives and contexts, the following project is to reverse the line of vision: It is to investigate how the environment in which digital image technologies appear react to such offerings stylistically and gesturally, and to understand how ways of seeing and habits are anticipated by design. As a result, their combined formal and technical analysis is to develop a new concept of “habitualized images”.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2172: The digital Image