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Cluster 3: Pictorial Knowledge and Social Meaning [Bildwissen und sozialer Sinn]
Prof. Dr. Cornelia Bohn (University Lucerne), Michael Hagner (ETH Zurich)
This cluster studies the way in which images are involved in the creation of social meaning and conversely, how social meaning is related to the production of images. Closely connected to this is the question of how the relationship between image and knowledge may be defined. We assume that image practices – including the generation and interpretation of images, as well as the pictorial structuring of behaviour and cognition – always have to do with perception as a physiological operation and at the same time also represent the result of experience, judgement, conventions, rules, and spontaneous intuitions. A series of questions thus arises: how does the genesis and comprehension of images, on the one hand, and a similar perceptual experience of images on the other develop together? How does the meaning and knowledge of an image help to turn an epistemic object into a stable entity? If knowledge of images is generated and established as a binding knowledge beyond all propositional articulation, the issue then is how this systematic problem is seen in specific historical constellations of cognition, debated and approached or “solved” in different social, media-based, and cultural contexts?
Module: Image and Sociality [Bild und Sozialität]
Prof. Dr. Cornelia Bohn, Dr. Il-Tschung Lim, Leon Jesse Wansleben, M.Sc. (University Lucerne)
This module pursues a decidedly social-theoretical perspective, which takes into account the methodical positioning and observation of the image within social contexts. Images create meaning, insights, significance, as well as the surplus of significance in situ – that is, within cultural formations, temporal-historical contexts, or differentiated societal realms of significance – and they are, assumedly, themselves even more fundamentally involved in the development of specific realms of social meaning. This module aims the image question, frequently neglected in social theories, from a double perspective: on the one hand, the dimension of the visual and figurative is to be plumbed in a comparative perspective with other societal horizons of meaning (science, art, politics) using the example of economy for historical and contemporary semantic analyses (Project I); on the other hand, we shall focus on the (audio)videographic practices by amateur media users using the example of the YouTube clip portal and starting with the observation that a specific arrangement of images on the Internet may be studied taking recourse to social interaction approaches and identity-theory (Project II).
http://www.eikones.ch/
