Organizer and Cooperation Partners: Research Group Image, Medium, Body. An Anthropological Perspective at the Academy of Arts and New Media in Karlsruhe; House of World Cultures in Berlin Concept and Coordination: Birgit Mersmann
Images live of transmission. They transmit themselves and are transmitted - in a socio-anthropological and media technological sense. The lively presence of images owes itself to the idea of magic mediation as well as to the palpable media of transmission, that images need for entering into evidence - and starting their migration. Like nomads, images move from place to place, from the imaginary to the medial forth and back, from man to man, from one culture to another. As a result of this high transfer potential, images have been substantially contributing to cultural exchanges. In this function they were highly stimulated by the development of new electronic image transmission techniques. The more transcultural images are circulating, the more intensive are the exchanges and interrelations between different cultures, also those between image cultures. The increasingly image-based transmission of culture, that culminates in the idea of a global visual culture, provokes reflections about the cultural codification of images. What happens if images and visual media enter into a representational system, that is, relating to its image and media culture, differently codified. The conference "Transmission Image" examines the cultural transfer potential of and through images. The attention will be directed to images and visual media as cultural transmitters, while keeping close to them as envoys, messengers, missionaries, diplomats and negotiators as well as refugees and expellees, tracing out images and their media between imagination and migration. The clash of and the mediation between different image cultures occurs primarily, where people are traveling, discovering, conquering, colonizing, missionizing, migrating and transnationalyzing. Accordingly, the various clashes and fusions extend from colonial to global image contexts: What kind of contacts do local image traditions and practices establish with imported ones, let them be imposed or taken over voluntarily? How do they instrumentalize western images and visual media? In which way is the relation between image and medium shifting within the transmission process? What forms of interpictoriality are emerging? Which media are crossing points for the development of new transcultural image codes and image genres like for example Bollywood and Japanimation? The conference searches to answer these questions by involving a cultural and media anthropological perspective on images. It reverts to the discussions brought up with the conference "Migrating Images", which was held in November 2003 in the House of World Cultures.
