ADAPTIVE IMAGING

Adaptive Images

ADAPTIVE IMAGES

Technology and aesthetics of situative digital imaging

The project is part of the priority programme „The digital Image“ of the German Research Foundation. From a multi-perspective position, the programme investigates the central role of the image in the complex process of digitisation of knowledge in theory and practice.

With recent technological developments, digital images are increasingly being integrated into portable, sensor-controlled and augmented visualisation systems that operate as a function of their environment. While virtual or augmented reality applications have become established in the consumer field, they also promise to yield wide-ranging applications in professional contexts, for instance in industrial production.

In fields such as medical practice however, the far-reaching implications of this technological arsenal of devices are becoming clear. Therapeutic interventions are assisted via automated real-time visualisations to such an extent that digital images have replaced the real body as the primary object of reference. The body is immobilised in hybrid, multimedia and multimodal image apparatuses that are being continually extended with interfaces, mechatronic and logistical elements.

This constant spatio-temporal interplay of visualisations, objects and actions produces new opportunities for diagnosis and treatment, but also poses challenges in relation to the perception, interpretation and design of images, which are increasingly guiding actions and even life-and-death decisions as algorithms anticipate decisions and restrict actions. If adaptive images can only be experienced individually, their purported proximity to reality results in a specific impossibility to grasp them.

This shift from digital to adaptive images forms the project’s central focus. Based on application-related case studies, it will explore the particular aesthetic, technical and operational facets of adaptive imaging and the associated representational problems. This study will not only make a fundamental contribution to the concept and critique of the image but also to better understand the overall mechanism of digital imaging that is in the very heart of the priority programme (SPP).

Matthias Bruhn
– Professur für Kunstwissenschaft & Medientheorie, University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe

Moritz Queisner
– Research associate, University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe

Kathrin Friedrich
– Associated member, Forschungskolleg „Sensing – Zum Wissen sensibler Medien”, Universität Potsdam

Image credit: Malte Euler, Moritz Queisner, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0, 2018.