Research

I. RESEARCH

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Main interests:

History and Theory of Vision and Visualization, Relationship between Art and Science, Aesthetics and Epistemology of Image Production Processes, Concepts of Space, History and Theory of Landscape Painting, History and Theory of Drawing and Graphics, Early Modern Portraits, Methods of Art History and the History of Science.

 

Current Main Projects

  • VISUAL WORLDS – Vision, Visual Objects, and Visual Disciplines (Book project, co-authored with James Elkins – see here the Table of contents –, under contract with Oxford University Press). A large textbook on the visual world,  “it will compete with existing textbooks on art, but it will also include images from biology, medicine, physics, and engineering; and it will integrate theories of vision from the arts, humanities, and sciences. This will be the first major, synthetic survey that no longer focuses on fine art (as in art history), popular culture (as in visual studies), or particular socio-economic contexts (as in anthropology and postcolonial theory), but addresses the sum total of writing on the subject of vision, visuality, and visual practices, in art, area studies, political theory, neurology, cognitive psychology, and other fields”.
  • VISUALISATION. A CRITICAL SURVEY OF THE CONCEPT (Conference and book project, funded by: German Research Foundation / Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG, book under contract with LIT Verlag Berlin). The project explores the adequacy of visualization as a universal notion from an interdisciplinary and multicentered perspective that juxtaposes fields approaching the iconic process with different expectations: from Philosophy, Aesthetics and Epistemology, Literature and the Arts through Economics, Sociology, the Natural Sciences to Medicine, Neuroscience, Mathematics, Computational Physics and Data Processing. The starting point has been has been an international CONFERENCE (Program PDF) in April 2014.
  • INDUCTION OF VISIBILITY. An Attempt at the Notion of Aesthetic-Epistemic Action / INDUKTION VON SICHTBARKEIT. Ein Versuch zum Begriff der ästhetisch-epistemischen Aktion (Funded by: German Research Foundation / Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG)
      • The project is about the nature of processes of visual transformation and imaging as operations that involve the interplay between an object, a seeing and judging subject, and the image s/he produces. I propose to define these operations in terms of the new notion “induction of visibility” as a category of visual and imaging action in its own right. Since it derives from and likewise provokes operations that are at the same time epistemic and aesthetic, I propose the notion of aesthetic-epistemic action for this category. RELATED PUBLICATION ONE ; RELATED PUBLICATION TWO

Past Main Projects

  • ENCHANTED DRAWING. Framing Animation as an Imaging Culture (Funded by: German Research Foundation / Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG), a cooperation project with the Department of the History of Art – Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the Graduate Field Committee in Film Studies / Department of English of the University of Maryland. RELATED LINKS: Enchanted Drawing IEnchanted Drawing II
  • 2003-2008 Head of the Open Digital Library Project Drawing with optical instruments. Devices and concepts of visuality and representation. 
A project in cooperation with the Library and the IT-Group of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science – MPIWG Berlin.
The open Digital Library is part of the International Open Access Network ECHO (European Cultural Heritage Online), <http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/content/optics>.
 Funded by: German Research Foundation – DFG
  • 2003-2007 Head of the Project “Vision and Representation between Aesthetic Experience and Scientific Objectivity” in cooperation with Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science – MPIWG Berlin. The project is a research Unit of the Cooperative Research Center – SFB 626 “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits”, Freie Universität Berlin.
Funded by: German Research Foundation – DFG.
  • 2002 Research Project “Between Experience and the Real World: Landscape Painters, Natural Philosophers and Optical Drawing Devices 1806-1840”. Kunsthistorisches Institut, Freie Universität Berlin.
Funded by: German Research Foundation – DFG.
  • 1998-2000 Research Project “The Interaction of Art and Science. Its Character and Limits 1600-1900”. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich.
Funded by: Ministry of Culture, State of Bavaria.

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