Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Ph.D., is Professor of “Media and Game Studies” and a Founding Director of the Cologne Game Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne. From 2004 to 2014, he was Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the ifs international film school Cologne. Prior to that, he worked as a writer in Germany and the US. He is co-editor of the series “Bild und Bit. Studien zur digitalen Medienkultur” and has published 15 books of fiction and non-fiction as well as several hundred essays and feature articles. He has also directed documentaries and written scripts for radio plays, feature films, and documentaries. His research concentrates on digital audiovisuality, especially film and games, transmediality and network culture.
Abstact
From Looking Through Alberti’s Window to Playing with Real-Time 3D Game En-gines: The Digital Transformation of the Modern Image Space (and Some of Its Cultural Consequences)
In order to be perceived as images and not as objects, images require – as Martin Seel stated – a specific space on which they appear. My presentation follows the transformations of the modern image space. First, I analyze the role images play in the history of digital games, thereby trying to define the function of visuality in view of this medium’s central characteris-tic, its procedurality. In a second step, expanding the historic horizon, I cast a look back at the media-technological and media-aesthetic construction of the modern image space, based on the principles of separation and distancing, between Renaissance and postmodernism and its being called into question since the mid-20th century. In a third step, I venture to explore the ongoing construction of a new digital image space, which seems to be based on the principles of fusion and operativity.
The talk will be held in English.