We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today’s information explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual.

Imagery in the 21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the image in our time.

The contributors explore and discuss new critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neurosciences to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis. The goal is to expand visual competence in investigating new visual worlds and to build cross-disciplinary exchanges among the arts, humanities, and natural sciences.

I - Image Phenomena of the 21st Century

Sean CUBITT
Current Screens

Martin SCHULZ
The Unmasking of Images The Anachronism of TV faces

Eduardo KAC
Bio Art from Genesis to Natural History of the Enigma

Thomas VEIGL
Machinima. On the invention and innovation of a new visual media technology

Stefan HEIDENREICH
Steps toward Collaborative Video. Time and authorship

Olaf BREIDBACH
Imaging Science. The pictorial turn in bio- and neurosciences

Dolores STEINMAN, David STEINMAN
Towards new conventions for visualizing blood flow in the era of fascination with visibility and imagery

James ELKINS
Visual Practices Across the University: A Report

Wendy CHUNG
On Sourcery, or Code as Fetish

Christa SOMMERER, Laurent MIGNONNEAU
Interfaces Interaction Revisited

Marie Luise ANGERER
Feeling the Image. Some critical notes on Affect

Peter WEIBEL
Web 2.0 and the Museum

Adrian CHEOK
Kawaii. Cute Interactive Media

Tim Otto ROTH, Andreas DEUTSCH
Universal Synthesizer and window Cellular automata as a new kind of cybernetic images

Harald KRAEMER
Interdependence and Consequence – En Route toward a Grammar of Hypermedia Communication Design

IV - Coda

Martin KEMP
In and out of time