Digital Image Complexity: in Media Art and the Innovation of Novel “Hard Humanities” for its Visualization, Interpretation and Conceptualization

In the 21st Century, the Digital Arts utilize emergent science and technology as both their medium and subject. Reciprocally, Media Art informs and inspires some of the most cutting-edge innovation between the Arts and Humanities, Natural and Social Sciences, and Technological Sector. Fifty years after being first recognized as a field of inquiry, however, Media Art remains underrepresented by most Cultural Heritage institutions and unintegrated by many Art History scholars. Significantly though, the crosspollination across knowledge domains that characterizes Media Art, can support a unique genealogical meta-analysis for the very concept of today’s complex image. To what extent does Media Art regularly and systematically organize digital technology and imagery in order to create visual statements about the pivotal socio-political challenges of our time, such as with the empricially-selected case studies for this project: climate change, virtual finance, migration and surveillance society? And how do Media Artworks create both an image concept and a socio-political discourse, thereby transforming the role of images in a society? This proposed study will trans-disciplinarily combine Art History, Image Science and Digital Humanities towards the development of novel “Hard” Humanities. The research builds from the Principle Investigator’s leading international scientific achievements, which include the pioneering Archive of Digital Art, its social Web 2.0 features, and Research Thesaurus. Here, by using qualitative as well as quantitative methodologies, in sequential and simultaneous tension, the project will use instrumented procedures for computer-assisted analysis beyond the state-of-the-art and envision new theories to inform future inquiry. This project breaks new ground not only by critically advancing the study of Media Art and its histories, but of the very images by which the Digital Revolution and its futures is perceived and understood.