Central Themes of the newest Media Art Histories (climate, body, surveillence, image and media revolution) in Image historical context.

Digital technologies and devices have modified and transmitted the way we perceive and interact with images. The project addresses this transformation by exploring the particular expression potentials of Digital Art to visualise complex issues of the 21st century; e.g., climate change, body, surveillance, virtualization of global finance, image and media (r-) evolution. Using five case studies based on clusters of relevant themes from worldwide festivals identified through empirical study (conducted during a preliminary FWF project), this rigorous analysis will deliver aspects of an integrative conception of complex digital imagery. Digital Art uses and transforms the same technologies that led to these phenomena; whereas, traditional art media principally offers metaphorical approaches. Because of its inherent intermedial and interactive quality, Digital Art challenges the more object-oriented approach of traditional Art History, which does not integrate current digital image phenomena and its ephemeral, time-, process-, and experience-based factors. Even established definitions of the object or film based image in the early debates on digital imagery (Cubitt, Grau, Manovich, etc.) will no longer suffice. The proposed project contributes to this gap by exploring the mutually-intertwined complexity of Digital Art, which can be considered: 1) through artistic strategies and tactics of reception based on its specific mediality; e.g., interaction, simultanity, sequentiality, interface and display design, etc. 2) it is implied because of the inherent complexity of the topics addressed by Digital Artists.