Module 01: The Power of Images – Image Politics (workshop)

The first module is at the same time the intellectual and thematic axis of the entire "Iconic Criticism" project. It focuses on exploring the ominous "power", i.e. the effect, of the iconic as manifested down the long history of the image and knowledge, from the ancient high cultures to the digital revolution of the present day. But the "Iconoclastic Controversy" is not merely an historical phenomenon, it is also the key to the modern-day cultural, social and "political" role of images. To understand and contribute to an enlightened critique of that role is the primary objective of this NCCR project.

Clearly, iconoclastic portents have accompanied the history of the image from the earliest times. In the Near Eastern cultures, particularly, in Israel and Egypt, there is evidence of an awareness of the potency of images. But what can we learn from the millennia-old controversy between iconodulists and iconoclasts over the power of images? A strife that continued in the twentieth century, becoming internalized in scientific and artistic processes.

Thus it was that the " flood of images" unleashed by the digital technology of the 1990s – in diverse forms, often melded with text, figure, symbol or sound – fundamentally changed the world of work. The consequences of this welter of images affect the lives of millions across the globe. We are also dealing with a confrontation between old and new images, a conflict between an analogue and a digital anthropology.

Running parallel to this, with its origins in the late nineteenth century, modern art has proved a laboratory of the image. Moreover, th