Jameson 2.0. Cognitive mapping in contemporary art

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Leeb
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 421346851

Digital images are based on a double crisis of representation: On the one hand, the mode of existence of digital data is not primarily a visual one; pictorial representations are not their necessary manifestation. On the other hand, in a data-driven world it seems impossible for the human observer to gain an insight or overview into the way data are generated and processed that determine today's world. Despite or precisely because of a growing number of visual media and the data they generate, the subject is less and less able to grasp the algorithmic totality that surrounds it. Since the 18th century, statistical diagrams have promised to make information visible "at a glance", but this no longer applies to today's digital environments. But instead of countering the crisis of representability with ever greater computing capacities, the project relies on exemplary procedures from art and visual culture that develop alternative forms of representation and experience via data structuring, information generation and interpretation. These include Mark Lombardi as (analogue) historical precursor, Trevor Paglen, Eyal Weizmann and Forensic Architecture, Tactical Tech Collective, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walid Raad or Ingrid Burrington. These works and practices are to be conceptualized under the concept of cognitive mapping. This concept - published by Jameson in his influential book Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) - is based on the diagnosis of a loss of orientation in globalized cultures, a rift between individual experience and the global (economic) structures that determine it, which have become invisible and unrepresentable. Jameson proposed to regain a dimension of experience and a perspective for agency that for him consisted in the theory and practice of cognitive mapping. If Jameson could still be seen in a historical line with the diagnosis of a loss of experience in times of increasing abstraction as a critical topos of modernity, the current, digital "technological condition" (Hörl 2011) with its arbitrariness between data and information and a constitutive "undecidability of digital images" (Rubinstein, Sluis 2013) represents a different starting point to which the artistic works react. The project wants to investigate how artists intervene in different manifestations of data as information. It wants to demonstrate a dimension of agency in dealing with digital images, and based on this research, develop an updated art theory of cognitive mapping under the condition of digitality.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2172: The digital Image