Capturing Movable Images. Screenshots as Theorizing Media Practice

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jens Ruchatz
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 421460278

The aim of the proposed project consists of theorizing the digital image from an inside perspective, setting out from picture practices, which are considered to materialize in digital pictures. Practical media knowledge, posited to be present in the pictures themselves, is to be retrieved in order to gather elements for a practice theory of the digital image. To get to this theorizing knowledge, the project relies on picture practice analysis, a method developed by the preceding project, which scrutinizes pictures for media knowledge.Given the diversity of manifestations of the digital image, the search for media knowledge has to be limited to a concrete field. The project does so by addressing a form of meta-imagery: the screenshot, capturing pictures from a digital screen. More specifically, the project is focused on screenshots taken from 360° pictorial environments of digital games and panoramas (e.g. Google Street View). It thereby addresses metapictures, which capture and reflect a type of picture that is often regarded as an epitome of digital imagery, because it is “operative” (Hoelzl/Marie) insofar the pictorial display is continuously modified according to the navigating operations of the user.Frequently, screenshotting has been likened to traditional picture practices like photographing and photocopying, reducing digital picture practice to a remediation of analogue and digital predecessors. Even if the observed media references appear obvious and well-founded, the project will analyze media practices closely in order to pinpoint to the manifest differences, which make screen-capturing a specific digital picture practice. Screen capturing of 360° pictorial environments is particularly informative in this respect, as it can be examined as an implicit media comparison, which operates a fundamental transformation that extends to the movability, spatiality, and circulability of the image, turning a movable, endless picture into a seemingly still image, which can easily be shown in a variety of contexts.Picture practice analysis will be conducted with respect to screenshots of the 360° pictorial environments of digital games and panoramas. Practices (and respective media knowledge) will be found on three levels: navigating practices operating the space-image; capturing practices, producing a picture (the ‘shot’); exhibiting practices, which make screenshots publicly visible. The entry for the analysis will be the sites of exhibiting, where the pictures are presented according to the practices of documenting, advertising and criticizing. These exhibiting practices will be diversified by intersecting them with the various navigating and capturing practices, which materialize in the picture as well. By scrutinizing screenshots cut from contemporarily popular games and panoramas like Google Street View, the media knowledge about digital image(s) will contribute to a praxeological media philosophy of the digital image.

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