The Digital Past. Facticity and Fiction in Visualizations of History

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Peter Geimer
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 421563556

The project is intended to make a fundamental contribution to the question of what active part digital imaging technologies play in our understanding and our imagining of past events and epochs. The project’s focus is explicitly on reconstructions to which a documentary character is ascribed (filmic documentations, visualizations in museums of history). We should ask which new forms of the reception of history can be observed in the field of digital reconstruction and simulation, for example through the promise of a new immediacy through immersion in simulated pasts, to actually “experience history” – which is one of the central motifs of current history simulation in the field of virtual reality. It is the goal of this project to develop criteria of a genuine image history and theory of digital reconstruction, a critique of historical imagination under the changed conditions of digitization.

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