GRK 1539:  Visibility and Visual Production: Hybrid Forms of Iconic Knowledge

• Subject Area: Art History, Music, Theatre and Media Studies ; Geophysics and Geodesy ; Philosophy
• Term: from 2011 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 73540635

The Research Training Group at Potsdam University explores forms of visualisation in science and art. The interdisciplinary setting combines a wide-ranged expertise from cognitive and natural sciences with humanist research and artistic practice. The research at the centre takes as its starting point the seemingly unlimited distribution, manipulation and archiving of visual data, digital delimitations of the experience of space and time, and the incurrent destabilisation of the difference between reality, imagination and fiction.
An essential focus is on the interplay between visibility and visualisation in various media and technical methods of production, as well as reflections of these in art and science. Central enquiries are the following: (1) What can or cannot be expressed by means of visual media? (2) How does visibility relate to or draw upon discursive practice? (3) What do particular possibilities and limitations of visual argumentation consist in? (4) How is people’s attention guided by visual procedures? Thus, the Research Training Group intends to cover a wide spectrum: from an analysis of the apparatus and mediatic conditions of production, via concrete practices of visualisation and their application to image codes and orders of sight, to scientifically demonstrable eye movements.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Universität Potsdam
• Spokespersons: Professor Dr. Hartmut Asche, since 10/2014; Professor Dr. Dieter Mersch, from 4/2011 until 9/2014
• Participating Researchers: Professorin Dr. Ute von Bloh-Völker; Professor Dr. Arthur Engelbert; Professor Dr. Ottmar Ette; Professor Winfried Gerling; Professor Reinhold Kliegl, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Sybille Krämer; Professor Dr. Jürgen Kurths; Professor Dr. Andreas Martin Köstler; Professorin Dr. Gertrud Lehnert; Professor Dr. Torsten Schaub