FOR 1627: Evidence of Images: History and Aesthetics

研究股处理与图像有关的最古老和最基本的问题之一，即与图像证据以及产生图像的结构和程序有关的问题。我们的出发点是这样一个前提，即作为一个基本的审美范畴，图画证据的产生涉及客观外部现实的再现，但同时也产生了真正的视觉存在形式，它不存在于图画之外。对图像的这种双重定义--作为表现和存在--是根本的，因为图像的中心意义和功能只有通过这两种模式的辩证调解才能得到充分的表征。我们的目标是调查这种调解进程所采取的各种历史性和系统性形式。鉴于文化、视觉和图像研究试图通过明显对立的方法来确定图像的意义的现状，这项工作既具有挑战性又迫在眉睫。一方面，普遍存在一种对证据地位的广泛怀疑，这种怀疑是由图像提供的关于自然和社会、政治和历史的；根据这一模式，图像被视为一种语言，类似于可辨认的符号系统，缺乏任何内在的活力，可以说，一旦它们的信息被解码，就会耗尽。另一方面，图像产生了自主的、纯粹的自我参照意义，因此，图像完全脱离了任何外部现实，可能正是由于这种孤立和独特，才实现了它们的审美效果。与当前的趋势相反，在我们的项目框架内，应该特别关注的正是图像的参考价值，明确地重新定位了生成图像证据所固有的美学问题。假设图像正是通过审美手段体现了反身性的力量，从而等同于一种话语状态，这对于它们如何产生证据的问题至关重要。因为这一假设开启了从图像本身推导出制约审美形式的约束性标准的可能性--标准，而这些标准又与它们自己的历史联系在一起。通过这种方式，将历史深度恢复到证据范畴的项目旨在将历史解释与美学方法、概念与感知相结合，从而在概念上重新整合S将现实及其自身的现实作为物质对象的形象。只有这种动态的图像与证据概念才能克服图像与文本、视觉与文本能力对峙的恶性倾向，从而开辟跨学科视角的研究新领域。

The Research Unit takes up one of the oldest and most fundamental questions concerning images, namely those pertaining to pictorial evidence and to the structures and procedures through which it is generated. Our point of departure is the premise that the generation of pictorial evidence as a basic aesthetic category involves the representation of an objective external reality, but at the same time engenders forms of genuine visual presence, which exists nowhere outside of the picture. This double definition of the image - as representation and as presence - is fundamental, for the central significance and function of images can only be adequately characterised through the dialectical mediation of these two modalities. It is our aim to investigate the various historic and systematic forms assumed by such processes of mediation. Such an undertaking is both challenging and exigent, in view of the current situation in which cultural, visual and image studies seek to define the significance of images through apparently antagonistic approaches. Prevailing, on the one hand, is a wide-ranging scepticism concerning the status of evidence, which is provided by images in regard to nature and society, politics and history; according to this model, images are regarded as a kind of language, as analogous to legible systems of signs, which lack any inherent dynamism and which are exhausted, so to speak, once their messages have been decoded. On the other hand, it is claimed that images generate autonomous and purely self-referential meanings, which, as a consequence, are wholly detached from any external reality, presumably achieving their aesthetic effectiveness solely by virtue of such isolation and distinctiveness. In contrast to these current trends, in the framework of our project it is precisely the referential valence of images to which particular attention shall be turned, repositioning categorically the aesthetic issue inherent to the generation of pictorial evidence. The assumption that images precisely through aesthetic means embody reflexive potencies and thereby equal a discursive status is essential to the question of how they generate evidence. For this assumption opens up the possibility of deriving the binding criteria governing aesthetic forms from the images themselves - criteria, which are in turn bound up with their own histories. In this way, the project of restoring historic depth to the category of evidence aims at a conflation of historical interpretation and aesthetic approach, of concept and percept, and consequently at a conceptual reintegration of the image¿s reference to reality and its own reality as a physical object. Only such a dynamic conception of image and evidence is able to overcome the virulent tendency toward an antagonistic confrontation between image and text and between visual and textual competence, thereby opening up new fields of research in transdisciplinary perspectives.