Symposium Live-Stream
via https://www.co-berlin.org/

31.8.-1.9.2020

A joint event organized by C/O Berlin and the research center Das Technische Bild at the Institute of Art and Image History of the Humboldt University/Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Technology to mark the 20th anniversary of both institutions

Concept: Felix Hoffmann/Katja Müller-Helle/Kathrin Schönegg

At the latest since the first picture postcards of the 1880s, picture motifs have been used for the transmission of news, stamped, framed with framing writing and infiltrated into the distribution channels of the postal service. But the greater the promise of personalized picture greetings became, the more sensitive the institutions reacted to their containment. Even during the First World War, field postcards with caricatures, abusive or salacious depictions came under the scrutiny of the Prussian censorship authority in Berlin, which had been established specifically for this purpose. The beginnings of circulating images, their potentials and their limits are to be traced in this symposium up to the social media: Today, digital image circulation creates utopias of participation and dissemination on the part of the user, which are contained by practices of algorithmic image deletion and regulatory mechanisms. Despite image censorship and curated content, the platforms’ rhetoric is based on the myth of net neutrality. Accordingly, the question of the mass divisibility of images is to be examined in a double perspective of potential and regulation, of freedom and censorship in a historical perspective.

With Friedrich Balke, Estelle Blaschke, Matthias Bruhn, Eva Ehninger, Felix Hoffmann, Christian Kassung, Roland Meyer, Katja Müller-Helle, Margarete Pratschke, Simon Rothöler, Kerstin Schankweiler, Kathrin Schönegg, Friedrich Tietjen und Wolfgang Ullrich.

Picture credits:
Berlin, 2006, from the series Photo Opportunities (2005 – present), © Corinne Vionnet