Transporting Images: Session 1 | Georges Didi-Huberman & Jennifer Roberts

Images today, digitized and disseminated online, are essentially mobile and transitory. They exist in order to be shared and sent. It is often thought that this circulatory nature of images is a recent phenomenon. But already a century ago, German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg, in the introduction to his Mnemosyne Atlas, coined the term “image vehicles” and suggested that the “migrations of images” are woven into the very existence of images themselves.

The notion of image vehicles calls for a dialogue between, on the one hand, art history, iconology, or image theory and, on the other, infrastructure studies. There would be no image vehicles without what allows for their mobility: wires, cables, satellites, shipping routes, and other components of transportation.

This symposium addressed the significance of image vehicles and the infrastructures that make them possible, as well as the ways in which we can visualize these infrastructures in the form of images that can themselves be disseminated.

Panel 1:

00:00:00 Opening Remarks | Peter Szendy
00:09:44 Introduction | Peter Szendy
00:11:14 The History of Art Is a Story of Migration | Georges Didi-Huberman
00:51:25 Introduction | Peter Szendy
00:53:26 The Interstellar Medium | Jennifer Roberts
01:40:27 The Sound of Images | Q&A
01:41:49 Looking Back at Ourselves | Q&A
01:49:50 The Primacy of Images | Q&A
01:55:04 Images & Colonization | Q&A

Symposium playlist:    • Transporting Images  

Recorded on October 20, 2023. Presented by the Cogut Institute’s Economies of Aesthetics initiative. Convened by Peter Szendy.