The 2015 Image Atlas seminar focused on the collective production of this online image atlas. As both a catalog and curation of divergent kinds of images, this site serves as a vehicle to explore the status, roles and technologies of images in contemporary society, and as a speculative platform to propose and imagine transdisiciplinary projects and affiliations that might reorganize the student participants’ academic fields of work and intellectual interests. The Image Atlas is inspired by mid-twentieth century examples such as Any Warburg’s Mnemosyne, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Eduardo Paolozzi’s Psychological Atlas as well as the more recent work of artists such as Gerhard Richter, Taryn Simon and Ed Ruscha.

 

Each participant’s contribution to the 2015 Image Atlas began with a single source image and used Google’s “search by image” function to assemble an inventory or archive of affiliated images, which are then organized systematically as plates according to logics and techniques distinct to each project.