ABOUT

 

Nomadikon is a transdisciplinary research group and center for image studies and visual aesthetics at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. The center launched in the fall of 2008 with the project New Ecologies of the Image (2008-2013), and consists of a core team of six locally based scholars, international affiliates, and a global network of visual culture studies researchers.

Taking as its point of departure the epochal transformation of the visual world engendered by the digitalization of culture, New Ecologies of the Image will address a host of interrelated theoretical and critical issues that in various ways either require, imply or propose a different hermeneutics of the visual, a new interpretive optics. How has the process of seeing itself been affected by the flux of the contemporary mediasphere? What is the nature and effects of the emerging scopic regime of the digital? In what ways might the notion of a general iconology be revived and made applicable to the conceptual demands of an image culture that appears to transmute ever more rapidly? How can we develop a critical language to analyze visual artifacts that does not fall victim to logocentric predilections? Most fundamentally, how can we formulate an ethics and an aesthetics for these new ecologies of the image?

Among the research topics pertinent to the Nomadikon project are the manifestations of iconoclasm and iconophobia; image wars and visual ideologies; the cultural performance of on/scenity (Linda Williams); the aestheticization of affliction; controversial and offensive images; media convergence and the formation of new visual ecosystems; the nomadicization of the image; and the visual codification of subjectivity and social value.

Nomadikon is jointly funded by The Bergen Research Foundation and the Faculty of Social Sciences.

 
WEB: