Image Evolution

Book excerpt: The history of images can be described as a history of technology and mediality. The development of images is deeply rooted in the potentials of media technologies and the numerous human inventions in the range of traditional craftsmanship, engineering science, computer science, and art and design. The factual embedding of images in the historical-technological processes constitutes a complex structure of an autonomous "image evolution" that must be highlighted, characterized and analyzed by the interdisciplinary academic discourses that are related to the functions and structures of visuality, pictoriality, and forms of multi-sensoric representations. The chosen term "evolution" is deliberately indicating structural laws that underlie historical events. These laws are intentional and logical processes of a historical and technological interdependency. In this interdependency, technology is evolving out of its inherent structures and additionally embedded in anthropological conditions and sociocultural dynamics. In this context, we should work with the concept of an "image evolution".