The attention of German speaking discourse is more than ever before driven to conceptualise the picture/image as medium, and performance. Studies in art, media, theatre, performance and picture theory guided by these efforts all vie for superiority. ¿eir manoeuvres seem for the outsider motivated by a fear of falling into the status of secondary disciplines, where insufficient funding loom on the horizon as a result.
The present popularity of this discourse on the iconic and pictorial media makes the accompanying discussion of the possibility, expedience, and the viability of an interdisciplinary picture science with its special significance for the sciences and society at large particularly interesting.
The present volume should focus the discussion of the role and importance of performance and media arts caught between art- and pictorial sciences’ contribution to the contended field. At the centre of this are the time- and action-based arts seen before the backdrop of a general concept of the pictorial. These contributions also throw a light rich in contrast when the entirety of the picture science debate spreads before our view. Their mixture
of perspectives and discursive affiliations provide current readings for this area of scholarly study.
The majority of the contributions collected in this volume originated in May 2006 at a conference of the Department of Culture and Geo-Sciences of the University of Osnabrück, that was devoted to questions of performance and media art within the context of the current discussion of the picture/image science. ¿e theoretical, practical, and technical discourse on media arts’ assumptions, effects, and possibilities still take place at the margins of media festivals and media exhibitions, hard- and so¿ware fairs, and
particularly within the framework of internet based “communities”. ¿e
few specialized production and training centres offer a very manageable number of docents and students, while the discontinuity in funds supporting research projects hamper consistent theoretical efforts.

The conference was an attempt to alleviate the suppression of media arts’ practice, theory, and history from university contexts and brought together competent media experts, junior research staff and the interested public. The present collection of texts begins with Dawn Leach’s brief discussion of the image and text issue, image differences, and systematisation attempts.
Special attention is paid to the notion of picture anthropology and the age old image of man question, as currency in the German debates. ¿is sets the stage for some comparisons between North American and German efforts in this field and is rounded off with brief mention of new evolving agendas as well as concluding remarks concerning possible changes in academic
fields at university level.

Slavko Kacunko devotes his essay to a generation of 1947 born
“prophets” and “slanderers of prophets” that will be sixty come 2007. A characterisation of this generation, which here is called the Generation of Eighty-three furnishes the pretext for historicizing “prophecy” in the age of its topicality. The focal point of his characterisation is the programmatic
text published in the biopolitical year of birth of the Eighty-three-ers, Peter Sloterdijk’s Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983; in English as Critique of Cynical Reason [Minnesota, 1988]), flanked by the postdoctoral thesis Beat Wyss completed in 1983, Trauer der Vollendung (Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity, Res Monographs in Anthropology and Aesthetics series, Cambridge [UK] and New York, 1999) and, again dating from 1983, Hans Belting’s inaugural lecture in Munich on the end of art history.
The current image-theory debate is interpreted as one of the by-products of the ’83 ideology – an outlook formed out of the criticism that raged against the generation of ’68 and which is proving increasingly to be a stumbling block on the onerous path toward a fitting scholarly treatment of more recent developments in art and the media.

Lena Bader reminds us of the dual function of photography at the
inception of art historical study as both subject and medium with a view to defusing polemic tendencies to either postulate continuity at the expense of iconic differences, or to stylise historiographic shi¿s into a complete rupture with the past. Her new /old instrument of choice is the comparative analysis, which she believes can accommodate both consideration of pictoriality and
mediality.

Katja Hoffmann is critical of historical efforts aimed at an “all-inclusiveconcept” since it produces generalities at the expense of differences. She does place symbolic actions at the core of her exemplification, but hopes to show by means of memory and context how the interpretive approach can produce more than levelling results.

Verena Kuni’s agenda is different from Lena Bader’s and Katja
Hoffmann’s since her specialist concern with web based art prompts her to a differentiated account of the state of disrepair in documenting her subject and already foresees the detrimental effects on future historical treatment. ¿e context of the web, she argues, is a complex one that can only be insufficiently emulated. Kuni sees the reflexive re-enactments of several artists as a possibility for sharing creative efforts that would otherwise be
totally lost.

Marga van Mechelen’s project relates the first directorship of De
Appel (1975-1983) to the question ‘Is the medium still a condition of art?’ Van Mechelen shows that the idea of the essential qualities of a medium and the many forms of artistic production more properly placed within Rosalind Krauss’ idea of the post-medium condition were realised within the framework of De Appel. She argues, that the De Appel programme went far beyond the medium condition and explains this paradox by discussing
some of the better known projects that were realized in this framework.

Petra Missomelius is concerned with narration in the spatial organisation of digital environments. She brings a “topological turn” into play. The concept of narrative works introduced into participatory aesthetics offers the active viewer new modes of comprehending the spatial. She argues that our spacio-temporal experience of the architectonics of contact, the active negotiation of possible and actual space can be read as narrative
structuring. Social interaction in “third spaces” (Bhabha 1994), she says, engages imaginary faculties, facilitates new, tentative, alternating identities, and creates hybrid cultural communities.
The storytelling and pro-type development in interactive systems which Daniela Reimann is involved in as interdisciplinary didactic researcher represents a shift from Missomelius’ perspective. Not only conceived as teaching instrument, these practice oriented co-operations are equally instructive for teachers, specifically art instructors. Performative aspects and robotic systems stimulate different links to the spatio-temporal experience that instil imaginative outlets and make fit for creative output in a new
environment.

“In Between” is an excellent example for Gabriele Schmid’s critical
observations concerning the short reach of aesthetic reception theory
when faced with the holographic experience. Her arguments go beyond the specific example, but are strongly supported by its force. The noncontemplative, embodied reception is of course argued in all forms of digital based art defence, but the holographic medium has received far too little attention and is worthy of far more attention as Schmid cogently argues.

With Jens Schröter’s contribution we are invited to rethink our scopic
regimes and he has good grounds to argue his transplanar perspective. Like Schmid he invites us to reconsider our discursive efforts on an individual work: Marcel Duchamp’s TU M’. But his reconsideration proves that our blind spot has implications. He identifies three types of transplanar images:
1. the stereoscopic, 2. the holographic, 3. the virtual interactive i.e. volumetric images. The “third spaces” that Missomelius introduces turn into a scientific re-evaluation of our scopic regimes with the purport of new genealogies that Spielmann wishes us to recognize in the differences between the media of moving images.
Yvonne Spielmann’s insistence here on medium specifity, grounded as it is in technical differences, prompts her to argue that these considerations must preface and inform any interdisciplinary approach to visuality. Even if we agree with Mitchell’s verdict that strictly speaking there are no visual media, since our perception encompasses more than the visual, we can not ignore, says Spielmann, research into the structuring of multi-sensory
reception of multimedia artefacts. She offers an exemplary taxonomy of the filmic, videographic and digital forms of presentation meant to contribute to intermedia investigation of the reflexive participation of the recipient.