The double-blind peer-reviewed Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS) is now accepting abstracts from scientists, scholars, artists, film makers, game designers or developers for the fourth issue entitled »Image Evolution. Technological Transformations of Visual Media Culture«. YoMIS will be enriched by disciplines like media and film studies, image science, (film)philosophy, phenomenology, semiotics, design and fine arts, art and media history, game studies and other research areas related to static, moving and digital images in general.

The history of images can be described as a history of technology and mediality, because material transformations have always had a great impact on form, structure or content of mediatized and often multimodal representations. It took many years from the origin of images in the caves of our prehistoric ancestors to the interactive, arithmetic and highly immersive images of the digital age. This development always seemed to be 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. This perspective is the beginning of an autonomous media theory, whether if it starts with leading thinkers like Walter Benjamin or Marshal McLuhan. Nowadays, these academic discourses would surely work with more profound and more detailed analytical tools and concepts. But also a modern media theory that analyzes describes and characterizes technological transformations surely receives new insights. 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 not teleological or ontological driven, but more intentional and logical processes of an historical and technological interdependency. In this interdependency, the 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«.The editors of YoMIS would like to understand images as visual, and further multi-sensoric, artifacts that are historically and technologically embedded within the ‘developments’ and ‘relations’ of materiality, mediality and reception. Beside the integration of this different aspects the issue is also expanding the time frame of the research topic: The development of mediality is not only a project for media historiographies in the context of a media archaeology, but also connected with the logic of recent developments in the context of prototypes, future ideas and innovations. Topics of submissions should focus on (but are not necessarily limited to) the materiality and technology of images and media, the academic approaches on the history and logic of image evolution and media developments, the processes of creating or programming digital images, and the material and technological effects on the reception of dynamic representations, the multi-sensoriality of static, moving and digital images, which goes beyond pure visuality, and a specific focus on the historical, cultural and transformational impact of prototypes, prototype research and future innovations.

The official deadline for abstracts is November 5, 2017. Abstracts should be 800 to 1.000 words in length (not less). Please send a short biography, contact details and your abstract to Prof. Dr. Lars C. Grabbe, Prof. Dr. Patrick Rupert-Kruse and Prof. Dr. Norbert M. Schmitz via: kontakt@bewegtbildwissenschaft.de.

The official deadline for articles is May 27, 2018. Articles should be 5.000 to 8.000 words in length. If you are interested in contributing an abstract and article, please contact the managing editors via e-mail.

Die Sonderausstellung „Gesten – gestern, heute, übermorgen“ findet vom 17. November 2017 bis zum 4. März 2018 im Sächsischen Industriemuseum Chemnitz statt. Sie untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen der menschlichen Gestik, dem Wandel der industriellen Produktion und unserer Interaktion mit Maschinen in Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Die Ausstellung vermittelt also komplexe semiotische Zusammenhänge mit hoher und auch aktueller gesellschaftlicher Relevanz an ein breites nicht-akademisches Publikum.