The first panel will deal with historical and cultural impacts of archival orders, considering th archive as a form of organising science and knowledge. The difference between pictorial and textual/written registering of images will be discussed and consequently the notion of the image according to analogous or digital methods of registering.
The issues of this panel include viewings of historical image-archives (e.g. Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne- Atlas) as well as inquiries about the history of technical representation, measurement and observation. Also, the relationship between the technical medium of memory and the culturally encoded gaze of the observer should be considered: does digital retrieving of images place us at a new turn of iconological orders, one which produces new units of meaning, as Morelli's epistemological revolution had done? (One of the first digital image retrieving systems for art scholars was namend after him!)
Finally, the question of the images' status as historical documents should be taken into account, and the question of hidden authorship and reference in found footage, scientific and industrial films as well as the "abandonment" (Tobias Nagel) of digitally reproduced pictures that can easily be manipulated, mixed and scratched.

The second panel will discuss political impacts of any historically new organisation of visual knowledge. William J.T. Mitchells theory of an imminent "pictural turn" away from verbal logics has not been satisfactorily met by a theory on the epistemological status of images and especially that of film images. In what way did cinematography influence and change traditional iconography, how did film images interfere with political imagery and icons? And, consequently, how will those new image retrieving systems transform and even question established forms of cinema-aesthetic and of of film-critique that have traditionally been fields of political intervention and analysis?
Another issue on this panel are interfaces of human perception and imaging techniques and the political strategies they make way for (up to the politics of satellite pictures, as Lisa Parks has demonstrated). At this point the project touches the larger complex of image culture in the Web only to be able to determine more precisely what its own artistic and scientific intentions are, and also to discuss the possibilities of a visual culture opposed to commercial or military imaging, which is has been regarded a derivative of.
Finally the question remains what is lost in a re-organisation of pictural archives, analogous or digital, and what might disappear for good: certain forms of sense perception, certain forms of visual knowledge.