Martina Sauer

Institute for Image and Cultural Philosophy: https://www.bildphilosophie.de/en-gb

Philosophie von oben oder von unten? Höhere Ideen oder Empirie? Für die Ausdifferenzierung der universitären Fächer in Deutschland seit der Mitte des 19 Jh. stehen diese Fragen im Vordergrund. Fragen zur Ästhetik bzw. dem Schönen, Wahren und Guten und zu dem was ist überhaupt schön, gut und wahr spielten dabei eine zentrale Rolle. Vgl. hierzu mein...

Can the metaverse and AI be understood as an opportunity to rethink aesthetics? Panel Image & Fashion 25-27 September 2024: Rhineland Palatinate Technical University of Landau. In the panel Image & Fashion organised by Martina Sauer and Petra Leutner, 17 speakers from Germany, Australia, Turkey, Iran, Italy, Slovakia and Lithuania will address thi...

Which aspects, brought into the present day, have visionary potential, offering, e.g., an organic theory of feeling as a new avenue in biology? Can Susanne K. Langer´s concept of mind aid in navigating an age of Human-like artificial systems? These are the key questions for Susanne K. Langer at our round table in Rome at 25th World Congress of Phil...

In hindsight, it is primarily Susanne K. Langer’s theory of act, and only secondarily her theory of art, that is central to the conception of Vitality Semiotics. It focuses on affective, semiotically relevant forms that constitute our world experience, human social interaction, and ultimately art experience. Thus, this somewhat unusual distinction...

Once an overlooked figure in 20th-century philosophy, Susanne K. Langer has become a prominent thinker among philosophers and artists, particularly because of her development of a new theory of art from symbolic logic. This open access book brings together a collection of major thinkers on Langer and elucidates her transdisciplinary connections and...

Intercultural Approaches between Europe and China via Art? Two landscapes from different cultures, Europe and China, that are both considered masterpieces are the focus of a study by Martina Sauer. To what extent are they each perceived as beautiful? Can the differences in aesthetic understanding tell us something about the respective cultures?...

CfP (Deadline: March 3, 2024) for a special issue on Frames and Framing: Dynamic Nature and Material-Cognitive Interplays, edited by Natalia Igl & Martina Sauer. Contributions are welcome from disciplines as diverse as literature, image studies (art, design, film, etc.), cultural studies and cultural anthropology, philosophy, developmental psychol...

How is it possible that emotions in the community can be influenced by media? According to the paper’s concept, this is only understandable if we accept with Marshall McLuhan that media and the human body are not separable. There is no divide. The medium is the message expressed through the body/human being. This has preconditions, because the conn...

Vorbemerkungen: Die Exponenten der spekulativen Ästhetik in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts vertreten die Ansicht, dass eine Begegnung mit den verschiedenen Gegenstandsbereichen der Welt und unsere Einordnung in diese Weltbezüge nur gelingen kann, wenn nicht alles rein zufällig und verschieden ist, sondern vielmehr in einer alles übergreifenden Einh...

Call for Papers (D/En) of the joint panel of the sections Image and Fashion on the topic "Metaverse - AI and new aesthetics?" in the context of the 17th International Congress of the German Society of Semiotics (DGS) e.V. "Signs.Cultures.Digitality" (September 24-28, 2024 at the TU Kaiserslautern-Landau). Deadline for submissions in German or Engli...

According to the neo-Kantian and cultural anthropologist Ernst Cassirer, man always interacts with nature. This assumption forms the basis for his philosophical approach to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms of 1929. It is based on the thesis that we do not conceive nature as objects (‘Ding-Wahrnehmung’), but immediately feel and suffer nature throug...

In past decades, the subject atmosphere and mood has gone beyond the physio-meteorological and psychological scopes and become a new direction of aesthetics which concerns two sides of the same phenomenon. As the primary sensuous reality constructed by both the perceiving subject and the perceived object, atmosphere and mood are neither a purely su...

The form of an action has a strong influence on the interaction between humans. According to their mood, people may perform the same gesture in different ways, such as gently or rudely. These aspects of social communication, named vitality forms by Daniel Stern, represent a mean to establish a direct and immediate connection with others. Indeed, th...

Der Sammelband der Sektion Bild, der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Semiotik, über Bilder als Agenten kultureller Transformationsprozesse ist im Anschluss an die letzte interdisziplinäre Konferenz der Gesellschaft in Chemnitz 2021 entstanden. Sein Schwerpunkt liegt - im Anschluss an Aby Warburg - darin, Bilder als Agenten zu verstehen und insofern nich...

With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular at...

Everyday media consumption leaves no doubt that the perception of moving images from various media is characterized by experience and understanding. Corresponding research in this field has shown that the stimulus patterns flooding in on us are not only processed mentally, but also bodily. Building on this, the following study argues that incoming...

One drawing may seem light and dance-like, the other static and solid. But one thing is true for both: the drawings do not actually move. This is the starting point for far-reaching research questions that have not yet been clarified: does human perception underlie "aliveness"? It makes sense that we perceive gestures as alive. But does this also a...

To relate theories of affordance and frame with the tradition of formal aesthetics, philosophical iconology and the life sciences (keyword Vitality Semiotics) is the starting point of the paper. According to this approach, the structural preconditions of images, as determined by materials, techniques and the composition of the design means, become...

Call for Essays in the online open access, peer review journal Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine on: "Atmosphere and Mood: Two Sides of The Same Phenomenon" Editors: Martina Sauer (Institute for Image and Cultural Philosophy: https://www.bildphilosophie.de/en-gb) and Zhuofei Wang (Institute for Philosophy at the University of Hildes...

Call for Essays in the online open access, peer review journal Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine on: Multimodality: On the sensually organized and at the same time meaningful and socio-culturally relevant potential of artistic works Editors: Martina Sauer (Senior Editor, Institute for Image and Cultural Philosophy: https://bildphilo...

30-minütiger Radio- bzw. Videobeitrag im SWR 2 Wissen: Aula, Sonntag, 27.05.2012, 8:30 Uhr - 9:00 Uhr., May 27, 2012 über: Ein Bild ist ein Bild. Wie funktioniert unsere Wahrnehmung? Kunst- und kulturphilosophische sowie neurowissenschaftliche und entwicklungspsychologische Erkenntnisse zur Wahrnehmung von Bildern am Beispiel von Paul Cézanne und...

20-minute opening-talk at the online conference of the German Society for Semiotics in Chemnitz, Germany, on Sept. 28, 2021, 2:30 p.m. in the section Image: "Images as Agents of Cultural Transformation Processes": http://www.semiotik.eu Impressum: Text and film © Martina Sauer: https://www.bildphilosophie.de/en-gb Photos: 1. Katharina Sieverding,...

20-minütiger Eröffnungsvortrag auf der Online-Konferenz der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Semiotik in Chemnitz am 28.09.2021, 14:30 Uhr in der Sektion Bild: "Bilder als Agenten kultureller Transformationsprozesse": http://www.semiotik.eu Impressum: Text und Film © Martina Sauer: https://www.bildphilosophie.de/ Fotos: 1. Katharina Sieverding, Installa...

Panel Speech in the section Image on "Vitality Semiotics. Impulses from the "Hamburg Circle" around Warburg and Cassirer for a new method in image and cultural studies" - I - Formal aesthetics and iconology are still the standard methods for analyzing images today. With them, stylistic features can be clarified in historical comparison and concrete...

CfP: Images as Agents of Cultural Transformation Processes Call for papers for a panel of the German Association for Semiotics’ sections Image and Cultural Studies at the 16. international congress „Transformations. Signs and their Objects in Transition“, postponed to 28.09. to 02.10.2021, University of Technology, Chemnitz, Deadline 1.12.2019: ht...

This article starts from the assumption that there is a connection between art and language and responsibility. What is it based on? It follows on from the research of the Hamburg Circle in the 1920s by Ernst Cassirer and Aby M. Warburg, and was strengthened in the 2000s by Hartmut Böhme. Their joint starting point is the emotional life of human be...

Es sind die starken positiven Effekte des Versprechens auf Glück, Sicherheit und Gemeinschaft, die uns alle prägen und zusammenhalten. Die Grenzen, die dieser „Gesellschaftsvertrag“ uns allen auferlegt, fallen uns daher häufig nicht auf. Am Schicksal des berühmten Philosophen der Antike Sokrates, der 399 v. Chr. für seinen anhaltenden Verstoß gegen...

The paper follows the thesis, that the perception of real or virtual media shares the anthropological state of "Ausdruckswahrnehmung" or perception of expression (Ernst Cassirer). This kind of perception does not represent a distant, neutral point of view, but one that is guided by feelings or "vitality affects" (Daniel N. Stern). The prerequisites...

Affordance as a Method in Visual Cultural Studies Based on Theory and Tools of Vitality Semiotics. A historiographic and comparative study of Formal Aesthetics, Iconology, and Affordance using the example of Albrecht Dürer´s Christ Among the Doctors from 1506. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

Renaissance paintings, fashion and clothing, people, oscilloscopes, food as art, Instagram, photo collections, Greek vases, ancient mirrors, and damaged coins – what do all these “things” have in common? Not much at first sight, except for being part of the human world, that may catch our attention and stimulate us to engage with them. This is the...

Promise of Happiness, Security, and Community − Frames and Framing in a New Light It is not art history but archaeological disciplines that are currently providing new impulses for research. Their attempt to reconstruct historical certainty with the help of the iconological method via events and finds has reached its limits, as corresponding sourc...

Neither the art historians Panofsky and Warburg nor the philosopher Cassirer had any interest with their cultural-historical research in fact-based, historical questions. An approach that had become common in the 19th century due to the loss of validity of the speculative aesthetics. On the contrary, instead of this substantial understanding as the...

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine, an online, biannual, and peer–reviewed online magazine devoted to art and culture, invites the submission of extended essays. Special Issue on the Material Image. Affordances as a New Approach to Visual Culture Studies. The deadline for the submission of essays is November 27, 2020. This issue is...

Special Issue: Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine, New York/São Paulo: https://artstyle.international/issue-7/ The deadline for the submission of essays is November 27, 2020. This issue is scheduled for publication in early March 2021. Editors: Martina Sauer and Elisabeth Guenther

On the Postmodern Age, Issue #6, Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, New York/São Paulo, 2020 We live in the age of postmodernism. What does that mean? With this call for essays, we asked for proposals for a better understanding. At the same time, we were looking for posts that show how the arts have processed and are still processing...

What is reality? It is postmodern or poststructuralist philosophers like Roland Barthes, who realized that it only seems that the media present reality in the form of facts, because they actually spread myths. Accordingly, Jacques Derrida made it clear that communication via media is not based on logic, but is characterized by a significant “différ...

Als Immanuel Kant 1784 seinen berühmten Aufsatz „Was ist Aufklärung?“ verfasste, glaubte er selbst noch nicht daran, dass wir tatsächlich aufgeklärt sind. Heute dagegen sind wir davon überzeugt. Worauf gründet unser Selbstverständnis und ist es berechtigt? Reicht es in diesem Zusammenhang auf die zur Zeit Kants dominierenden monarchischen und kirch...

Call for Essays Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine, an online quarterly magazine devoted to art and culture, invites the submission of extended essays. #issue_6 Deadline: June 28, 2020 Special issue on postmodern age. Appearances of a contemporary phenomenon in design, fashion, architecture, film, and art. Roland Barthes, Michel F...

"Liberation from the parasitic existence at the ritual". Perception of artistic artefacts between devotion and distance ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In his famous essay "Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" from 1936, Walter Benjamin hoped that with the introdu...

Program details of the current seminars can be found at https://www.bildphilosophie.de/seminare.

What distinguishes humans form animals? To acknowledge that humans are part of nature, that can process psychologically their affective-vital reactions to nature, and thus be held responsible for cultural processes, is the result of art historical, cultural-philosophical and life science research over the past two centuries. This line of argumentat...

How does an audience receive a work of art? Does the experience only affect the viewer or does it have an effect and thus influence his or her actions? It is the cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer and his successors in philosophy and developmental psychology as well as in neuroscience to this day who postulate that perception in general and percep...

With the aim of teaching and practicing art for the good or moreover the better, Josef Albers proves to be an idealist. At the same time, he confirms with this conviction that art can also arouse the opposite. This conviction is already evident in the grammatical form of the term, which proves that art is functional or a technique for socio-cultura...

According to the neo-Kantian and cultural anthropologist Ernst Cassirer, human beings always interact with nature. This assumption forms the premise of his philosophical approach in Philosophy of symbolic Forms of 1929. It bases on the thesis that we do not conceive nature as objects (“Ding-Wahrnehmung”), but instantaneously feel and suffer nature...

Ansage Redakteur Ralf Caspary: Mit dem Thema: „Ein Bild ist ein Bild ist ein Bild – Wie funktioniert unsere Wahrnehmung“. „Ein Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte“, dieses Sprichwort wird unterstützt durch die Neurowissenschaften und durch entwicklungspsychologische Theorien und Studien. Die besagen: Menschliche Wahrnehmung im Allgemeinen und Bildwahr...

Aesthetics versus Art History? Ernst Cassirer as Mediator in an ongoing Controversy on the Relevance of Art for Life. Against the background of Ernst Cassirer’s cultural philosophy, art studies are to be classified as cultural studies. Central to this is Cassirer’s philosophy as the basis for answering a question that has been posed by the methods...

Aesthetics versus Art History? Ernst Cassirer as Mediator in an ongoing Controversy on the Relevance of Art for Life. Against the background of Ernst Cassirer’s cultural philosophy, art studies are to be classified as cultural studies. Central to this is Cassirer’s philosophy as the basis for answering a question that has been posed by the methods...

This is the first coherent monography about the life and work of the important Bauhaus master Josef Albers. It aims to discover Albers as a teacher and an artist anew. Thus, 40 years after his death an artist shall be honored, who has had till now not enough attention within the Bauhaus masters. It fall too short to introduce him solely as the teac...

How do we perceive the world and pictures? The book is based around the hypothesis that we initially perceive the world as well as pictures by feelings and that there is a direct connection between the two. By debating fascination and horror, such as can be triggered by Anselm Kiefer´s Deutschlandbilder, the author discusses their consequences and...

„Grenzen“ auszuloten und zu beschreiben machte sich der Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Semiotik in Passau im September 2017 zur Aufgabe. Insgesamt 12 Sektionen der Gesellschaft schrieben dazu eigens einen Call for Paper aus. Mit der vorliegenden Anthologie gilt es deutlich zu machen, wie konkret gerade auch über Bilder die Grenzen des je E...

In the thirties of the 20th century Erwin Panofsky established the so called iconological method in the research field of artistic artefacts that is in commune use till nowadays. His method is based on ideas of Ernst Cassirer and Aby M. Warburg. But in contrast to the tendency of historicization of the artefacts Panofsky followed, Cassirer as well...

From the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day, it has rarely been doubted that whenever formal aesthetic methods meet their iconological counterparts, the two approaches appear to be mutually exclusive. In reality, though, an ahistorical concept is challenging a historical analysis of art. It is especially Susanne K. Langer´s long-overl...

Programm mit Podiumsdiskussion zur Konferenz in Passau, siehe Anhang

Do we communicate with pictures? If so, the text asks, what about their complex, dynamic appearances? Are they part of the communication process? By analysing a cover image of the journal Jugend from 1896 and by consulting the research on the logic of pictures (“Eigenlogik”) in Bildwissenschaft, Iconology and Cultural Anthropology these questions s...

Is it true that there is an analogy between modes of creation and such of perception? Respective to the cultural anthropological research of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne K. Langer and John M. Krois and by the analysis of a tape of the Swiss video-artist Pipilotti Rist this initial thesis of Formal Aesthetics shall be supported. - I - Lässt sich die Be...

The ability to form "images" of our experiences with the world (imaging effect) and to adjust our drive and determination in accordance with those images (action effect) is what characterises men, as stipulated by Cassirer and subsequently confirmed by Langer and Krois. Special techniques are required to communicate to others the images of life and...

Do have pictures an impact on future? Yes, say theories of embodiment by making perceptual foundations in place of representational arrangements responsible for it. - / - Wirken sich Bildern auf die Zukunft aus? Ja sagen Verkörperungstheorien und machen dafür weniger Repräsentationsmodelle als Wahrnehmungsweisen verantwortlich.

Do have pictures an impact on future? Yes, say theories of embodiment by making perceptual foundations in place of representational arrangements responsible for it.

Ernst Cassirer as well as his followers the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer and John M. Krois postulate a non-discursive and functional relevance of forms. Exposed by the arts this assumption proves to be valid for all kinds of life (man, animals, and plants) as well as the machines (technics). Herein, the nearness to pragmatism becomes obvi...

Observing processes of art perception two contradicting phenomena are characterising them: absolutely nearness and distance to the image. As a matter of being ("Seinsweise") the phenomenologists Martin Heidegger and Bernhard Waldenfels are declaring this contrast as a matter of being ("Seinsweise") of images offering new views of the world whereas...

So many things have a meaning for us. How is it possible and how can we deal with it? In "gestures of attention" (rituals) we understand it, Hartmut Böhme says, and we produce it ourselves, Aby M. Warburg and Ernst Cassirer are suggesting. That means the producer and the recipient are responsible for their doing.

Art et kitsch – est-ce compatible? L'auteur pose cette question à travers l'oeuvre de la vidéaste suisse Pipilotti Rist, présentée au Kunsmuseum de Saint-Gall en Suisse, en 2012.

In accordance to Cassirer the origins of pictures depend on a process of forming. On behalf of research this process of forming is characterized by affective-emotional experiences. Pictures suchlike of arts are displaying an expression of it. On the one hand devotion (undergoing) and on the other hand distance (symbolic forms) are signifying the fo...

Emotions play an important part in general perception and in particular perception of pictures. Their relevance to the construction of meaning and actions that is cultural processes will be shown. By referring to traditions of philosophy and history of art as well as to more recent research in neuroscience and developmental psychology this assumpti...

Affects and emotions seam to be more essential for an understanding of world than assumed. The apperception is given distinction by them, Cassirer said. Coherent to Cassirer and the acutal debate of anthropolocial reserach work on image theory it can be shown that also the apperception and the production of an image especially of art base on them a...

When Cassirer puts "feeling" or "suffering" and "enduring" the world at the very beginning, which will be grabbed by our ability of "imaging and doing" ("Bild- und Tatkraft"), everything we are knowing about the world takes on a new meaning. By the arts this connection becomes clear.

Wie verstehen wir Bilder? Vergleichbar der Wahrnehmung von Welt, so eröffnet der Ansatz von Cassirers Philosophie, wird auch das Bild zunächst nicht über sprachliche und begriffliche Bewusstseinsleistungen erfasst, sondern affektive. Ein Ansatz, der, wie die Untersuchung aufzeigen soll, in Kunstwissenschaft und Philosophie in unterschiedlicher Weis...

Fascination and horror are two key experiences that are present particularly in the early work of Anselm Kiefer. Particularly in Germany these have prompted surprisingly strong reactions. Why is it, that his work dealing with the National Socialism has been received so ambivalently? The answer to this question, the text attempts, is based on the an...

Do abstract paintings still make sense and if so what do they mean. By reducing the paintings to simple square blots as by Cézanne, to lines as by van Gogh and color traces as by Monet their meaning is fundamentally questioned. But by interpreting these compositions as effective forces or rather affective stimuli a new and different meaning becomes...