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Cultural and artistic forms as well as forms shaping societies forms are not firm and fixed, but always in motion. They emerge under particular conditions and they stabilize, establish and change across different times and cultural spaces. The question of the dynamics of forms allows us to pay closer attention to the forces at work in their migration and transmission. What is the relationship between their intrinsic potentials and the external influence of actors in changing historical, social, or political contexts? And how do art and culture reflect changes in their forms? Problems of form in the very literal sense are to be investigated, that is, geneses and adaptations, which possibly allow for insights into their dynamic preconditions precisely where the forms remain incomplete, or dissolve. What special role, then, do ephemeral, elusive, or distorted forms play? What cultural power do forms unfold in images and ideas? With these questions, the thematic focus invites to question theoretical traditions of form reflection and to discuss concrete artistic and cultural (non-)forms.

Research into the emergence and reproduction of forms as well as their flexibility and elasticity has a long tradition at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg. With his philosophy of symbolic forms, Ernst Cassirer laid the foundation for a philosophy of human culture; Aby Warburg investigated the medial conditions of the distortion and transformation of pictorial formulas in the process of migratory movements. These traditions have been and are being continued in the projects ›Bilderfahrzeuge‹ (BMBF) on the materiality of pictorial traditions, in the project of digitizing the ›Image Index of Political Iconography‹ (DFG) as well as in the Centre for Advanced Studies ›Imaginaria of Force‹ (DFG), in which dynamic conceptions of the arts are discussed.

The program of scientific lectures and conferences takes place in close cooperation with the NOMIS research group ›Traveling Forms‹ (University of Konstanz) and the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies ›Imaginaria of Force‹.

Journal

Dynamics of Form

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