The lecture gives a semi-technical introduction to and historical overview of image processing. Using the example of the Unsharp Mask, an ‘analog’ photographic filtering technique dating back to the 1930s and popularized in digital form by Adobe Photoshop in the 1990s, it will illustrate how the abstraction of pictures to numbers made possible today’s computational photography and AI-powered image synthesis.

Till A. Heilmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC Virtual Lifeworlds at Ruhr University Bochum where he is part of a project on digital image archives. His recent publications address training data for Large Language Models, historical praxeology of digital media, theories of analog media, the history of CD-ROMs, and the genealogy of image filters.

Participation via Zoom: Zoom link

Part of the International Lecture Series 

Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary

From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.

Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series “Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary” is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.

Further Program

November 25, 2025
Isabel Wünsche (Art History, Constructor University Bremen): “Beyond Western Avant-garde Approaches: Abstraction in a Global Cross-Cultural Dialogue”

December 2, 2025
Sabine Eckmann (Director and Chief Curator, Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis): “Abstraction, Sensation and the Digital”

December 9, 2025
Sven Lütticken (Art History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University): “Lethal Abstraction and Alter-Abstractions”

December 16, 2025
Kim Albrecht (Information Design, Folkwang University Essen): “Data Visualization as Abstract Realism”

January 13, 2026
Birgit Schneider (Media Studies, University of Potsdam): “Making Climate Data Graspable through Visualization and Sonification in Art and Science”

January 20, 2026
Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths London): “A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision”

January 27, 2026:
Crystal Z. Campbell (Art, University of Buffalo): “Abstraction, Pareidolia, and the Underloved”

For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1 

Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).

With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.