Weaving together image theory with environmental theory, counter-anthropology, feminist materialism and ecofeminism, the publication COMMON IMAGE explores Western and non-Western thought, past and present, poetic and mythic in search for a common image: a sensus communis, an ethico-aesthetics implicating the mineral, the vegetal, and the animal.

Western humanism has established a reifying and predatory relation to the world. While its collateral visual regime, the perspectival image, is still saturating our screens, this relation has reached a dead end. Rather than desperately turning towards transhumanism and geoengineering, we need to readjust our position within community Earth. Facing this predicament, COMMON IMAGE develops the notion of the common image understood as a multisensory perception across species; and a common ethics, a comportment that transcends species-bound ways of living. Highlighting the notion of the common as opposed to the immune, Hoelzl and Marie ultimately advocate otherness as a common ground for a larger than human communism.

Ingrid Hoelzl will discuss the book’s central notion of the common image asking how it may institute a larger than human community-in-the-making and unmaking, and reflect on the sound-image (Chapter 4) as an immersive condition of oceanic resonance. 

Day 1: December 3, 19:30 – 21:30 / Public book launch & conversation with Ingrid Hoelzl on COMMON IMAGE: Towards a Larger than Human Communism (transcript verlag) by Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie

Day 2: December 4, 14:00 – 17:00 / Closed workshop & group discussion: Ingrid will introduce her research project General Humanity and open a discussion on practices of Resonance

Errant Bodies studio, Cotheniusstrasse 6, 10407 Berlin

see more: General Humanity

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Ingrid Hoelzl is an independent scholar specializing in digital and environmental image theory, and the artistic director of the General Humanity collective bringing together theory, poetry, and performance. She holds a PhD from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a diploma in Fine Arts/Visual Culture Studies from the Universität der Künste Berlin. She is the author of Der autoporträtistische Pakt (2008, Fink) and (with Remi Marie) of SOFTIMAGE (2015). Ingrid has worked as a researcher and educator at universities and art academies worldwide, most recently as a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich. Her research on the soft- and postimage, the image as transaction and the Martian image has been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Multitudes (2019), Parallax (2020), the Posthuman Glossary (2018) and The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (2021).