The Artl@s project joins the projects of the IMAGO Centre (label Centre d’excellence Jean Monnet, cofunded by the Erasmus + Programme of the European Union, the Ecole normale supérieure, and the University of Geneva), and the VISUAL CONTAGIONS project (University of Geneva, FNS 2021-2025) to work on the international circulation of images and their role in the construction of shared identities.
The aim of the “IMAGO” Centre of Excellence is to understand how European cultures have met through the international circulation of images. The center hosts a collaboration between historians, art historians, cognitivists, computer vision specialists and contemporary artists. We study, teach, and exhibit to broader publics to what extent images have been the crucible of European cultural homogenization, or reveal particular cultural and political differences. Website: www.imago.ens.fr
The VISUAL CONTAGION project (visualcontagions.unige.ch), funded by the University of Geneva and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF 2021-2025), extends the project of IMAGO to the Global. The team studies the global circulation of images in the age of print over a century, from the 1890s to the advent of the Internet. It describes and analyses how certain images circulated more than others – in reproductions, copies, pastiches, imitations -, through which channels and according to which chronology they were disseminated. The ambition is to understand what makes an image successful, but also to identify how the circulation of images has contributed to the globalization of cultures, and whether or not it reveals the symbolic domination of certain countries and cultures over others, depending on the period.