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Antonio Somaini, 'High and Low Definition: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Politics', keynote presented at the conference Visual Noise: Wandering Artifacts and Aberrant Images , ICI Berlin, 17 June 2016, video recording, mp4, 55:18

Often used as a synonym of 'definition', the term 'resolution' indicates the quantity of detail a raster digital image holds, and may refer to image resolution (the size of a digital image file), display resolution (the total number of pixels or the pixel density of a digital visual display), or optical resolution (the number of image sensor elements in a digital camera). Resolution may be increased or decreased, and its various degrees determine not only the visual appearance of an image, but also the conditions of its production, storage, and circulation. As a way of measuring and controlling visibility, resolution raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications, and may be tackled from the different perspective of media theory, media archaeology, and visual culture theory. Reaching back to McLuhan's reflections on the low definition of the television screen and on its analogies with mosaics and pointillisme, this introduction examines the question of resolution in a number of film, media, and artistic practices from the 1960s to today.

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media's adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.

The expression 'organization of perception' appears in one of the first paragraphs of Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility' (1935-36), in a passage that highlights the historical determination of sensory perception. The idea of the historicity of perception – which Benjamin found in art historians such as Alois Riegl, Franz Wickhoff, and Heinrich Wölfflin – lies at the very center of what one can consider his 'media theory'. Yet the notion of an organization of perception also relates to the wider context of aesthetic theories and practices of the 1920s and 1930s, including a series of sensorial experiments exploring this link: Thus, in theorizing rhythm, the Soviet avantgarde negotiates between transgressions of a homogeneous, linear time regime and the industrial organization of movements and frequencies of body, speech, and thought. Projection, on the other hand, structures the perception of light and redefines the materiality of perception in such a radical way that the very notion of materialism is challenged. The workshop considers the relation of media and perception in terms of historicity, rhythm, and projection, thereby connecting to the current ICI Focus 'ERRANS, in Time'. It brings together a number of scholars who have researched particular constellations of the historical, technical, and political organization of perception. Programme Part I 16:00 Welcome 16:10 Antonio Somaini (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3) Light as Medium 16:40 Elena Vogman (DFG project 'Rhythm and Projection' at FU Berlin) Rhythm, Medium, Milieu: On the Memory of Forms 17:00 Gertrud Koch (Freie Universität Berlin) Film Theory as Media Theorie 17:20 Discussion 17:50 Coffee break Part II 18:10 Ekaterina Tewes (DFG project 'Rhythm and Projection' at FU Berlin) Organization of Perception, Organization of Matter 18:30 Georg Witte (DFG project 'Rhythm and Projection' at FU Berlin) Rhythm, Organization, Form 18:50 Clara Masnatta (ICI Berlin) Paradoxical Presence: Projecting ...