The Image Society foundation’s goal is to provide a forum for an artistically visionary take on visual culture. It pursues this aim by means of research, projects, publications, events and exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad. Visual culture’s international character has not yet been sufficiently analyzed, and the Image Society seeks to change that. The Image Society is a cross between a makers’ studio and a production agency, a creative meeting place for today’s image makers and visual thinkers. Here, modern image makers (born-digitals, wireless cosmopolitans, visual intellectuals) look around them and dive into the flood of competing meanings and new visual currents.

BACKGROUND

The Image Society is a new foundation whose origins lie in various organizations and initiatives that have sprung up over the last 30 years. A network has formed of people concerned with the cultural and artistic changes brought about by the emergence of the Internet. Projects like International Browser Day, held in Amsterdam, Berlin and New York in the late 1990s, and the Visual Power Shows, staged between 2003 and 2008, have provided starting points for thinking about visual culture. Organizations including VPRO, Waag Society, the Institute for Network Cultures, the Sandberg Instituut, the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, and MOTI, Museum of the Image, have played an important role in bringing the Image Society into being.

www.imagesociety.network