Mapping a global dialogue on images and imagination.
Established to connect visual theory and practice across disciplines, the Network has grown into a truly international forum for research, making, and curation.
Interrogating how images represent, reframe, and transform the world.
The Image Research Network brings together artists, researchers, curators, technologists, and educators to explore the nature and functions of images across cultural, scientific, and civic life. Member-based and scholar-led, the Network investigates how visual media shape understanding and open possibilities for practice and imagination.
Founded in 2010, The Image Research Network emerged as digital visual culture was accelerating across art, media, and everyday life. Launched by Phillip Kalantzis Cope and Tamsyn Gilbert, the Network grows out of their research on how images organize knowledge and public life, framing the image as both method and evidence. From the outset, it has examined images in their empirical, normative, and imaginative dimensions—how they reflect reality, encode perspective, and project futures across cultural, scientific, and civic contexts.
The International Conference on the Image has since been hosted with universities and cultural partners including the University of California, Los Angeles; Venice International University; Manchester Metropolitan University and its School of Digital Arts; the University of New South Wales; the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon; The University of Texas at Austin; Universidad San Jorge (Zaragoza); Universidad Abierta Interamericana (Buenos Aires); and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, among others.
Founding Chairs Phillip Kalantzis Cope and Tamsyn Gilbert established its initial focus on images as engines of cultural meaning and social imagination, grounding the Network in visual culture, media theory, and practice-based research. In its formative years, photographer and educator David Cubby served as Network Chair, emphasizing the image as a site of critical inquiry across media, methods, and publics and strengthening ties between studio practice, visual theory, and technological change. Today, the Network is co-chaired by Cátia Rijo (Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon) and Ana María Sedeño Valdellós (Universidad de Málaga, Spanish-language Chair), whose leadership reflects a commitment to multilingual, cross-cultural scholarship and to curatorial and pedagogical experimentation in the visual field.
Across its history, the Network has hosted influential thinkers shaping debates about images and society. Plenary speakers such as Douglas Kellner, Howard Besser, Sean Cubitt, Dina Iordanova, Tomasz Wendland, Erkki Huhtamo, Adam Harvey, Caroline Wilkinson, James Coupe, and Kate Pullinger have advanced conversations on topics ranging from visual ideology, media archaeology, and documentary practice to surveillance, biometric imaging, artificial intelligence, and interactive narrative. Their contributions underscore the Network’s interdisciplinary commitment to understanding images as forces in culture, technology, and public life.
The Network’s publishing ecosystem is anchored by The International Journal of the Image, a Hybrid Open Access journal. The journal is a cross-disciplinary forum for interrogating the nature of the image and the processes of image-making in all their empirical, normative, and imaginative dimensions. It explores how images are fashioned, interpreted, and deployed across fields such as architecture, cognitive science, media studies, religious studies, and the arts, examining how visual media represent, reframe, and potentially transform the world we inhabit. In an era where text, sound, and image are increasingly intertwined, the journal stands as a convergent space for dialogue on perception, representation, visual grammars, and the social life of images.
Each year, the Network awards the Image International Award for Excellence, selected from the ten highest-ranked peer-reviewed articles published in the journal. The winning article is granted Open Access status and the author is invited as a featured speaker at the subsequent conference. Recent award-winning research has addressed subjects such as metaverse realities and image-based communication, panoramic photographic ecologies, visual journalism and trust, Peircean theories of mental imagery, Islamic feminist film analysis, orientalist stylometry, the survival of images in performance, transhumanist meme cultures, smartphone photography and time, and philosophical engagements with photography and virtual reality—demonstrating the breadth and depth of contemporary image studies.
Long-form scholarship is supported by The Image Book Imprint, which publishes monographs and edited volumes that extend arguments beyond article length and support scholarly, curatorial, and practice-based projects. The imprint is inclusive by design, welcoming authors of all nationalities, career stages, and disciplinary backgrounds, and explicitly encouraging both broad and highly specialized topics in visual culture. Open Access pathways ensure that books can be made freely and permanently available online, allowing research on images and image-making to circulate widely among scholars, educators, museum and gallery professionals, media makers, and civic institutions.
Today, The Image Research Network continues to bring together artists, researchers, curators, technologists, and educators to explore the nature and functions of images across cultural, scientific, and civic life. Through its annual conference, its peer-reviewed journal, its book imprint, and its year-round presence on the CGScholar community platform, the Network sustains a member-based, scholar-led space committed to rigor, inclusion, and actionable knowledge—interrogating how images represent, reframe, and transform the worlds we inhabit and imagine.
We are thankful for the leadership of the following past and present Research Network Chairs.
Chair, Editor
(2019- )
Chair, Editor
(2014-18)
Founding Chair, Editor
(2010-13)
Founding Chair, Editor
(2010-13)
Current Chair and Editor
The International Conference on the Image has a rich history of featuring leading and emerging voices from the field, including:
Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
(2010)
Professor & Associate Academic Director, New York University, New York City, USA
(2010)
Joint Head of Department of Media & Communications, University of London, London, UK
(2010)
Film Studies Director of Research, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland
(2011)
Director, Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland
(2012)
Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
(2013)
Artist & Researcher, Berlin, Germany
(2016)
Director of the School of Art & Design, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK
(2016)
Artist & Associate Professor, Center for Digital Art & Experimental Media (DXARTS), University of Washington, Seattle, USA
(2016)
Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
(2019)
The Image Research Network has had the pleasure of working with the following organizations:
