What does it mean to own an image?

What does it mean to own an image? Beyond mere possession it seems to be a matter of imagination: an act of determining space and time, a rule of production. From invention, creation and distribution to recognition, exhibition and conservation, images are subject to an infinite variety of operations that are not only characterized by ongoing conflicts about the power of producing, possessing and processing them. In fact, images are the products of struggles for imagination. Images manage their violations rather than obviating them or preventing them from happening.

In the era of digital reproduction and networked distribution ownership of images has turned into the challenge of implementing solutions that are executed in real-time. Ownership means assigning a set of permissions that specify an ever differentiated level of accessability or "access without access": Who has got, right in this moment, the permission to read, write and execute imaginary property?

IMAGINARY PROPERTY is both, a series of video programs and video installations as well as a theoretical research project that is supposed to investigate the current implications of owning images. The aim is to further complicate and increase complexity around property affairs rather than reducing them towards a level where one could fall back into the illusion of an alleged identity of "myself" and "my own" that may have characterized the era of possessive individualism. The project aims to demystify existing property relations and to trace the links with the emergent development of reproductive forces. And it tries to speculate on concepts of a worldwide redistribution of imaginary property...

The project should lead towards a critique of the political economy of image production, in most practical ways, by jumping from square to square so to say: As a production and reproduction of images of images of images...