INTRODUCTION
The present publication deals with issues of imagination and creativity as a notion, philosophy – and social and cultural form, with point of departure in current debates on visual culture. Whereas these debates cover a large ground, spanning from media studies over design to cultural studies, they seldom reflect on the basic fact that visual culture in its present form indicates a huge collective creativity in some capacity, implicating the entire postwar era. From early focuses on the possible social and cultural roles of the image in the 1950s and 60s - e.g. in work of Roland Barthes and Daniel Boorstin - to the present day, forms of visual culture have proliferated through a variety of collective dimensions, as reflected for instance in the curriculums of visual communication within design education and studies of image representation and pictorial cognition in art history and cognitive science.
Thus visual culture points to an interesting inroad to - and a possible novel focus on - the image - pictorial representation - as an issue of cultural creativity. For one thing the current interest in visual culture goes along with a surge in concrete interest in culture and creativity, e.g. related to debates on the cultural circularity of “the network society” (Manuel Castells), and the aesthetic modes of "economies of signs and spaces" (Scott Lash & John Urry) over analyses of the “experience society” (Gerhard Schulze), to the recent focus on a possible "experience economy" (B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore) and a "creative class" (Richard Florida). But in addition to that one may discern a larger social and cultural role for the image conjunct with a focus on creative image formation, as addressed traditionally by the notion of creative imagination in Western thought, in classic modernist thought, from Kant to the romantics, up to recent work of Paul Ricoeur, Richard Kearney, Johann P. Arnason and Charles Taylor, or in the interest in the image from an anthropological point of view in recent work of Arjun Appadurai.