Multimodality: The Sensually Organized Potential of Artistic Works, ed. by Martina Sauer and Christiane Wagner [Special Issue, Art Style, 10, 1, September 2022]

2021 instead of 2020, the 16th international congress of the German Society for Semiotics took place on the topic of transformations. Due to the Corona pandemic, it was finally not held in presence at the TU Chemnitz, but took place online. 11 sections with different foci from archaeology, architecture, design, digital humanities, on the body, from the field of literature & youth and subcultures, media, fashion, environment and carto/atlas semiotics and sign philosophy had each published their own call for papers. The Image & Cultural Studies sections addressed the research community with a German/English call on images as agents of cultural transformation processes. The focus of the call was to understand images as agents - in the words of art and cultural studies scholar Aby M. Warburg - and to recognize and understand not only their potential for cognition, but also their potential for action. As an active part of culture, they not only convey it, but at the same time stimulate action. In this respect, images can be understood not only as documents and testimonies of collective history, but also assume an active role as carriers and repositories of affectively effective elements of communication. As agents of cultural transformation processes, images take on a status of their own within the human capacity for expression and action. The essays in this volume bear eloquent witness to this