David Bucheli

David Bucheli is a member of the eikones Graduate School at the Center for Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel. He studied Media Studies, German Studies, and Science Studies in Basel and Lucerne. Between 2019 and 2023 he was leading the interdisciplinary research project “Early Cinema in Switzerland 1896–1900” supported by the Gebert Rüf Foundation. His current project is concerned with the history of the Rorschach test and other image-based testing procedures in experimental psychology.

The project

Title: Test Images. Aesthetics and Epistemology of Categorical Work

"Around 1900, at the intersection of psychology, media technology, art history, and forensics, a new mode of operationalizing images for the investigation of the psyche emerged. Across Germany, France, and Switzerland, visual media were displayed, studied, and interpreted under experimental conditions — not to objectify images as aesthetic or cultural artifacts, but to render their perception observable as a subjective process and to draw inferences about the psychological properties of their viewers. This project offers a systematic genealogy of image-based testing procedures in twentieth-century psychological science, anchored by an extended case study: a media and intellectual history of the Rorschach test, the psychodiagnostic instrument developed by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922) on the basis of ambiguous inkblot figures and described as recently as 1998 by the American Psychological Association as "perhaps the most powerful psychometric instrument ever envisioned."

Hosting Institution(s): Centre Allemand d'Histoire de l'Art

Selective Bibliography

• Digitale Camouflage. Geschichte eines Phantasmas, Berlin: Humbolt Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften (Sonderdruck, 8).
• “Bilder geben. Eine Objektgeschichte des Rorschachtests” [Giving Images. An object history of the Rorschach test], in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 29: Test (2023),
• “Gleich nebenan. Kinematografie und Völkerschau in Genf 1896”, in: Cinema 70.  Archive (2025)
• “Total Landscraping”, in: Images secondes, 05 (2025).