| Beschreibung |
Today’s increasingly technological and communications based culture is deemed to be particularly visual. We are living in a ‘visual world’, where everything has an image and ‘visual skills’ are considered a valuable resource. Yet, what actually is an ‘image’?, ‘What do pictures want’ and in what ways do visual media structure our ‘ways of seeing’ the world and relating to each other? What role do images play within the scientific and/or artistic research process, and, finally, what kind of knowledge does the ‘visual’ produce?
Discussing these and other related questions, the scientific module ”Towards the Image” will familiarize students with key concepts and methods of contemporary Image Science. The German ‘Bildwissenschaften’ and the Anglophone Visual Culture Studies are two exciting new areas of study that emerged with the turn towards the visual proclaimed at the end of the 20th century. Rather than focusing on fine art alone, these critical academic fields look at a range of art, media, and visual images, from an interdisciplinary perspective.
To reflect on the interrelation between visual culture and key concepts on the ‘image’, we will apply recent and canonical theoretical concepts (i.a. by W.J.T. Mitchell, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Mieke Bal, Kaja Silverman, Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, Dieter Mersch, George Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, Arjun Appadurai, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey and Susan Sontag) to objects from contemporary art and media as well as to other cultural phenomena. Thereby, the scientific module will also introduce methods and techniques used to critically analyze contemporary ‘visual culture’, from art and photography, to television, film and electronic media, using a variety of overlapping analytic frameworks.
The module seeks to devise a set of conceptual instruments to describe and theorize the aesthetic, epistemological, social and political dimensions of ‘visual images’. Thereby, we will also reflect on the ‘digital image’, looking at the ways in which new media, enabling global ‘flows’ of images, reshape contemporary visual culture. Finally, we will also touch upon recent debates on ‘artistic research’ and the ‘epistemology of aesthetics’.
The primary goal of the scientific module is to get an overview of canonical and recent theoretical approaches in ‘Bildwissenschaften’ and Visual Culture Studies, and to develop analytical and critical skills for reading, examining and presenting academic papers. Each student is encouraged to take the responsibility for one of the course readings, either individually or in groups, and to present the text to his/her peers (article summary, reflection and analysis).
The aim is to disclose the productive interactions that arise when crossing over between academic theory and artistic practice. Therefore, students are explicitly invited to put their own artistic work into theoretical perspective, for instance by engaging with the texts through artistic means. Ideally, at the end of the module, students will be able to give an own critical account on theoretical discourses.
Outstanding papers may be published online as part of the summaery 2021.
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