Class Visual Culture

The course offers a critical approach to visual culture as a field in which knowledge, technology, experience and subjectivity intersect. Drawing on a genealogy of images and visual apparatuses, it examines how different technologies-from perspective to artificial intelligence, through photography and cinema-have transformed the ways we observe, represent and understand the world. Images are approached not merely as objects of representation, but as technical, cultural and affective dispositifs that shape perception, memory and experience, giving rise to different regimes of visuality. The course further examines the relationships between aesthetics, science, technology and politics, as well as the role of images in shaping contemporary experience. From the affects elicited by images to the psychic life of forms, through the transformations of media that reshape these regimes, the course explores images as a means of analysing culture.

Not applicable

1. Introduction to Visual Culture: the image as an epistemological problem 1.1. Visual culture as a problem and its epistemological foundations 1.2. Visual hermeneutics: images, interpretation and knowledge 1.3. A genealogy of images, visual apparatuses and regimes of representation   2. Modern Optical Regimes: the transformation of visual experience 2.1. Technical reproducibility and the multiplication of images 2.2. From the optical unconscious to the visual culture of science 2.3. Modernity and disciplinary regimes of vision 3. From Affects to the Psychic Life of Forms: images and the production of the subject 3.1. Theories of wonder 3.2. The technological Unheimliche 3.3. The informe: psychoanalysis of abjection 4. The Political Economy of Images: images and the production of culture 4.1. Montage and the metamorphic instability of images 4.2. Images of desire: veiling, voyeurism, fetishism and absence 4.3. From simulacra to algorithms: synthetic images, artificial intelligence and new visuality  

The course adopts a theoretical-practical approach, structured around lectures combined with discussion, integrating conceptual framing, critical analysis and debate. Learning is organised around the interpretation of a diverse corpus of visual materials-including art, photography, cinema, science, medicine and digital culture-treated as sites of knowledge production rather than as mere illustrations of theoretical concepts. The discussion of case studies fosters the articulation between theory and interpretative practice, encouraging critical autonomy and interdisciplinary reflection. All teaching materials are made available on the Moodle platform at the beginning of the semester, supporting continuous, independent and well-prepared learning throughout the course.

Bataille, G. (2015). O nascimento da arte. Sistema Solar. Benjamin, W. (2006). A obra de arte na época da sua possibilidade de reprodução técnica. In A modernidade. Assírio & Alvim. Berger, J. (2018). Modos de ver. Antígona. Bragança de Miranda, J. (2023). Constelações: Ensaios sobre cultura e técnica na contemporaneidade. Sistema Solar. Crary, J. (2017). Técnicas do observador: Visão e modernidade no século XIX. Orfeu Negro. Didi-Huberman, G. (2007). Diante do tempo: História da arte e anacronismo das imagens. Orfeu Negro. Freud, S. (2019). O infamiliar (Das Unheimliche). In Obras incompletas de Sigmund Freud. Autêntica. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Columbia University Press. Onians, J. (1994). I wonder: A short history of amazement. In Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honor of E. H. Gombrich. Phaidon.  Simondon, G. (2024). Imagination and invention (J. H. Smith, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.