Class Introduction to Visual Culture

Introduction to the Visual Culture is an introductory approach to the regime of understanding images at large, as well as the world inder its conditition of a vision apparatus, all this in contemporary societies, whether under the model of literacy, whether under one of hermeneutics, semiotics  or phenomenology of perception.

I ¿ Visual Culture: contexts
1. Visual Culture: what is it? ¿ culturalist definitions and visualist definitions.
2. Vision, visuality and visibility: towards a literacy.
3. The centrality of gazing in the Western modern experience.
4. The post-modern statute of images: the simulacrum, the pastiche and the virtual.
5. Methodologies in visual analysis ¿ the interdisciplinarity: the ¿good eye¿ and the compositional reading; content analysis and assessment; semiology and decoding; psichoanalysis and interpretation.

II ¿ Visual Culture: concepts
1. The ocular, the optic, the scopic: oculophilia and oculophobia
2. Distraction and hiperattention: the urban culture and Georg Simmel¿s blasé
3. Aura, distance and exposure: Walter Benjamin¿s viewing
4. The panopticon and the deviant surveillance: space and vision bound to power¿s will, according to Michel Foucault
5. Technologies of looking: photography, cinema, and Siegfried Kracauer¿s monogram and last image.

Theoretical lectures and thematic debate.
Reading and interpretation of texts e images.
Visual analysis.
Evaluation:
Test (60%) ¿ compulsory feature taking place during the last session of the semester.
Oral presentation (30%) ¿ compulsory feature; working group (2-3 members) on an analysis of the objects in the syllabus, or other ones under the students¿ choice, once submitted to the approval. Duration: 10-15 minutes each group/ (schedule to define).
Attendance and participation (10%).

• ¿ ARNEIM, Rudolf O poder do centro : um estudo da composição nas artes visuais / Rudolf
  Arnheim ; trad. Maria Elisa Costa, Lisboa : Edições 70, 1990
  ART/333-Bc
  ¿ BAUDRILLARD, Jean (1991) Simulacros e Simulação; Lisboa: Relógio d¿Água
  Cota: CO/88-BC.
  ¿ BENJAMIN, Walter (1992) Sobre arte, técnica, linguagem e política; Lisboa: Relógio d¿Água
  Cota: CO/205-BC
  ¿ ELKINS, James (2003) Visual Studies: a skeptical introduction; New York, London: Routledge
  Cota: AV/534-BC
  ¿ EVANS, Jessica, HALL, Stuart, ed. lit. (1999) Visual culture : the reader; London: Sage
  Publications Cota: AVF/97-BC
  ¿ GIL, Isabel Capeloa (2011) Literacia Visual: estudos sobre a inquietude das imagens; Lisboa:
  Edições 70
  Cota: AV/795-BC.
  ¿ MIRZOEFF, Nicholas, ed. lit. (2002) The visual culture reader; London, New York: Routledge
  Cota: AV/488-BC.
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