Class Cinema, Art, and Culture

The curricular unit "Visual Culture" aims to initiate the students in the problematics of a new field of studies that recognizes the permanent interpellation of the visual experience as one of the main critical issues of contemporaneity. The curricular unit will give students a critical insight into the analysis of images, allowing them to establish links and antecedents to the contemporary challenges of visual culture, to understand visual aspects as a source of cultural transmission, and to explore the relationships and interferences that cultural systems bring to the visual identification process and the understanding of the world and reality. This curricular unit will focus, above all, on the opportunities to create new and creative communication strategies that respond effectively and creatively to the most diverse challenges posed every day by an increasingly demanding modern society. 

1.  Image, sign and significance. C. Peirce and F. Saussure significance models.

2.  Categories of signs. Icon, index and symbol. Iconic and arbitrary signs. Convection. Paradigms and syntagms.

3.  Significance orders. Denotation, connotation, myth and symbolic order.

4.  The text and image relations. Interaction and complementarity.

5.  Intertextuality. Types of intertextuality. Memes.

6.  Significant plastic and composition I. Gestalt Theory. Strong points. Weight, balance and symmetry. Lines and shapes.

7.  Significant plastic and composition II. Image sections. Axial, focused, in-depth, by values and sequencial constructions. Frameworks. Angles.

8.  Color and their meanings. Color and light. Color systems. Psychology of color. Color and communication.

9.  The written and visual language. Typographic and topographic plan. The word-image. Visual identity. The narratives of the brand. 

A series of innovative methodologies are implemented in all the sessions of this curricular unit:

- Active methodologies, in which the teacher mediates the training so that the student can present their point of view in class and increase their critical sense.

- Use of STEAM resources.

- The Maker Movement, as several disciplines and teachers are involved in the development of this course;

- Project-orientated teaching, in which students work in groups, with peer review, to solve challenges proposed (problems) by the class.

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