Presentation
Educational project Listen
The PhD in Visual Culture is a third-level educational project capable of crossing different fields: Literature, Aesthetics, Art History, Image Theory, Media Theory and Digital Technologies.
"Visual Culture" studies the cultural aspects of visual experience: from the history of perception and gazes to media, from images to the institutions that convey them, in the context of a given era and a given culture. However, this discipline has deep roots, especially in the history of international Cultural Studies, and certainly corresponds to the need to understand the study of visuality and the image within the more significant "Cultural Turn" of the humanities, and more specifically, in the context of the so-called "Pictorial Turn”,addressing the issues posed by the production, the circulation and the global consumption of images.
This is a discipline that includes "Visual Studies" – originated in the British and American Cultural Studies – "Bildwissenschaft" (image science) – with its prestigious ancestry in the science/history of German culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - and "Image Science" recently proposed by W.J.T. Mitchell.
These approaches are complemented by the "Bildanthropologie" inaugurated by Hans Belting, which is strengthened today by embodiment theory and the study of image from the perspective of neuroscience and cognitive science.
Even art history, in all its national versions, the French "Philosophie de l'image," as well as literary theory and comparative studies engaged on the front of the relationship between image and word, between visual and verbal, and they have long been seeking points of convergence and a common lexicon thanks to international "Visual culture”. It should also not be forgotten the remarkable contribution of gender studies, which has innovated with an anti-essentialist spirit the study of the gaze and visual practices.
- Contemporary visual culture studies are thus engaged in defining:
- the experience of image-making; spectatorship and theories of the gaze; the broad debate that has evolved from media archaeology into a media ecology;
- the agency of images in relation to human behavior;
- the biocultural and biotechnological turn in the theories of image, gaze and device.
Contemporary visual culture also seeks to cope with the challenges thrown up today by "machine vision" and Artificial Intelligence (neural networks, pattern recognition systems, the vast scope of application of surveillance technologies and the so-called "operational images"), as well as by Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Reality technologies.
Training Objectives Listen
Visual Culture marks a convergence between cultural studies and art history, but also between psychology, anthropology, sociology and literature. At the same time it is an interdisciplinary tool that stimulates the "visual turn" of other established disciplines: from geography to comparative literature, from philosophy to theology, from politics to anthropology. Studies in Visual Culture have taught that image-making, spectatorship and media/devices, must be understood within the framework of an inquiry into the fundamental behaviors of Homo sapiens and thus within a biology, more precisely an ecology, that explains the significance of the relationship the human species has established with images, gazes and devices during its evolution.
The doctoral course in Visual Culture aims to train young scholars to deal with interdisciplinary issues and methodologies in order to understand the complex processes in which images are involved, in terms of representation, production, storage (including digital), processing and transmission.
Along the three-year course training will provide the theoretical and practical foundations of the discipline but it will also to open up new exploratory and innovative horizons. For this reason, alongside more "traditional" paths in the fields of art history and literary theory, film, photography and television theory, aesthetics and performing arts disciplines, innovative paths will be proposed toward the interactions between aesthetics and cognitive neuroscience:
- media theory and archaeology and their relation to corporeality/embodiment);
- the new technologies of image, and sound, (both in terms of how image and sound are created and manipulated through different technologies, and in terms of political communication, artistic practices and social systems of surveillance);
- issues related to sex, gender, and the practices, styles, and genders of particular subcultures through works;
- globalization and transcultural practices (the connections and/or collisions between territorial claims, postcolonial traditions, and global circulation, transcultural memory, urbanization, migration, planetary resources, and precariousness);
- the relations between culture and memory (the study of memory, as a collective and individual faculty, in a globalized world;
- the ways in which memory can be "blocked" by trauma or by political or psychic forms of repression);
- the "environmental humanities and ecologies" (practices and interventions that address the now unavoidable questions posed by environmental and ecological crises, from the "animal question" to the sociologies of "everyday life");
- performance studies (cultural practices and registers, e.g., fictional and world-making activities, queer theatre, popular imagery, performance of resistance);
- the "immersive environments" (produced by VR, AR, XR technologies) and their applications to different spheres of culture (performance studies, to disability studies, graphic medicine etc. ).
Occupational and professional opportunities Listen
The Ph.D. course in Visual Culture aims to train scholars in carrying out researches and teaching activities in universities and AFAM institutions, in all the disciplinary areas covered by the course, as well as to train experts capable of carrying out high-profile tasks in cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, archives, foundations and cultural enterprises, in publishing houses and in areas related to the training, direction and coordination of their activities. Additional professional fields are more broadly related to knowledge dissemination and the public humanities.
Ph.Ds in Visual Culture are able to work with traditional and digital communication tools, to actively participate in the conception, production and management of cultural events such as festivals, reviews, exhibitions, and to act as mediators between public and private bodies.
The knowledge and operational skills acquired during the three-year doctoral program are also a useful tool for effectively interfacing with the world of advertising and marketing.
PhDs in Visual Culture also acquire both technical and cultural skills, in the new immersive visual technologies, developing integration skills in the scientific and industrial contexts that involve their application.