Class Visual Culture

This Curricular Unit offers Psychology students the opportunity to explore the complex relationships between images, knowledge and human experience. From the affections aroused by the wonder of images to the psychism of forms, and through the media changes that operate them, in this course we visit images to analyze Culture.

Not applicable

1 Introduction to Visual Culture. 1.1 Visual culture as a problem and its epistemological nature. 1.2 General questions of Visual Hermeneutics. 1.3 Brief History of Images   2. Modern optical regimes. 2.1 Reproducibility and multiplication: the explosion of images. 2.2 From the optical unconscious to the Visual Culture of Science. 2.3 Modernity and the problem of the observer: the disciplinary field of vision.   3. Under the gaze of images. 3.1 Theories of astonishment. 3.2 The technological Uncanny (Unheimliche). 3.3 The Informe: psychoanalysis of abjection.   4. The Political Economy of Images 4.1 The political effects of montage and the metamorphic instability of images. 4.2 Images of desire: veiling, voyeurism, fetishism and absence. 4.3. From simulacra to algorithms: virtual, digital and A.I. image generators.

Theoretical-practical course, expository in nature but in which the debate of ideas is encouraged in class, using visual materials as case studies (cinema, art, photography, medicine, cyber-culture) and their theoretical problematisation. All the content is published on moodle at the start of the semester to enable continuous learning.

Bataille, G. (2015). O nascimento da arte. Sistema Solar. (pub. original 1955) Benjamin, W. (2006). A obra de arte na época da sua possibilidade de reprodução técnica. In A modernidade (J. Barrento, Trad.). Assírio & Alvim. (pub. original 1936-1939) Berger, J. (2018). Modos de ver. Antígona. (pub. original 1972) Bragança de Miranda, J. (2008). As imagens no início. In Corpo e imagem. Vega Bragança de Miranda, J. (2023). Constelações: Ensaios sobre cultura e técnica na contemporaneidade. Sistema Solar Crary, J. (1988). Techniques of the observer. October, 45, 3-35. Freud, S. (2019). O infamiliar [das Unheimliche]. In Obras incompletas de Sigmund Freud (pp. 40-71). Autêntica. (pub. original 1919) Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Columbia University Press. (pub. original 1980) Onians, J. 1994. “I wonder: Short History of Amazement”. In Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honor of E. H. Gombrich. London: Phaidon.