Visual Culture

The expression “Visual Culture” involves all kinds of visual realities in a unique concept whose role is expanding gradually in our culture. Thus the traditional categories in Art History – such as Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Decorative Arts – have been enriched by others – such as Photography, Cinema, Computer Graphics, Design, Fashion, Publicity, Dance, Theatre, Comic, Graffiti, Net.art, etc. Therefore, the interdisciplinary perspective of the visual fact could contribute to add new points of view to the Art History tradition which are linked to the collective imaginary. First and foremost, our Visual Culture is constituted by the images which are produced and manipulated by the human being, provided with a meaning and an intention. Nowadays, this discipline has become established, not only as a working method, but also as a field of innovation and future research. In this sense, the research line Visual Culture is integrated at the moment by two sub-lines, arisen by the Research Groups Hispano-Roman Mosaics and History of Art, Image and Artistic Heritage. Both sub-lines would like to concentrate on the image as the object of study and, at the same time, as a source of information allowing access to the knowledge of the artistic culture from the beginning of the Occidental civilization to the present. 1. Hispano-Roman Mosaics. From the Artistic to the Social This sub-line is concentrated on the study of the Hispano-Roman mosaics as a document, using an approach that departs from the artistic work and goes into the image’s semantics. The figured scenes are globally studied inside the iconographic programs of the public and private buildings which they decorate, and they become indicators of the Hispano-Roman society, economy, culture, values and philosophic streams of the epoch. 2. The artistic imaginary in the Modern and Contemporary societies This sub-line is concentrated on the development of the artistic culture in the Occidental societies between the 15th and the 21st centuries. It departs from the novelties meant by the invention of the press – which entailed the reproduction and diffusion of both image and text –, until reaching the world of the global Visual Culture, opened to the perspectives offered by the new technologies.