From Industrial Revolution to Big Data: Reading Visual Culture

In this short series of seminars, our starting point will be the cognitive turn in 19^th century following Industrial Revolution and how this turn affected artists, psychologists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists. The highlight of these seminars will be their focus on the sense of sight, and its importance in Western culture. We will sift through theories of vision, practices of sight and the space visuality occupies in todays culture while at the same time we tell the tale the start (and the end of the) Visual Cultural Studies. We will touch upon a diverse set of questions from the dissemination possibilities internet has brought to how we have ended in an era of selfie’s, and how the millions of user-generated images effect visual arts in general.