Visual Studies

This publication is the first outcome of an ongoing series of seminars at the Bergen University of Fine Arts, developping critical and creative perspectives on invisible practices. These essays and works seek to investigate the operations of visibility by highlighting the unseen, the camouflaged, the immaterial and the erased as particular aesthetic strategies, and to reflect on the possible outcomes of such strategies on the socio-political realm.

Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, T. J. Demos critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations, trough a series of cases study taken from contemporary visual culture.

A transdisciplinary study on the Tutsi genocide, tackling various issues related to the writing and the transmission of the genocide's history, to its political and judicial dimensions, and to its media and artistic representations.

A collection of essays focusing on the notions of invention and image in art.

Different perspectives (art history, philosophy, photography, film, architecture, history of science...) on the heterogeneous forms the discourse of pictures can take (an anthology).

Finnish media theorist discusses slow violence & environmental crisis through the prism of art, design, and technological practices.

This publication offers new insights into the broad and differentiated spectrum of functions images could assume in political contexts in those areas dominated by the Portuguese in early modern times. How were objects and artifacts staged and handled to generate new layers of meaning and visualize political ideas and concepts? And what were the respective reasons, means, and effects of the visualization of Portuguese power and politics?

The Futures of Screen: an aesthetic and technical analysis.

Crossing perspectives on living among screens.

The political dimension of Visual Studies, between Francophone and Anglo-American studies.

An impressive collection of essays offering a critical examination of representations of vision in motion—from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze.

The concept of time in art history.

An historical and ethnographic investigation into the popular origin and environment of Cubist innovations.

Ambiguity is inherent in images because visual perception is an interpretative act involving memory and imagination. Modern art has made this aspect of perception crucial to its relationship with the viewer. Images potentielles (Potential Images), the first systematic exploration of this topic, considers those works of art that rely to a great degree on imaginative response.

Renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman conducts a careful analysis of Cube—Giacometti's only abstract sculptural work.

A unique multidisciplinary approach to Visual Studies.

The return of the anthropological question has completely redesigned the issues of representation. A state of play.

A social history of socialist realism imagery in the former East Germany.

Seven essays about Marcel Duchamp's work.

An innovative analysis of our relationship to the image.

A historical and theoretical reflection, on the border between aesthetics and politics, on the decisive role of the images and the power and limits of representation, in the context of the last genocide of the twentieth century.

Social and political dimension of the emergence of a culture of the image carried by the amateur practice of photography in Germany at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Function of visual arts in France during the First World War.

An "archaeology" of contemporary art, between Matisse and Duchamp, between art and philosophy: a book to deconstruct the aesthetic regime of the image, for a new diagrammatic thinking, after Deleuze and Guattari.

The frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan, Marat at his last breath by David, "Your country needs you", Guernica by Picasso: four essays on political iconography.

An exploration of the relationship between artistic creation and industrial production, between the artist and his material.

Thirteen texts (including an unpublished essay by Georges Didi-Huberman) to think art and history together, from the tools developed by the theorist of the future of images.

Forty years of Anglo-American feminist theory in art history (an anthology of reference texts by Laura Cottingham, Gen Doy, Lisa E. Farrington, Lisa Gail Collins, Judith Halberstam, Amelia Jones, Lucy R. Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Rozsika Parker, Griselda Pollock, Abigail Solomon-Godeau).

An anthology of texts by philosophers, theoricians and art historians (H. Belting, H. Bredekamp, G. Didi-Huberman, J.-L. Nancy, W.J.T. Mitchell...) around the specific logic of the image and the transformation of the contemporary visual field.

An essay on the the appearance of the image.

This brilliant work studies the notion of modernity as it's been defined at the end of the XIXth century, especially through the analyse of the links between the visual culture and several main social debates of the time such as sexuallity, urban crowd, riots and social control mechanisms, the Republic and the Church, nationalism and militarism.

A thoroughly investigation of the social role of art articulated by the French left during the July Monarchy and Second Republic.

A science of sensitive experience prolonged by a theory of atmospheres, at the origins of philosophical aesthetics.

Eyal and Ines Weizman explore the history of the before-and-after image, from its origins in 19th-century Paris to today's satellite surveillance.

The first French translation of Vivian Sobchack's work, Le corps du film – Une phénoménologie de l'expérience filmique offers a new perspective to the phenomenological tradition through an interrogation of our cinematographic experience and, more generally, of our relationship to screens.

The implications of the digitization of image production and distribution on the contemporary ecology of the moving image.