Visual Studies

How machine learning and computer vision generate images.

How does the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.

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

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.

Combining archive material with a wide selection of photographs of body paintings produced by the duo in the 1970-1980s, this publication retraces the evolution of gender identities and the treatment of the female body in visual culture from the 1950s to the present.

Cinema as a method of investigating the visible and a journey into the theoretical thinking of images.

The challenges of the library and the photographic collection founded by Aby Warburg in the 1920s, as a "laboratory" for collective research on the forms of transmission of images since Antiquity, and an intermedial device of knowledge. An exceptional case study, driven by the question: what was the impact of photography in Warburg's turning point in the history of art and culture?

Some insights into the imaginaries that inhabit techno-scientific realities, transforming our relationship with the world, closing or opening up the future.

Interviews with artists and researchers on the issues of catch and data.

A study of "spectral" (rather than ghostly) cinema, starting with the film Ringu by Hideo Nakata, as well as a philosophical essay on the haunting of images.

A reflection on the notions of catch and data.

The challenges of the library and the photographic collection founded by Aby Warburg in the 1920s, as a "laboratory" for collective research on the forms of transmission of images since Antiquity, and an intermedial device of knowledge. An exceptional case study, driven by the question: what was the impact of photography in Warburg's turning point in the history of art and culture?

A vast study of the visual culture of industrial music during its development in Europe, the United States and Japan, from the 1970s to the 1990s, a global culture that goes beyond sound experimentation to cross different media (graphics, film, performance, video), in a close dialogue with the heritage of modernity and under the growing influence of technologies.

Artist, photographer and filmmaker Aradhana Seth's photographic archive of painted signs in India: a visual itinerary through the historical-economic changes of Indian society over the years.

A glorious design herbarium of marijuana ads from the great underground magazines of the 1960s and '70s.

The temporal dimension of the image.

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

The book "Movements of Air" reprints the breathtaking pictures of Étienne-Jules Marey, that he took between 1899 and 1901 during his scientific experiments with moving air and smoke, and complements them with two essays of Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni. 

A comprehensive survey of visual studies and visual culture, from its origins in art history to the current perspectives opened by new technologies, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

Art historian and philosopher Horst Bredekamp reveals the importance of visual analysis and the central role of images in the development of the philosophical thought of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Relying mainly on the Leibnizian concept of the monad and on the Theater of Nature and Art, elaborated by the German philosopher and scientist from 1671 until his death, Bredekamp places Leibniz as a precursor of the theory of the image.

A critical approach to visual communication and contemporary globalist aesthetics.

An essay to account for the architectonics of Aby Warburg (1866-1929) by resituating his work within his project of general anthropology of expression: Lara Bonneau shows, from a text as little known as it is important, that the invention of iconology, which made the art historian famous, was underpinned by an ontology drawing on various sources, philosophical, psychological and biological as well as historical.

The non-human images, challenging our own relationship to the world.

An iconographic taxonomy—researched, conceived, and ideated by Wolfgang Scheppe, also author of the book's final essay—that traces the state and police visual control through almost 500 images from the May 1968 police archives in Paris.

An original multidisciplinary study of the text-image pair in its political dimension, from the militancy of the early twentieth century to the struggles for "visibility" of minorities.

Visual Cultures as Time Travel proposes a notion of time travel in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery and in the moment of mass illegalized migration, of wildfires and floods, of lost and co-opted futures.

A study of representations of HIV and AIDS in American and European art, that opens up a vast political, economic and social history of two decades fatally haunted by the catastrophe.

An artistic research on the political construction of representations of socialist and capitalist modernity during the Cold War, through a history of exhibitions.

A history of the concept of data.

First monograph dedicated to Pierre Leguillon's Museum of Mistakes: a traveling exhibition gathering a collection of mass culture artifacts and craft objects, questioning with humor and subversivity the mechanisms of today's visual culture.

A collective and transdisciplinary study of the representation of plants and their powers to reflect on the question of animation, cinema, photography and, more broadly, image, in the Anthropocene era and in the context of the "vegetal turn" at work in the human sciences as well as in contemporary art.

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

A platform for discussions between some of today's leading artists, writers, theorists, curators, and historians aimed at questioning the very status of photography today.

A platform for discussions between some of today's leading artists, writers, theorists, curators, and historians aimed at questioning the very status of photography today.

An history of the artwork and the image first apprehended as an act and a process.

A conversation, accompanied by an introduction by Andrea Soto Calderón, to better understand the crucial role that images occupy in Jacques Rancière's work, and how images are the site of imaginative and reconfiguring operations.

An an extensive analysis of the advent of Christian visual culture in the Kingdom of Kongo and its and development across four centuries.

A history of photography through its accidents.

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?