Images are everywhere and now have a more prominent place than ever in our everyday lives.
Research into ‘Visual Culture’ has been coordinated by the Visual Culture Research Group since 2005. As one of the university’s flagship research initiatives, ‘Visual Culture’ has succeeded in uniting different research areas and practice-related course offerings. The research cluster follows a transdisciplinary approach and involves various departments within the Faculty of Humanities, but also draws in researchers from other faculties at the University of Klagenfurt. Several research projects are currently being carried out under the excellence initiative. In addition to lecture series and guest lectures, research efforts in this field have also lead to a number of publications.
In recent years, research activities have been bundled and given a distinct profile, and researchers are increasingly interlinked around the following three central research (and teaching) pillars:
As of the winter semester of 2018/19, the range of degree programmes offered at the University of Klagenfurt includes the Master’s degree programme in Visual Culture (programme information in German only).
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Kulturredaktion2016-10-06 09:10:062018-04-23 10:50:51Art as midwife for a new Europe
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Forschungskommunikation2016-05-03 11:02:552017-10-11 11:08:10Wissenschaft und Kunst reflektieren europäisches KulturerbeANNOUNCEMENT
Research Days Visual Culture on the 12th and 13th of November 2020
More information to follow shortly.
Popularisation and Populism in the Visual Arts. Attraction Images
Anna Schober, 2020
This book investigates the pictorial figurations, aesthetic styles and visual tactics through which visual art and popular culture attempt to appeal to „all of us“. One key figure these practices bring into play—the „everybody“ (which stands for „all of us“ and is sometimes a „new man“ or a „new woman“)—is discussed in an interdisciplinary way involving scholars from several European countries. A key aspect is how popularisation and communication practices—which can assume populist forms—operate in contemporary democracies and where their genealogies lie. A second focus is on the ambivalences of attraction, i.e. on the ways in which visual creations can evoke desire as well as hatred.
Images as Agents in Digital Public Spheres
International workshop organised by the Institute for Cultural Analysis | Visual Culture Section in cooperation with RC 57 Visual Sociology, ISA
When: 27th – 28th June 2019
Where: University of Klagenfurt, Stiftungssaal Room O.0.0.1
For further details, please refer to the programme.
June 27 – 28, 2019: Images as Agents in Digital Public Spheres.
3rd International Workshop on Visual Research for Doctoral Students
Department for Cultural Analysis. Division of Visual Culture: Prof. Anna Schober
University of Klagenfurt, in cooperation with the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee/ RC 57 Visual Sociology
For information and registration see: https://visualworkshop.info/workshop-program/
Please also refer to the workshop astract for further details.
Image credits: author Victoria Restler, permission of Wendy Luttrell
Situated Cinemas: Films and their Screening as Agents of Contemporary Participatory Democracy
8th of June 2018
L 4.1.01 (Lakeside Park House B 04)
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
9:00 – 17:00 hrs.
Cinema today creates a public presence in very varied social spaces: as a politicised film intervention, a socio-critical festival, but also as refugee cinema, as a themed summer party event, as a youth project or as a spectacle of aesthetic imperfection. In this workshop, the question will be posed regarding the global-local networks into which such cinematographic scenes fit in today, with which spatial and social conditions they connect in the process, and how existing urban or rural spatial situations are adapted and changed. Above and beyond this, questions will also be raised about the aesthetic manifestations of these cinema events, the consequent superimposition and mutual commentary of different media and artistic formats (film and fine arts, music and dance, photography and video) as well as aesthetic styles. A central focus of the event is on the role that such cinema situations play in the establishment of contemporary activist democracies.
The lectures in this series at a glance:
02.05.2018 – Edith Futscher V.1.07 | 17.00
Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien
Ohne Profil: Kopf und Figur bei Bruno Gironcoli
16.05.2018 – Angela Harutyunyan V.1.27 | 18.00
Department of Fine Arts and Art History, American University of Beirut
Social Realism and the Communist Ideal:
The Human as a Subject of History
06.06.2018 – Marian Füssel V.1.04 | 18.00
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Die Kunst der Schwachen. Erkundungen zur politischen
Anthropologie des „everybody“ mit Michel de Certeau
20.06.2018 – Katharina D. Martin V.1.27 | 17.00
AKI Artez Academy for Art and Design Enschede
Das Gesicht ist Politik. Zur Sehmaschine im digitalen Milieu
This lecture series is designed to present topical research positions in art history and visual culture studies. Methodological and empirical studies focus on figurative representations of the face, the body and human gestures in modernity and post-modernity and on the function of the human figure in humanities discourses. The various papers thus concern pictures looking back at us in the audience and how this is changing in contemporary mediatised society.
Linda Williams (University of California, Berkeley)
„Serial Melodramas of Black and White: The Birth of a Nation and Oscar Micheaux’s answer“
9. Oktober 2017
Hörsaal 10
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
12.00 c.t.
American popular culture has manufactured a great many demeaning racial stereotypes, among them, in rough chronological order: Jim Crow, Zip Coon, Uncle Tom, the Mammy and the Tragic Mulatta. Some form of blackface racial imitation has been at the root of these stereotypes going all the way back to blackface minstrel shows. Indeed, it seems fair to say that the original spirit of blackface minstrelsy—the imitation of what whites perceive as black vernacular culture, especially black forms of song and dance—is at the very origin of American mass culture. However with The Birth of a Nation, which summarized all of these earlier stereotypes, a new and more vicious stereotype was added— one that arguably had less basis in black vernacular culture than any of the earlier, more minstrel-influenced stereotypes. The sexually active black buck had been part of earlier minstrel lore, and his sexuality was a source of much humor and fun, but the “black beast” whose rapacious lust was targeted at defenseless white women was new and borrowed from Thomas Dixon. This talk argues that D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film was especially effective in galvanizing national racial sentiment away from the sufferings of an Uncle Tom and towards the sufferings of an embattled “white South” because of this new stereotype of the “black beast.” But it also argues that, unlike Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots, Griffith’s film did not seem to be as full of racial hatred as Dixon’s models. Rather, Griffith’s addition of the antebellum first part of his story permitted an apparent homage to the kind of racial amity found in the symbolism of the humble cabin of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom as a democratic place of racial integration, only now, instead of the locus of black and white amity, it symbolizes all-white unity, the infamous “defense” of an “Aryan birthright.” Unlike Dixon, Griffith’s new form of race hatred thus poses as the inheritor rather than the antagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s racial sentiments. A second part of the talk asks how Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates countered or accepted such stereotypes and thus necessarily engaged with the unrelenting American melodrama of black and white.
April to October 2017
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
Vorstufengebäude, V.1.04
6:00 p.m.
The lectures investigate the ways in which visual art and visual popular culture attempts to appeal to “all of us”, but with very particular “faces”, bodily figurations and aesthetic tactics.
The lectures focus on ways of addressing the audience that emerge in the environment of the bourgeois revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries besides more contemporary, “postmodern” ways of establishing contact with spectators. This also includes questions about today’s image circulation via the internet, where images appear in an increasingly multiple, repeatable and generic fashion to coin and to displace complex, multifaceted expressions and aspirations. In addition, some presentations deal with public spectacles where popularisation tips over into populism and with the relationship between the spectacular and artistic activism.
Overall, a key aspect of the various lectures is on exchanges between various visual practices such as film, photography, television, advertising and propaganda, visual art, performative arts and internet use. A second focus is on the ambivalences of attraction, i.e. there will be a discussion of the way in which visual creations arouse desire as well as hate, invite identification and produce disavowal or are involved in mimicry as well as conversion processes.
Elena Pilipets: Contagion Images. The Affect of Queering the Social through Digital Memes (06.04.2017)
In times of networked media environments, digital images take on a dynamic of their own; in their circulation they start to work by means of contagion. Digital memes are serialized visual social phenomena that rapidly gain popularity on the internet as they move and change in their viral spread. During their movement they transform and are transformed across a variety of transmedia and transcultural contexts. As vernacular products of techno-social (sub-)cultures that are characterized by both dominant and deviant intensities of engagement, digital memes transgress the established boundaries between source and adaptation, human and nonhuman, affect and meaning in a variety of ways. Considering the contingent conditions of their visual social workings, the main focus of this presentation will be on examining the queer potentiality that the memes unfold in their circulation.
Elena Pilipets ist Universitätsassistentin am Institut für Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft der Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. Sie forscht zu medien- und kulturübergreifenden Prozessen der Serialisierung in digitalen Netzwerken und unterrichtet im Bereich „Medien- und Kulturtheorie“. Forschungsschwerpunkte: Media/Cultural Studies, Popkulturforschung, Akteur-Netzwek-Theorie, affective turn.
Elisabeth Fritz: Attraktion und Wirksamkeit. Spektakel als kritische Praxis in der Gegenwartskunst. (04.05.2017)
Während das Generieren von Aufmerksamkeit durch Sichtbarmachung sowie partizipative künstlerische Strategien im 20. Jahrhundert noch unhinterfragt als Ausdruck einer gesellschaftskritischen Haltung galten, geraten diese vor dem Hintergrund aktueller medialer und neoliberaler Entwicklungen zunehmend in die Krise. In diesem Kontext werden weniger ›ernsthafte‹ Verfahren der Publikumsansprache als Strategien für den künstlerischen Aktivismus interessant. Im Vortrag wird das Spektakel als ein ästhetischer Modus, der in erster Linie auf Schaulust, Staunen und das Hervorrufen starker Affekte abzielt, als Möglichkeit in den Blick genommen, in der Kunst soziale Anliegen zu artikulieren und politische Kritik zu üben.
Elisabeth Fritz ist wissenschaftliche Assistentin am Lehrstuhl für Kunstgeschichte der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Sie studierte Kunstgeschichte und Soziologie in Wien und Paris und war an verschiedenen Kunstinstitutionen in Wien tätig. 2012 promovierte sie an der Universität Graz über “Mediale Experimente mit ‘echten Menschen’ in der zeitgenössischen Kunst zwischen Authentizität, Partizipation und Spektakel”. Derzeit arbeitet sie an einer Habilitationsschrift über Figurationen von Geselligkeit in der französischen Kunst des 18. Jahrhunderts.
Eva Kernbauer: Ambivalenzen der Popularisierung: Zur Theorie und Praxis des Publikumbezugs in der bildenden Kunst (11.05.2017)
Bereits in der frühen Neuzeit bildet sich neben dem fürstlichen Patronagesystem ein neuer Adressat bildender Kunst heraus: das – zumeist urbane – anonyme Publikum, das über den Kunstmarkt und öffentliche Kunstpräsentationen erreicht wird. Innerhalb des Repräsentationsverständnisses des französischen Absolutismus wird diese nicht-exklusive Öffentlichkeit, die das gesamte Volk einschließt, zu einem auch kunsttheoretisch klar konturierten Konstrukt. Dies führt zur Etablierung neuer Strukturen und Präsentationsformen – Ausstellungen, Kunstvermittlung und Kunstkritik – ebenso wie zur Herausbildung spezifischer Identifikationsangebote, Bildthemen und Formensprachen, die das Kunstpublikum gleichermaßen ansprechen sollen, wie sie es erst hervorbringen. Die kunsttheoretische, philosophische und politische Auseinandersetzung mit dem neuen Konstrukt des Kunstpublikums trägt erheblich zur Konturierung des Öffentlichkeitsbezugs bildender Kunst bei. Die dabei regelmäßig auftretenden Konflikte und Spannungen zeigen ein Auseinanderklaffen von Theorie und Praxis, das jedoch nicht immer ein konkretes Scheitern von Popularisierungsbemühungen bedeutet, sondern konstitutiv ist: Denn, wie anhand exemplarischer Scheidewege des Publikumsbezugs gezeigt wird, schafft sich die Kunst, zugespitzt formuliert, zuweilen eher selbst ein eigenes Publikum als sich nur auf sozial gegebene Öffentlichkeiten zu beziehen: Theorie und Praxis greifen stark ineinander. Der Vortrag verfolgt einzelne Momente des höchst ambivalenten Verhältnisses zwischen Kunst und ihrem Publikum bis hin zu Debatten um Besucherbezüge in musealen Präsentationen und künstlerischen Arbeiten der Gegenwart.
Eva Kernbauer ist Professorin für Kunstgeschichte an der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien. Sie hat mehrfach zur Entwicklung von Publikumsbezügen in der bildenden Kunst und der Entstehung von Ausstellungen, Sammlungen und Kunstkritik publiziert (u.a. Der Platz des Publikums. Modelle für Kunstöffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert, Köln 2011; Höfische Porträtkultur. Die Bildnisse der Erzherzogin Maria Anna (1738-1789), Berlin 2016, mit Aneta Zahradnik, Hg.) und Fragen zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Öffentlichkeit auch in der Gegenwart verfolgt.
Mihnea Mircan: The Name of This Place: Daphne as Identitary Model (01.06.2017)
Revisiting a mythological scene and the contradictory operations that its historical and contemporary representations appease or emphasize, this talk takes Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel tree as thinking model: as a cipher for the current predicaments of ‘transformation’ and ‘de-anthropocentrism’. Daphne’s flight from Apollo’s unwanted embrace is as much a ‘becoming vegetal’ as it is a ‘becoming imperceptible’, a triumph and a figure of anonymity. Immobile and beyond capture, symbiotically resilient, Daphne’s double body responds to some of the pleas and injunctions voiced in today’s environmental humanities.
Mihnea Mircan is a curator based in Leuven, Belgium. He was the artistic director of Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp and has curated exhibitions at institutions such as Stroom, The Hague; Museion, Bolzano; David Robert Art Foundation, London and Project Art Centre, Dublin. His writing has appeared in numerous monographs, catalogues and art magazines.
Lynda Dematteo: The Mask and the Narcissistic Wound. An Anthropological Perspective on Nationalist Leadership (08.06.2017)
In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti argues that the mask functions as a bandage over the wounded egos of the crowd: humiliated, annihilated, they recover self-esteem by identifying themselves with a character as worthless as themselves, but displaying disproportionate pretensions. The mask thus responds to a need for recognition and serves to redefine the identity of the group in depth. By writing these lines, Elias Canetti was of course thinking of the fascist leaders of his time. Can this interpretation help us to understand the characters of the populist “clowns” of today? Which wounds do these the mask-bandages cover? People’s suffering is increasingly mentioned in reference to the 1930s, yet our historical situation has nothing in common with that of our ancestors. In order to grasp this strange temporal short-circuit, I shall seek to better understand the relationship with the past that emerges from such comparisons.
Lynda Dematteo is graduated from Sciences Po in Lille (1996) and obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris (2002). She undertook an anthropological study of the Northern League based on classic analyses of the rites of inversion. The synthesis of her PhD was published by the French CNRS Éditions under the title: L’idiotie en politique (2007) and by Feltrinelli, L’idiota in politica (2011). She was recruited by the CNRS in 2008 to carry out studies on the impact of globalization on political life in Europe, particularly by exploring the strategies to promote and defend the “Made in Italy” label on a global scale. She aims to highlight the complex and paradoxical links between globalization and the rise of economic patriotism.
Martine Beugnet: Change of Scale: Film between the Big and the Small Screen (12.10.2017)
This paper explores the effect of the “Gulliverisation” (to paragraphrase Erkki Huhtamo’s evocative expression) of the film image, as an effect of the proliferation of small screens, and, in turn, as mobile phones in particular progressively become a visual motif in films, the appearance of their diminutive frames on larger screens. Whereas the so-called “relocation” (Casetti and Sampietro) of the cinema to non-cinematic viewing devices is usually discussed primarily in terms of the operational properties of such devices, this paper is interested in the aesthetic impact, and indeed, the specific attraction, of miniaturization, and of the superimposition of the very small with the large scale moving image.
Martine Beugnet is Professor in Visual Studies at the University of Paris 7 Diderot. She has curated exhibitions and written articles on a wide range of film and media topics. She is author of Sexualité, marginalité, contrôle: cinéma français contemporain (2000), Claire Denis (2004), Proust at the Movies (2005) with Marion Schmid, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (E.U.P., 2007, 2012) and L’Attrait du flou (forthcoming 2017). With Kriss Ravetto she also co-directs E.U.P.’s book series Studies in Film and Intermediality and with Baptiste Bohet the Editions Bord de l’eau series Usages des patrimoines numérisés.
