events: Visual studies today: The power of images
Abstracts
Boris Ružić
Visual Study of the Conjuration of Images in Media Texts
Questions regarding the nature of medium, and consequently new media, should not be sought exclusively in contemporary culture. Visual culture as a discipline and theoretical approach, along with cultural studies, is necessary for the investigation of the traditional notion of communication from producer to receiver, and for the reaffirmation of the need of a more appropriate paradigm in which information can achieve its full potential through the process of intersubjectivity of visual introspection. The talk will lay out two anecdotes (the film The Wizard of Oz, (1939) and the so called “Darwin incident”, as described by Meaghan Morris) which will show not only the multifacetedness of the “visual” in the dominant media systems, but also its neuralgic spots: those points of rupture are not only the quality of new media practices, but can also be found in traditional media occurrences. The talk will try to show that the productive reading of visual media practices exist precisely through ruptures in their dominant mode of production, i.e. in its visual systems.