Transvisuality

Lisbon, June 27 – July 2, 2016

Deadline for paper proposals: January 31 2016

The VI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture addresses the role of visual regimes in the creation of meaning, in the refashioning of identity, in organizing the political, long before the awareness that the social is increasingly being constructed in visual terms. The very process of modernization, from the late 18^thcentury onwards and more so later with the development of reproducible technologies, is deeply entangled with a transformation of optical regimes, that is, ways of seeing that impact ways of doing and the fashioning of identity. Even the hailed ‘visual turn’ was coined many decades before the visual euphoria of the 1990s, when in 1924 Hungarian theoretician Béla Balász described a ‘visual turn’ which spoke to the impact of film on culture.

The Summer School wishes to focus on the longue durée of the visual construction of the cultural by inviting a reflection on transvisuality. Because visual practices are unavoidably comparative, and visuality, i.e. the semiotic and cultural system that structures the way visual artifacts are produced, interpreted and disseminated works across dialogue and hybridity, through citation, borrowing and adaptation, a discussion of the cultural process of visualization is best understood through a comparative strategy, such as that of transvisuality.

The circulation of images under the aegis of modernity has not only changed modes of production, but also modalities of reception, aesthetic forms and cultural environments. It has also made us aware that the way we see and what we see are not singular acts built on biological determination, but depend heavily on cultural frames, which are unstable, situated and comparative.

This is a process that is deeply complex, and certainly ambiguous and contradictory, because visual regimes may support a democratic or authoritarian gaze; repression or resistance; de-individualization or singularity; tradition or transformation. Located precisely at the intersection where the national and the cosmopolitan collide, and where situated comparison between systems, genres, institutional and technical relations, and modes of viewing contribute to a deeper, if more complex, understanding of visual culture, transvisuality both refers to and invites a conversation between visual practices.