Andrea Pinotti e Antonio Somaini, Culturale visuale, 2016

Over the last thirty years, the rapid evolution of digital technologies has led to the appearance of new types of images and new vision devices, introducing new forms of display and spectatoriality. Faced with an ever-changing iconic and media landscape, it becomes increasingly urgent to develop a series of concepts and tools that can help us understand the technically, socially and historically determined cultural dimension – of images and gaze. The volume first of all reconstructs the origins of the concept of “visual culture” and the development of that broad field of study that has established itself internationally under the names of visual culture studies and Bildwissenschaft, determining a real iconic turning point in the human sciences and social (and even in relevant fields of the natural sciences). The essential theoretical and methodological coordinates are then presented to face a critical analysis of the visual cultures of the present and the past.