Images

Interacting with a multiplicity of screen devices in our everyday life, we have become oblivious to the force and uncanny quality of images. In an attempt at looking at images through fresh eyes, this course initiates and develops a conversation on the being of images and their position and role within cultures at large.

It will offer SAS students the opportunity to familiarize themselves with some of the central debates and theoretical questions animating the studies on both cinema and media. Our course will begin by discussing what an image is and how images emerge. On this foundation, we will proceed to explore the effects and functions of images in a series of epistemological contexts and historical practices. The course will invite students to reflect on what images can do and what we can do with them.

The goal of this reflection is to gain awareness of the processes through which images shape the way in which we conceive of the world, ourselves, and of our relationship with others. We will interrogate the potential of images to articulate subjective experience and social relations, their empowering and disempowering effects, and the temporalities they construct. Throughout the course, we will engage these questions through a variety of theoretical perspectives and case studies. Among the topics the course addresses there is the function of the imagination, the distinction between images and pictures, the automation of perception, the agency of images, the circulation of pictures, and the experience of inhabiting digital and material networked spaces.