Communication

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale Program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. This course explores the role that visual imagery plays in contemporary society, by means of looking at the visual as a key communication as well as economic and cultural resource. The course offers both an overview of established critical theories of visual communication and more contemporary takes on visual analysis and visuality at large. To gain a critical understanding of the central role that visual communication plays in global and local contexts alike, the course relies on a wide range of examples and case studies from key communication industries including advertising, film, stock photography, branding, social media, and news media. As well as studying visual communication theories, methods for critical visual analysis and specific examples and cases, students develop their own original research on specific dimensions of visual communication.

The course is interdisciplinary and reviews the impact of media on the political rhetoric of politicians, moulders of public opinion, and potentates. The main focus is placed on the impact of new communication technologies such as writing, print, and broadcasting on rhetoric and the manifestation of power.

This seminar invites participants into a process for deepening their/our understanding of key concepts and practices in the digital mediation of culture, in the interests of a greater shared awareness and agency within the overwhelming, epochal processes referred to generally as digitalization. In lectures, readings, site visits, and group discussion, the course offers useful theoretical bases for approaching digitalization as a/the process at work on culture today. It practices critical skills for exploring and evaluating digital mediations of cultural heritage (both on-site at Berlin museums and online). And it empowers scholars/thinkers/artists/designers as producers of digital culture mediations with practical tools for developing and pitching effective concepts. The course takes Berlin’s cultural landscape as a field and the newly completed Humboldt Forum as a special object of study, drawing on the teacher’s professional experiences from 2015 to 2020 in the development and implementation of the Humboldt Forum digital concept for offer on-site and behind-the-scenes perspectives. The course invites participants to identify the issues, questions, or processes in culture that most concern them and support them in formalizing and refining constructive proposals of their own.