IMAGES Journal for Visual Studies    www.visual-studies.com/images/
 

Projects

Visual Culture and New Media

The Center for Visual Studies launched a research study into the interrelations of digital technology and culture, i.e. the relation between the new communication media (the Internet, mobile phone, satellite and digital television, etc.) and visual art. The research brings together various specialists from the fields of art history, history of literature, semiotics, sociology and media theory. Taking into account the tradition in media culture and media art, as well as the importance that new digital technology has in modern Croatian society, we believe the time has come for a certain reassessment of the events on the new media scene in the past twenty-odd years.

The objective of the study is to map, and then interpret those cultural practices which in the past fifteen-odd years have been or still are in one way or another marked by the so-called new media. To this end, areas in which the new media paradigm has been especially successful in Croatia – ranging from modern art, film, television, via literature on the Internet and cultural activism to design – will be analyzed from various positions of humanistic science: from the positions of art history, sociology, ethnology, information science, study of literature, etc. Using modern digital communication technologies, we will, thus, approach the subject not only from positions of visual studies, but also from positions which, even though they do not primarily highlight visual aspects of the new media, still speak of them, no longer as of isolated aesthetic phenomena, but rather as of elements of a wider social process.

The study will be finalized on 31 October 2009, and the newly gained insights and results of the project will be presented to the general public at a dedicated one-day symposium. Finally, a collection of papers by all researchers and theoreticians included in this project will be presented, to be published in the Visual Theory series of the Center for Visual Studies.

Chief researcher is Klaudio Štefančić.

Research Summaries

Marina Kožul / Mirna Belina
Animation Techniques as a New Medium

Mirela Ramljak Purgar
Digital Photography as a New Medium

Tomislav Medak / Nenad Romić
The Political Right and Tactical Media

Ivica Mitrović
Design and New Media - the Croatian Context

Katarina Peović Vuković
New Media Genres and Their Reception

Klaudio Štefančić
New Media, Old Culture Forms