Filippo FIMIANI | Visual culture Program 2024-2025

• Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, MIT 2014, capp.3, 4, 5, 7, 9
• Valentina Tanni, Memestetica, Nero edizioni 2020, cap.5

Generalities: FILIPPO FIMIANI

Academic Year: 2024/2025

Study Class: Master Corporate Communication and Media

Teaching Activity: VISUAL CULTURE (9 CFU = 60 HOURS)

EDUCATIONAL GOALS

The educational aim is twofold: to provide students, the future communicators, with a transversal and at the same time critical and creative approach to understanding and experiencing, on the one hand, the phenomena of contemporary visual culture as the embedded, organized and dynamic result of processes of collective and complex construction of knowledge, and, on the other, the communication as an assemblage for shaping and perform a shared and connected view about the world and the environment, ourselves and others, about the living beings and the media. Students will acquire an adequate and up-to-date interdisciplinary knowledge to decode and realize visual and audiovisual contents–especially short and viral: from spot (in relation to cinema) to memes, stories and feeds–capable of activating symbolic experiences, beliefs and feelings, uses and consumption, thanks to appropriation and remix practices. Such post-digital practices will be tested and discussed during the subsequent activities conducted during the course and workshop, by a learning-by-making process.

PRE-REQUIREMENTS

Would be desirable notions of semiotics, aesthetics, modern and contemporary art history, history of cinema and media.

TEACHING METHODS

Theoretical lectures and practical exercises.

VERIFYING METHODS

Constant intercourse, group and individual verifications, and the production of an audiovisual product. Examination with final grades.

CLASS CONTENTS

The course will provide students with a (briefly) historical and thematic reconstruction of the main proposals and interpretations in contemporary visual culture studies of the practices, poetics, and aesthetics of short digital and post-digital communication forms, particularly of viral and memetic (social) contents and small stories. Networked, such audiovisual images are ambiguous and impure, both creative and critical assemblages of heterogeneous archives and intermedial memories. They are created and consumed also through appropriation and remix practices, and according to a logic of viral communication and aesthetics, with different purposes and styles (commercial, critical and ironic, political, expressive, etc.) and by different means (TikTok, Instagram, etc.). The digital viewing and visualization devices at our disposal, such as smartphones and mobile devices imply new figures of spectator and performer-consumer and new genres of narration and representation of the world and the planet, of ourselves and of others. The course aims to provide the appropriate interdisciplinary tools to critically read such contemporary post-digital practices. Through a leaning-by-making process and during the verification activities foreseen by the course and the workshop, the student will be able to experiment and test the implications and effects, including the ideological rhetoric and critic and creative potential (i.e. about climate crisis), of these post-digital practices.

REFERENCES TEXTS FOR 6 CFU

Students who attend classes (workshop required)

• Alice Palumbo, Luca Borsoni Previdi, Estetica virale, Scholé 2020
• Valéry Schafer, Fred Pallier, ‘All your image are belong to us’: Heritagization, archiving and historicization of memes, «Visual Communication», 23(3), 2024, pp.527-543

Students who do not attend classes and then do not participate in the workshop

In addition to the texts listed above

• Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, MIT 2014, capp.3, 4, 5

REFERENCES TEXTS FOR 9 CFU

Students who attend classes (workshop required)

• Alice Palumbo, Luca Borsoni Previdi, Estetica virale, Scholé 2020
• Valentina Tanni, Memestetica, Nero edizioni 2020, cap.3

- Valéry Schafer, Fred Pallier, ‘All your image are belong to us’: Heritagization, archiving and historicization of memes, «Visual Communication», 23(3), 2024, pp.527-543

- Helle Kannik Haastrup, Having fun saving the climate: The climate influencer, emotional labour, and storytelling as counter-narrative on TikTok, «Persona Studies», 9(1), 2023, pp.36-51

- Gemma San Cornelio, Sandra Martorell, Elisenda Ardèvol, ‘My goal is to make sustainability mainstream’: Emerging visual narratives on the environmental crisis on Instagram, «Frontiers in Communication», 8:1265466, 2024

Students who do not attend classes and then do not participate in the workshop

In addition to the texts listed above

• Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, MIT 2014, capp.3, 4, 5, 7, 9
• Valentina Tanni, Memestetica, Nero edizioni 2020, cap.5