Filippo FIMIANI | Programma Estetica e Teorie delle immagini 2019/2020

Study Class: Three-year Degree Communication Sciences

Teaching Activity: AESTETICS AND IMAGES THEORY (9 CFU = 60 HOURS)

Educational goals

First educational goal is to provide the necessary elements and tools to learning of the main themes and categories of the aesthetics and the image theories, with particular regard to the arts and the media, specific ones or re-medied into new devices and the social expanded field. The student will be able to orient himself with intelligence in the contemporary debate about images and imagery, technological apparatus and social appearances, as well as to verify his know-how and critical skills creatively, actually proposing and discussing an inter-medial product or a paper.

Pre-Requirements

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

Class Contents

All around you. From the screen to displays.

Aesthetics first concerns the aisthesis, the senses and sensitivity, the sensorial and embodied experiences in general, not restricted to the "art world", but shared in the ordinary "life world" and the expanded field of expressivity in general. The course will examine unreleased productions, broadcasts and use of images: no longer limited to a specific medium - exemplary, the screen of a movie theatre - the images more than ever have spread in an environment media, that is everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous and portable. Technically, socially and historically determined, the images transform themselves and alter us, they dislocate themselves and move us: images, change nature and function of communicating a vision displaying from a device to another one, and they change our ways of seeing too, they renovate our ways to interpreting the world we live in. Images, as material pictures, take up and reformulate the languages of the previous media, and as mental images, anticipate and prefigure our future experiences and their possible shares, too.

By many textual –fictions, essays– and iconic supports –movies, clips or found footages on the net, documentaries, etc.–, which will be presented but also reworked by the students during a dedicated workshop, the course aims to provide the ingredients and the tools to the understanding the contemporary media landscape.

References Texts

• Francesco CASETTI, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key words for the Cinema to Come, New York, Columbia University Press, 2015;
• Francesco CASETTI, Antonio SOMAINI, The conflict between high definition and low definition in contemporary cinema, «Convergence. The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies», 19/4 (2013), pp. 415-422:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856513494174

• Vito CAMPANELLI, Remix yourself. A Do It Yourself Ethic, «Comunicação & Sociedade», 22 (2012), pp. 8-15:

http://revistacomsoc.pt/index.php/comsoc/article/view/1271

• Richard GRUSIN, «La rimediazione nella tarda epoca del cinema delle origini», in Radical mediation. Cinema, estetica e tecnologie digitali, Cosenza, Pellegrini Editore, 2017, pp. 31-60.

Recommended Reading (a text of your choice):

• Richard GRUSIN, «YouTube alla fine dei nuovi media», ibid., pp. 137-149;
• Lauren S. BERLINER, «Shooting for Profit: The Monetary Logic of the YouTube Home Movie», in Laura RASCAROLI, Gwenda YOUNG, Barry MONAHAN (eds.), Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, New York-London-New Delhi-Sydney, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp. 289-300.

Students who do not attend classes, are obliged to study this book too:

• Nanna VERHOEFF, Mobile Screens. The Visual Regime of Navigation, Amsterdam University Press, 2012, cap. 4, pp. 99-231
  https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089643797/mobile-screens