Visual Culture - Overview

Overview

Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this field of study often overlaps with film studies, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, queer theory, and the study of television; it can also include video game studies, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component.

The field’s versatility stems from the range of objects contained under the term “visual culture,” which aggregates “visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology.” The term “visual technology” refers any media designed for purposes of perception or with the potential to augment our visual capability.

Because of the changing technological aspects of visual culture as well as a scientific method-derived desire to create taxonomies or articulate what the "visual" is, many aspects of Visual Culture overlap with the study of science and technology, including hybrid electronic media, cognitive science, neurology, and image and brain theory. In an interview with the Journal of Visual Culture, academic Martin Jay explicates the rise of this tie between the visual and the technological: “Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict. In so doing, we necessarily have to ask questions about . . . technological mediations and extensions of visual experience.”

It also may overlap with another emerging field, that of "Performance Studies." As “the turn from art history to visual culture studies parallels a turn from theater studies to performance studies,” it is clear that the perspectival shift that both emerging fields embody is comparable. "Visual Culture" goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies.

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