Research Projects

Visual technologies: Critical encounters

Humanities Faculty Research Theme

Visual culture and art as commodity have been profoundly affected by contemporary technological conditions in which the linear has become deeply infused with an almost acoustic simultaneity and the stable has been forced into dialogue with the fragmentary and the decentralised. The  'Visual technologies: critical encounters' project takes a critical look at the specific place and role of visual technologies in shaping cultures and identities in a sense where the word 'technology' is not used in any typically mechanistic or utilitarian logic. Rather it points to Marshall McLuhan’s idea of technologies or media as “extensions of ourselves”. For the purposes of this research project, technology is thus regarded as a prosthesis that introduces a new scale into our encounters with the world and leads to the production of visual culture of a specific kind, inviting critical speculation on a range of visual technologies and contexts. In their digital, curatorial, archival, creative and theoretical dimensions, visual technologies have the potential to develop trans- and cross-disciplinary discourses within academic disciplines in the humanities, as well as within the spatial, informational, medial and conceptual dimensions of society. The research investigates vision, visuality and ocularcentrism in its technological dimensions and has led to both text-based and creative outputs. 

 

Project Managers:

Prof Jeanne van Eeden, Department of Visual Arts, UP

Prof Lize Kriel, Visual Studies, Department of Visual Arts, UP

 

Distinguished scholars: 

(2014-15) Prof Chris van t’Hof, Artesis University College, Antwerp

(2015) Prof Audrey Bennett, Department of Communication and Media, Rensselaer, Troy, New York

(2016) Prof Gillian Rose, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, UK.

 

PhD student: 

Fatima Cassim, Information Design, Department of Visual Arts, UP 

 

Core team members

Visual Studies:

Prof Amanda du Preez

Rory du Plessis

Dr Jenni Lauwrens

Karli Brittz

 

Fine Arts:

Nicola Grobler

Avi Sooful

Dr Johan Thom

Sikho Siyotula

 

Information Design:

Fatima Cassim

Suzette Snyman

Anneli Bowie

Dr Duncan Reyburn

 

Other members of the research team include

Dr Annekie Joubert, Humboldt University, Berlin