Master in Visual Culture

This master's programme aims to strenghten the student's theoretical knowledge and understanding of the vital importance of images – or, the visual – for communication in society. Here, this visuality is studied from a critical and intermedial perspective, which includes elements of sound or music, and where aspects like power, history, social relations, gender, and ethnicity are central. The programme is mainly constructed as an interdisciplinary combination of Art History and Visual Studies, Film Studies, and Musicology.

Furthermore, the aim is to analyze the role of visual communication (and to some extent, its auditory reinforcements) – in artistic as well as mass medial forms – when it comes to shaping the major issues of life. Critical attention will be given both to aesthetic and commercial dimensions. A major part of the programme will focus on mass culture, for instance, moving pictures in the shape of film, video, and television as well as stills of various kinds, for example, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and design products. Also, there is one special course – which can be individually selected – that deals particularly with sounds and their role for communication, especially when they are intermedially combined with visual expressions.

The programme is aimed to contribute to the general development of knowledge – pertaining to society as a whole as well as to the individual student – by providing intermedial insights into genres and cultural forms built on images, visuality and seeing: documentary images, news images, art works, scientific images, entertainment, commercials, in various media like film, television, art, city planning, and design. The programme will provide knowledge of new media forms aimed to fascinate, persuade, and overwhelm the subject in a new culture of experience. The programme will also provide the basis for a critical discussion of the increased competition for attention created by modern consumer culture.

In his/her professional life, the student is supposed to be able to actively mediate his/her knowledge of the visual field, thereby satisfying society's needs for critical tools of analysis.

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