Visual Media in the Past and Present

Levchenko_VisualCourse_F25

Faculty:

Fall 2025: September 1, 2025 – December 19, 2025
Schedule: Tue, Thu 17:00 – 18:20 PM CET | 11:00 AM – 12:20 PM EDT
Subject: FILM
Level: 100
Credits: 4 US / 8 ECTS
Max Enrollment: 22
Language of Instruction: Russian
Prerequisites: No
Human beings usе more and more images, and visual experience seems increasingly natural for us and them. It is especially important to be able to summarize and comment on it, considering the products and technologies of popular culture as the key to understanding the contemporary world. Our visual experience stands on a background of arts from cave paintings to digital cinema. The visual environment that surrounds us with its entertainment spectacles, advertising, video games, and routes of travel (travelling, walking, shopping) contains everything appearing on that basis. In the present course, we will explore the ways in which contemporary visual culture is shaped by a variety of engaging optical tools such as the camera obscura, laterna magica, panorama, photography, film and television. In the second part of the course, I will explore how the contemporary visual industry works through examples of consumer objects design, as well as selfie as a key symptom of digital visuality. Starting from a distant backstory, we will return to ourselves, as the self is the most contemporary object we have.

 

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