Willem de Kooning Minor+ Visual Culture 2.23

Do you have an Instagram account? If so you might
be interested in more then just sel es and food post- ings and ask a bigger question: What is Visual Culture? What is the meaning of an image in our increasingly image-led and image-conscious society and in which way does it relate to the discipline and profession that you are becoming a professional in? These questions will be in the centre of the course Visual Culture. Images do not only illustrate but are immediately affecting our own perception and everyday life.

The study of Visual Culture helps us understand everything from cinema to painting, packaging to magazines, architecture, models to websites, photojournalism to social relations, visualizations of science and medicine to marketing strategies, business charts to technical drawings, cartoons to computer images, from games to warfare and satellite imagery, to name a few examples.

Conclusively, Visual Culture is the comparative study of visualities. These include visual images and visual media but also extend to the non-visual social relations, which images can produce.

To extend this, the Minor Plus Visual Culture consists in equal parts of theory and
a practical intervention. Theory in this regard means that we depart from the societal context and will look at examples deriving from popular culture.

Thereby, we will give the participants the tools – i.e. reading of images, deciphering the according language, historical understanding of contemporary images, their social relations and the development of critical awareness of the power of images since images produce meaning – to identify an area where we see that Visual Culture has a problematic effect.

We will ask the students to develop a critical approach to visual language and to develop a practical intervention.

This Minor Plus is open for students from all disciplines and you will be able to use your particular competence.

This new Minor Plus is part of the Honours Programme at Hogeschool Rotterdam.


Füsun Türetken, Course Director Visual Culture