Inicio - Área de Antropología Visual

Faculty of Philosophy and Literature

University of Buenos Aires

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Research areas

Inmersive Visual Anthropology

This line of research is based on the design of projects aimed at creating immersive experiences. Digital technologies are a very powerful resource for the creation of knowledge experiences as well as the development of new narrative experiences. This line of work is based on the contributions of image studies and cognitive neuroscience to develop projects in the field of anthropology, archaeology and cultural heritage.

Image and science. Visualising knowledge

Visualising and rendering visible are two terms that allude to the constructive aspects of scientific images as opposed to the passive idea of representation. The history of the relationship between the image and the sciences allows us to understand the way in which knowledge has been dependent on visualisation in order to establish connections, hypotheses, evidence and even develop new theories about unrepresentable objects. This line of research explores the universe of technical images over time

Image, empathy and motion. From Warburg to Experimental Aesthetics

The brain-body relationship understood as a system, has demonstrated how corporeality plays a decisive role in the cognitive processes -This line of research explores the contributions of experimental aesthetics in connection with the pioneering research of Aby Warburg. understanding our relationship with images as a inseparable from sensory-motor and affective experience of reality

Post mortem. Visual culture of absence

The line of research ‘Post Mortem. Visual culture of absence’ aims to study those images created after death. Life is presence, but it does not disappear after death: it moves on to inhabit other media. Death urges us, from the earliest times, to construct a whole visual culture of absence

Image, medium, body

Images must be distinguished from other terms by which we are alluding to different experiences and different objects. Image and picture, as well as Visual and visuality, entail a semantic complexity that differentiates them profoundly. The concept of medium is not disembodied as in the semiotic approach, which turns perception into a cognitive process based on discursive logic. The Anthropology of the Image proposal is the antithesis of this idea since the concept of medium is directly related to the anthropological function of the image

Iconoclasm, censorship and Bildakt

The act of imaging raises the question of how, by looking at or touching the image, it moves from latency to thought and action. Bildakt reflects on how and why images affect the way people think, act and feel. From this approach, this line of research deals with image acts such as iconoclasm, censorship, animation or substitution, punishment in effigy or damnatio memoriae.

Visual Culture 3.0. Image, medium and apparatus

The era of digital reproducibility and media interactivity necessarily obliges us to construct new theoretical outlooks in order to undertake a true work of critical reflection on the phenomenon we call Visual Culture 3.0. This line explores the transformations of the image, media and devices in the digital era.

Visual culture in the Middle Ages

This line of research explores the complexities of the visual and the practices related to images in the Middle Ages, using new approaches that allow us to think about images through other prisms, beyond the iconographic method. These images demand new questions and new methodologies. This line addresses questions about visual culture from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Political Iconography

This line of work takes up the path opened up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Aby Warburg, in his constant interrogation no longer of motives and attributions, traced back to a primordial origin, but of the dynamic life of images and their energetic assets. On this path, he recovers the gestures that animate the political life of the various social groups, the visual formulas of emotion understood collectively and their transformations and appropriations throughout history

Prehistoric Visual Culture

This line of research explores the contributions of cognitive neuroscience and digital technologies to the study of prehistoric visual culture. The review of rock art studies, together with the incorporation of digital tools and interdisciplinary approaches, has allowed for a theoretical renewal in the understanding of prehistoric visual manifestations. This new perspective has shifted the focus from the isolated interpretation of figures to the sensory experience and the environment in which these images were produced and perceived. The convergence between virtual reality and neuroscience opens new perspectives for a deeper understanding of how materiality and space played key roles in shaping the visual practices of early human communities