CECL - Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Linguagens

unl

Linha 3: Cultura e Técnica

Coordenada por José Bragança de Miranda

Keywords: Network Communication; Cultural Studies; Visual Culture; Ciberculture.

This research group was created to substitute the previous group «Mapping of the Mutations of Culture in the age of Technique». The group is developing individual and collective projects and will be responsible for the organization of conferences, publications and congresses.

The growing weight of technique, namely of digital and networked technologies, as well as of new media, affected the processes through which experience is constituted, on the level of space and time. In the case of space, new communications were created between seemingly fixed sectors or those with some autonomy, as is the case of culture, science and politics with economy, connecting regions and territories on a global scale, where the political frontiers and cultural specifications have become increasingly more penetrable. On the level of time, there is a kind of «eternal present» (Gideon, Walter Benjamin), based in the growing archiving of the traces left by history (and even pre-history) and by the very present, in enormous data-bases, used by new media and the new economy as recycled material. These processes affected the totality of experience, from the macro level of the Earth to the micro level of bodies, images and objects. Never as today has the notion of «total social phenomenon» by Marcel Mauss been more appropriate. Hence the need to recur to the notion of «cognitive mapping» proposed by Michel Foucault or Frederic Jameson.

Characterized by an integrative communicational strategy, this research group seeks to cross the communicational paradigm with issues and methodologies coming from Cyberculture, Cultural Studies and Visual Culture, which are themselves defined by the plurality of approaches and themes. In fact, these areas are a symptom of the growing crisis in culture, marked by the omnipresence of images and signs; by the instability of modern codifications and axioms; as well as by the constitution of new experimental domains, as is the case of the virtual communities, of blogs, of interactivity, etc.

The research goal of this group is to potentiate and strengthen the communicational approach with results, methodologies and themes from the above mentioned areas, in a perspective defined as having a critical core.

For the 2007-2010 period, several objectives were laid down in order to embody the above stated cognitive strategy:

Research
1. «Cartographies of contemporaneity»: theoretical research on the relations between contemporary culture and technique, implying a critic of the theories of cyberculture and network culture;
2. Research on the blogosphere, namely social software, peer-to-peer communication and wikis;
3. Research on copyright and network culture;
4. Project «The Impact of machines in Portuguese Literature and Poetry»;
5. Empirical research on «Web 2.0», namely in what concerns its use in teaching;
6. Research on the genealogy of cyberculture;
7. Research on the touristic cultures of the neo-residents in the Algarve;
8. Research on Technological Arts and the spatio-temporal mutations of culture in the age of technique;
9. Research in photography and post-photography;
10. Research on «Body, machine, image: the cultural invention of photography»;