In the passage from new media and tabloid culture, over political spin, branding and experience economy, to city scapes, design, and art in contemporary society, visual culture—visuality, ‘the visual’, ‘the image world’—is a key denominator. The book is the first volume of the project Transvisuality in three volumes, initiated by University of Copenhagen and Liverpool University Press. It collects leading scholars from all parts of the world in a scrutiny of what the visual means today. It builds on the debates on visual culture and visuality in the past decades studies of culture, but expands on these debates from the perspectives of theory, analysis and design. It shows how the visual impacts on the current world and transcends the most different aspects of the social: how the visual becomes transvisual by adapting and creating culture in the global, translocal world. It ultimately addresses the pervasive but puzzling claim of contemporary research that ‘the world has become more visual’ and tries to answer it.
In the first volume the issue of the dimension of the visual is a paramount theme, seen from different interdisciplinary angles. Whether approaches are prone to nominalism and discourse or to issues of cognition and framing, the question of what the visual is and what impacts may pertain to it remains a fundamental challenge to cultural research.