Presentation

In recent years, we have seen a constant questioning and a notable decline in the intensity and scope of artistic practices as they have been understood in the past.

Currently, it is difficult to affirm that the processes of production of subjectivity and sense in contemporary societies occur mostly in the arts, such as art historians and more orthodox aesthetics have argued.

New models, vehicles and systems of circulation of sense are articulated by reconfiguring their coordinates and modes of operation. Academic communities associated with the visual arts cannot avoid the discussion about the interdisciplinary field of visual studies, which attempts to capture and study the new status of sense and meaning in contemporary societies from various perspectives.

The new field seeks to expand and disintegrate the traditional relationship between image and culture by questioning, from various angles, the relevance of discourses on visuality, especially those that are based on the nineteenth-century paradigm of art, as well as study the human gaze from a scientific, artistic, psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective as an axis of the social construct and the identity of the individual with regards to
the technological changes of our times (or their exclusion), which is another of the topics that are included in the interests of this new field.

The growth of visual studies encourages us to rethink the productivity of underlying concepts with regards to the visuality that is discussed in our academic communities, especially in light of the feeble role of visual arts programs in society, which pale in comparison with the massified images of everyday life and their great influence on the production of subjectivities. However, the important arguments that inform their critical points-such as that of the problem of the purity of the visual, associated with the reassessment of what constitutes an object of study-are also unavoidable.

Thus, the publication and debate about the experiences of the institutions that have already experimented with educational programs within this conceptual constellation and the prospective of those who dare to advance the possible future of this locus of interest in society and the institutions that teach and publish visual cultural production, are essential.

The Department of Visual Arts has opened this forum in order to participate actively in the process of socialization and focus on the new proposals that have accompanied the emergence of visual studies in recent years.