Art and Visual Culture

The research field of Art History, as it has been called since the 1960s, has existed under various names (aesthetics, art history with art theory) for a long time at Swedish universities. In an international perspective, art history is a core subject in the humanities and its study area have been the subject of scientific interest since the period of Ancient Greece.

The traditional purpose of art history is to study artefacts, i.e., man-made objects given a conscious form. The research focus has previously mainly been on the architecture, arts and crafts and researchers' task has been to use different methods to explain why these artefacts have been created, why they look like they do, what the interpretative possibilities are and how they function and are perceived in their historical, cultural and social contexts.

From the 1960s onwards, the art science has gradually expanded its study area to include visual expressions other than architecture, arts and crafts, such as advertising, fashion, scientific images, industrial design and digital images. The researchers' interest has increasingly shifted from the objects themselves to the ideas that they convey and reinforce. The international research area Visual Culture, which is equally rooted in the social sciences and behavioural sciences as in the humanistic tradition that art history professes itself to, have today entered into "partnerships" with this older research tradition. Research that makes use of visual material to illustrate and explain different cultural and social phenomena, including methods developed in art history, occurs in many different research fields.

At Linköping University, successful research and development in the areas of visuality, visualization and image analysis in both technical and medical faculties. This can be linked onto the research on visual culture that is conducted at several institutions within the philosophical faculty.

Research

Current Projects