Department of Visual Cultures
www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures
The Department of Visual Cultures enacts a meeting ground between the philosophical, the political and the artistic. These inventive MA degrees (one year full-time/two years part-time) ask new and original questions on how to enter contemporary cultural conditions.
What makes these programmes unique is that on the one hand they are grounded in taught courses of established knowledge by faculty members whose cutting-edge research spans academic, artistic, and activist realms, and on the other hand they enable creative, experimental, individual and collaborative research projects. Students are encouraged to be diverse in style and voice—each project developing its own unique methodology to engage with its driving question. These courses build on Goldsmiths’ unique trajectory of trans-disciplinary research, opening up new spaces between theory and practice.
MA Aural and Visual Culture led by Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun
How do we think about the relation of sound and image in the era of ubiquitous media? The MA in Aural and Visual Cultures offers a unique opportunity to work with leading theorists and practitioners to explore the connections between experimental sound practice, broadcast media, film, music, visual art and theory. Focusing on such themes as the aural gesture, sound in cinema, music, spatiality, audible publics and hauntology, the MA gives students a solid grounding in current theoretical debates as a basis for their own research projects. Recent projects have included the voice in horror, the gendering of sound, and the auditory landscape. The MA is a vibrant cultural space that has brought musicians, theorists, filmmakers, sound artists and curators into conversations and collaborations that have persisted long after the formal period of study has ended.
Contact: [email protected]
MA Global Arts led by Irit Rogoff, Astrid Schmetterling, and Nicole Wolf
How can we find critical entry points into the accelerated processes of globalization? The MA Global Arts offers a new vocabulary for understanding how we can insert ourselves into set of micro-political instances that together make the scaled-up effect of globalization. Through a series of courses that take on large scale issues of mapping emergent geographies, questions of cultural trans-identification and of cultural memory, issues of ‘truth telling’ in contemporary documentary, the recognition of new practices of citizenship and of advocacy and the spatial understanding of conflict—this MA navigates another relation to the seemingly ungraspable scale of globalization.
Recent student group projects have included ‘Re-casting Citizenship,’ questioning traditional understandings of citizenship; ‘Marseilles – A Counter Cartography,’ hosted by MuCem in Marseille; ‘NEOutopia’ on utopian and dystopian urban developments; and ‘Here Comes Everybody,’ exploring new modes of collectivity. These and other projects can be seen here.
MA Global Arts combines a five-week Core Course (Professor Irit Rogoff) with compulsory special subject “Geographies.” This module asks how we can speak of geography in a globalised world? Drawing on key theoretical texts and the works of artists, architects, curators, activists, and philosophers, the course explores such issues as urbanism, mobility, conflict, migration, citizenship as well as critical concepts as governance, smuggling, informal economies and counter cartography.
In addition to the courses we hold a series of workshops with leading international figures and collaborate with numerous London institutions preoccupied with similar problematics such as Iniva, Gasworks, and The Showroom.
