From visual culture to visual communication. The pictorial and iconic turn in contemporary culture
From visual culture to visual communication. The pictorial and iconic turn in contemporary culture.

Summary/Abstract: The article attempts to approximate the notions of “visual culture”, “visual communication” and “data visualization”, which appeared with the pictorial and the iconic turns. The pictorial turn raised the picture to the rank of a sign system, similarly to language within the poststructuralist reflection. In contrast, thanks to the changes in art history research, Visual Culture Studies came into being, necessitating a definition of the term “visual culture”. Doris Bachmann-Medick characterizes the iconic turn as a late reaction of art history studies to the linguistic turn, which views a painting as a textual and discursive phenomenon. This situation gave rise to Norman Bryson’s semiotics of the image, which employs the notion of “the language of images”, creating the need for a definition of “visual communication”. The expansion of new media poses another challenge to visual culture, which is the need to define “data visualization”. W.J.T. Mitchell announced a new version of the pictorial turn – a turn towards biopictures, or biodigital pictures. These “animated icons” have been given the characteristics of life by the biological-information technology. However, the definition of “data visualization” is shaped by the “digital turn”, which views it as a practice of endowing the raw, mathematical sequences of codes in databases with anthropological and cultural information. Currently, the definition of "data visualization" is also impacted by the theory of databases and software studies by Lev Manovich. Finally, I would like to ask about the risks and benefits of the pictorial and iconic turns.

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