Sociability and urban life

2. Image and metropolitan life.

Assuming that the metropolis has its own specific dynamics, the project will focus on what type of experience urban life promotes for different social and local groups.

The objective is to understand how communication structures and, in particular the flow of images, form the framework for metropolitan experience. Image, in this sense, has a dual meaning. The first is ethnographic in character and investigates co-extension between image and the flows experienced in urban life. The second is more theoretical, and furthers the reflections accumulated by the documentary film group in the Communication area, that works to capture images of day-to-day life in the metropolis. The hypothesis is that existing or future images of different urban experience will result in a reading of sociability as a flow. To this end we must go back to the study of certain concepts that current film critics consider obsolete, such as physiognomy (the meanings an image may assume), empathy (the effect of an image of the viewer and landscaping, and evaluate their analytical potential in terms of contemporary urban experience.

Coordinator: Ismail Xavier, Paula Montero