We are transitioning from a written to a visual culture.

Interviewee: Neala Schleuning

My background is in political philosophy and intellectual history. Over the years my interest in art has grown. I’m not an artist but I’m very interested in philosophy and early on, I was interested in philosophy of aesthetics and gradually that came to be an area that interested me. Particularly how it interacted with politics. My other great passion is political philosophy and I also think that increasingly we are living in a world where we are transitioning from a written to a visual culture. Almost like back to the era of Guttenberg when printing first came to be a great power in the way that information was transmitted and shared culturally and now I think we are moving into another phase. We are just beginning, but I think increasingly people are immersed more and more and more in visual environments and I was interested in how complex ideas like politics are conveyed in a visual environment. So that’s what started me on my research. I looked at the big changes that took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Modernism saw itself as a rejection of the old at all levels and had to break with the past. The visual environment increasingly took on a political tone - and that’s what I started out to try to track, to see how it happened, and to see what the major visual voices were, if you can imagine visual voices.