Questioning Images. Video of the keynote lecture by Tobia Bezzola

What happens when a work of art "says nothing"? This situation of incommunicability, or at any rate of disappointing expectations, is relatively frequent with modern and contemporary art whereas it is rare in other contexts, for example advertising images. The relationship between artistic image and communication was the focus of the keynote lecture that Tobia Bezzola, director of the Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana, gave at the opening of the plenary assembly of the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society's cultural project held on 7 June.

The theme of the faculty cultural project for the two-year period 2022-24 is “Questioning images”. Art, as Tobia Bezzola illustrated in her talk, is a prime area for reflecting on the nature of images.

During the assembly, the four working groups that make up the faculty's cultural project – 'The Image Factory', 'Inclusive/Excluding Images', 'Images and Temporality', 'Truth of Images' – presented their topics of investigation starting with some images generated by artificial intelligence software.