At first glance, contemporary popular culture, filled with bleak images of the future, seems to have given up on the possibility of positive collective change. Below the surface, however, alternative culture is rife with artist-led projects, activist movements, and subcultural communities of interest that seek to spark the collective imagination and to encourage hunger for alternatives. More playfully self-conscious than past utopian movements, today's are often whimsical or ironic, but are still entirely earnest. Artists invite us to re-author city maps, or archive individual ideas for the...

A theoretical and empirical toolkit for analysing and understanding media and mediated images - from branding and PR, to tweets and selfies. It explores a range of approaches to visual analysis, while also providing a hands-on guide to applying methods to your own work.