Introduction to Visualization & Visual Studies

•Photograph by Robbie Cooper (New York Times 2007)

ImaginationM.C. Escher Relativity 1953

Visual Representations as

Documentation

Jan Van Eyck, “Arnolfini Wedding Portrait” (complete identification at National Gallery of Art, Wash. website)

Burtynsky

E. Burtynsky, Abandoned Mineshaft (image info, site)

Greensboro Sit-in

Civil Rights: On the second day of the Greensboro sit-in, Joseph A. McNeil and Franklin E. McCain are joined by William Smith and Clarence Henderson at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

(Courtesy of Greensboro News and Record) Freedom struggle site

Visualization & Concepts (Political Critique)

Jacques Louis David. The Lictors bringing to Brutus the body of his son. 1789

Visual Images & Concepts

Chris Henry Clarke Infinite Loop Go to Rhizome.org for more info.

Perception, Cognition and the VisualSeeing, thinking, knowing

Vision & the Mind

Inner Display?

Visual Cultures & Modes of Visualization

• Social and cultural, not natural– images and media as a process of

socialization in culture

• Rule-governed: grammar of learned rules– Minimal signifying units in meaningful strings

(syntax, grammar) to connected discourses

– theory and production rules already described the visual grammars of advertising, fashion, design, visual art, film, television genres.

• intervisuality, intermediality & visual literacy

• Trans-institutional and cross-media aspects of visual culture make it a large site for contested views of identity, power, and control

Course Administration

• Syllabus & Grading Scheme (Handout 1 and Schedule)

• Readings: Most from two required texts• First Design Project (Handout 2)• Lab Exercises (One set in Handout 3

but most will be assigned orally)• Course space (for resources/projects)

https://webdav.sfu.ca/web/cmns/courses/2008/387

Interest in Visual Culture/Visual Studies

• Rise of visual forms of communication in the postmodern world

• Merging of popular & "high" cultural forms

Intermediality

Visual Cultures as systems

• Cross-mediation, inter-mediality– Codes & contents migrate

across media, forms, genres– visual/textual opposition or

hybrid experience?

• studying visual cultures as systems– Institutions (macro, micro),

networks of communication

What is Visual Culture & How do our ideas of it inform Visualizations?

• Contested field• Multidisciplinary

approaches (read general intro. to the theory textbook)

Robert Doisneau, Sideways Glance (1948)

Practices of Looking (Sturken & Cartwright)

– Myth of photographic truth– Images & ideology– Meaning-making (producers’

intentions, “reading images”, appropriation & counter bricolage)

– Critical approaches to media production

• Representing representing (Irvine)

• Visualizations that position the creator

Other themes

– Visualizing things that are not visual

– Origins of “modern” visuality (visual arts & art history--Nicolas Mirzoeff, John Berger)

– Representation & mediation in global perspective

– Power/pleasureMr. Yuk warns children of poisons

MoreTheories

– British cultural studies/semiology (Stuart Hall)

– Visualization as discourse

– Society of the spectacle, simulacrum, male/female gaze, fetishism, voyeurism, reproduction, racialized discourse…

– Disciplinary & interdisciplinary ways of studying the visual (Elkins)

Falling Man, Photo by R. Drew, World Trade Center September 11, 2001

Strategies for Studying Visual Culture &

developing resources for

visualizations ?

• studying the ‘functions’ of a world through pictures, images, and visualizations, not just through texts and words

• But: “The visual is always ‘contaminated’ by the non-visual: ideologies, texts, discourses, beliefs, intertextual presuppositions, prior experience and "visual competence" (Irvine)

• meanings embedded in social institutions

“Representations of blacks by white Europeans” Exhibition curated by Lynne-Rose Beuze, Martinique, 2003.

Visualization & disciplinary approaches to studying the visual

• Levine’s Map of Disciplines

• Science & technology studies• Hacking (Do we see through the microscope?)

• Latour—“translation” in Actor-Network Theory)

• Pure & Applied Sciences

– Physics (optics etc.), Psychology (perception, cognition), Mathematics, Engineering, computer science

Adapted from M. Irvine(2005) applied media theory

Tying It All Together: Applied Media Theory

Media Object

Institutional Contexts & Preconditions

EncodingIntertexts & Intermedia:Prior, Contemporary, &

Presupposed works and genres

DecodingCommentary, Supplements,

Ongoing Interpretation

Ideologies &Discursive Practices

Media Systems:technologies & social hierarchies of media;social & institutional

history of media.

Receivers/Reception/Audiences:Media construction of subjects:implied receivers and subject

positions of interpreters

Subjectivities & Identities:

class, ethnic, national& gendered identities;sexualities

Producers/Production/SendingShared codes and Contexts

of Production

The Cultural Encyclopedia or “toolkit”:Learned Codes, Genres, Symbolic

Correspondences.Binary oppositions and semiotic

structures of meaning.

Economic and Industry Contexts;Consumer Market Conditions

Last part of Class: Video Screening• Black Sun 2005. Directed by Gary

Tarm. Screenplay and Dialogue by

Hugues de Montalembert.

But First: Presentation by Dave Murphy and Lunchtime

Assignment