Formula to determine overall grade
• 10% Quizzes: 5 quizzes during the semester.
• 20% Class Project: To be Announced. A separate paper will
detail this assignment.
• 25% Midterm: It will be based on the materials covered in
the first part of the semester.
• 20% Short Paper (group presentation): You will be given a
detailed form of what is required and a grading system
according to those requirements. All the deadlines related to
the paper are mentioned in the schedule.
• 25% Final Exam: It will be based on the material covered in
the second part of the semester.
INRODUCTION
Visual Culture is concerned with visual events
in which information, meaning, pleasure or
emotion is sought by the consumer in an
interface with visual technology for example
television, internet, sculpture or painting.
The word “culture” comes from the Latin
cultura meaning « cultivate the ground » and in
its figurative sense, it means cultivating the
spirit, the intellect.
The word culture is used also to refer to the
material and immaterial achievements of a
society.
Visual arts exist since ever but the mechanical
reproduction, the invention of photography ,
cinema, television and synthetic images turned
our century into a period considered one of
visual civilization.
There is an urgent drastic need for the
emergence of a field called today VISUAL
CULTURE.
Today, in the postmodern globalized world the
visual is part of our everyday life. Already in
schools children as young as 4 years old are
learning about visuals in art history.
Usually the different media are studied
independently but today critics are beginning to
think that there is a need for a field that
comprises all of these media and they called this
the visual culture field.
Visual Text
VISUAL TEXT : A text that makes its meaning
with images and that can be:
• “read” or decoded. Like written texts, visual
texts are often carefully constructed by their
composers.
• Why we can read images like texts?
• Images are based on certain rules and
regulation, they use means just like writing
(exaggeration, dramatization, structure,
metaphors, thesis and antithesis, style of
rhetoric
WE CAN OR WE SHOULD “READ” IMAGES
JUST LIKE WE READ AND ANALYZE A TEXT
We should know how Visual Culture works to
see the unseen!
“Reminder: the statue of Egyptian Renaissance”
The target is your brains.
We need to be in control. To know how to create
images as future artists, therapists, etc…
To educate our vision, taste, sense of aesthetics
and critical thinking. Your VIEWPOINT is
essential.
RELATIONSHIPS OF THE WRITTEN
SYMBOLS AND PICTURES: MANY.
1) THE WRITTEN SYMBOL OR SIGN WAS
PICTOGRAPHIC (*) IN ITS ORIGIN.
2) THE WORD AND THE IMAGE IN RELIGIONS.
(*)Pictogram, also Pictogramme:
is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through
its pictorial resemblance to a physical object.
Pictographs are often used in writing and
graphic systems in which the characters are to a
considerable extent pictorial in appearance.
4) THE ART OF MEMORY: A LINK BETWEEN
WORDS AND IMAGES.
Common sense suggests that many written
symbols began life as pictures, and a consensus
among scholars supports this idea.
What could be easier to “read” than a pictogram
of a person, a cow, a snake or tree?
Five common Chinese characters and their visual
mnemonics. The character for “male” is
supposed to represent “strength in the paddy
fields” , reflecting the fact that until recently
men’s major occupation in China was rice
cultivation.
Nowadays women too cultivate rice.
Plato’s world of ideas: Plato believes that there
is a knowledge not derived from sense and
impressions, that are latent in our memories.
.
Most of our visual experience take place aside
from formally structured moments of looking
like going to the movies or to an art gallery.
Visual culture deals not only with those formal
and structured viewing settings but also to the
visual experience in everyday life. We are more
likely to watch a movie on video, and to see a
painting on a book jacket. (correlation!)
St. Thomas Aquinas (*), the medieval
philosopher believes that sight is not to be
trusted. Can we really base our judgment on the
color of a thing that varies throughout the day ?
(*) saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 –1274)
Italian Catholic priest who was an immensely
influential philosopher, theologian and jurist
Assignment
Power point presentation :
3 “three” students will share one presentation
deals with a concrete topic related to the course
“Visual Culture”. Each presentation should
contain at least analysis of two images.
The topics will be announced on next week