Introduction to Visualization & Visual Studies

1. Introduction to Visualization & Visual Studies • Photograph by Robbie Cooper (New York Times 2007)

2. Imagination M.C. Escher Relativity 1953

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

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

5. 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

6. Visualization & Concepts (Political Critique) Jacques Louis David. The Lictors bringing to Brutus the body of his son. 1789

7. Visual Images & Concepts Chris Henry Clarke Infinite Loop Go to Rhizome.org for more info.

8. Perception, Cognition and the Visual Seeing, thinking, knowing

9. Vision & the Mind

10. Inner Display?

11. 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

12. 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

13. Interest in Visual Culture/Visual Studies • Rise of visual forms of communication in the postmodern world • Merging of popular & "high" cultural forms

14. Intermediality

15. 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

16. 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)

17. 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

18. 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/pleasure Mr. Yuk warns children of poisons

19. 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

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

21. 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

22. Tying It All Together: Applied Media Theory Adapted from M. Irvine(2005) applied media theory Institutional Contexts & Preconditions The Cultural Encyclopedia or “toolkit”: Learned Codes, Genres, Symbolic Correspondences. Binary oppositions and semiotic structures of meaning. Subjectivities & Identities: class, ethnic, national & gendered identities; sexualities Ideologies & Discursive Practices Receivers/Reception/Audiences:Media construction of subjects:implied receivers and subjectpositions of interpreters Producers/Production/Sending Shared codes and Contexts of Production Encoding Intertexts & Intermedia:Prior, Contemporary, & Presupposed works and genres Decoding Commentary, Supplements,Ongoing Interpretation Media Object Media Systems: technologies & social hierarchies of media; social & institutional history of media. Economic and Industry Contexts; Consumer Market Conditions

23. Last part of Class: Video Screening • Black Sun 2005. Directed by Gary Tarm. Screenplay and Dialogue by Hugues de Montalembert.

24. But First: Presentation by Dave Murphy and Lunchtime Assignment