Introduction to Visual Culture

“It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who

will be the illiterate of the future.”

– László Moholy-Nagy, artist, 1920s

Course Description: Introduction to Visual Culture is intended to introduce the student to critical approaches to the visual culture that surrounds us daily. Throughout the course, we will re-introduce ourselves to those visual aspects of culture that have become ubiquitous and interrogate their role as both art object and media production. Visual culture represents a powerful form of communication and meaning making and this course will offer students the opportunity to better understand the ways in which this meaning is made, received, and understood.

Course Evaluation:

  • Participation                                                 15%                
  • Personal History                                           10%             
  • Protest Art Creation                                     20%              
  • Image Journal                                               20%           
  • Final Essay                                                    35%    

Weekly Schedule & Readings:

WEEK 1 – Introduction: Ways of Seeing

  •  Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog, 90mins, 2010)

WEEK 2 – Looking

Supplemental:

  • Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave [1973],” in On Photography, edited by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, pp. 1-24.

WEEK 3 – Everyday

  •  Trend, David. “Asking: Questioning Culture and Consumption,” in Everyday Culture: Finding Meaning in a Changing World by David Trend, Routledge, 2016, pp. 12-47.

Supplemental:

  • Man with a Movie Camera  (Dziga Vertov, 67mins, 1929)
  • “1929: Man With A Movie Camera – What makes something ‘Cinema’?” (One Hundred Years of Cinema, YouTube, 5mins 31sec, 2017)

WEEK 4 – Protest

  • MacDowall, Lachlan John and Poppy de Souza. “’I’d Double Tap That!!’: Art, Graffiti, and Instagram Research,” in Media, Culture & Society, vol. 40, no. 1, 2018, pp. 3-22.
  • Kee, Michelle, Sarah Turner, and Danielle Labbé. “’People Want Good Graffiti’: Tensions, Contradictions, and Everyday Politics Surrounding Graffiti in Hanoi, Vietnam,” in Area, vol. 54, 2022, pp. 96-104.

Supplemental:

WEEK 5 – Consumption

  • Cohen, Nicole. “Commodifying Free Labor Online: Social Media, Audiences, and Advertising,” In The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, Routledge, 2013, pp. 177-191.
  •  Austin, Drew. “The Constant Consumer,” Real Life Magazine, 10 September 2018, https://reallifemag.com/the-constant-consumer

Supplemental:

  • Strasser, Susan. “The Alien Past: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Consumer Policy, vol. 26, no. 4, 2003, pp. 375-393.

WEEK 6 – Curation

  • Clifford, James. “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, by James Clifford, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 215-251.
  • “The Crow Flies,” Stuff the British Stole, Season 1, episode 3 (CBC, 22mins, 2023).

WEEK 7 – Digital

Supplemental:

WEEK 8 – Video Games

WEEK 9 – Streaming vs. Cinema

  • Baker, Djoymi. “Binge-Viewing as Epic-Viewing in the Netflix Era,” in The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access, edited by Cory Barker and Myc Wiatrowski, McFarland & Company, 2017, pp.31-54.
  • Burgess, Diane and Kirsten Stevens. “Taking Netflix to the Cinema: National Cinema Value Chain Disruptions in the Age of Streaming,” Media Industries, vol. 8, no. 1, 2021, n.p. https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/mij/article/id/95/

WEEK 10 – Gazing

  • Halberstam, Judith. “The Transgender Gaze in Boys Don’t Cry,” in Screen, vol. 42, no. 3, 2001, pp. 294-98.
  • Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.

Supplemental:

  • Smith, Terry. “Visual Regimes of Colonization: Aboriginal Seeing and European Vision in Australia,” in The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Routledge, 1998, pp. 483-494.

WEEK 11 – Audience

  • Meehan, Eileen. “Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, Feminism, and Political Economy,” in Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media, edited by Eileen R. Meehan and Ellen Riordan, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, pp. 209-222.
  • Coppa, Francesca. “Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding,” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1, 2008, n.p., https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2008.044.

Supplemental:

  • Browse fanvids on YouTube
  • Manovich, Lev. “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 319-331.

WEEK 12 – Wrap-Up: Ways of Seeing

  • Hickey, Amber. “Rupturing Settler Time: Visual Culture and Geographies of Indigenous Futurity,” World Art, vol. 9, no. 2, 2019, pp. 163-180.
  • Rosenbaum, S.I. and Arigon Starr. “How to Have a Pow Wow in a Pandemic,” The Nib, 29 July 2020, https://thenib.com/how-to-have-a-powwow-in-a-pandemic/

Supplemental:

Assignment Descriptions:

Participation                                                 15%               

            I am looking for active engagement with the course material and lectures. Participation can occur in the form of initiating and/or engaging in conversations during large or small group discussions, or occasionally offering comments and suggestions through email, or private conversations with me that I will often bring into a later lecture discussion. 

            Most of the participation grade will come from weekly posts on the discussion board on Moodle. Please don’t think of these posts as well-researched short essays. These are intended to be comments on the content assigned for the week. You can discuss the readings overall or a specific argument in one of the readings. You can point to an outside example that the readings reminded you of or you can discuss the ways the reading was confusing to you. You are also expected to comment on the posts of other members of the class so please don’t wait until the last minute to upload your posts. I am looking for active conversation here.

I will post a question or two for discussion to get us thinking about the material we’re reading each week and its relation to the content we are viewing or discussing, and our own positionality as viewers. Please feel free to engage in conversation there or in your own individual posts. I will also have a discussion open specifically for questions and issues (if other students know the answer, please feel free to post, especially if I don’t get to it right away!).  

Note on discussions: I am interested in engaging with you and the material in an open and respectful way. Remember that universities are full of people with different opinions – particularly when considering media and culture – so it is inevitable that there will be disagreements from time to time. Please understand that our course will remain a place for respect for each other and our ideas. 

Personal History                               10%              

            You will write a personal history laying out your initial or most memorable experiences with various elements of visual culture. You do not have to be comprehensive in your history so don’t worry about documenting your experiences with all forms of visual culture you have ever encountered, rather, consider the questions:

  • When did you first encounter something that you recognized as art?
  • What visual imagery sticks in your memory as consistent throughout your childhood?

You are not required to directly reference any of the course readings, but your reflection should be informed by the readings and concepts discussed in class. Do not analyze the content individually. This is personal reflection rather than an argumentative essay. 

Protest Art Creation                         20%           

            Create a piece of protest or satirical art & short written statement explaining your creation (art + 500 words). Your protest art will draw on the discussions of graffiti and parody of culture. Do NOT destroy public or private spaces in the creation of your protest art. Your creation can be a digital rendering of graffiti you would want to create (i.e. digital creation of graffiti on an image of a relevant public space), a physical creation on a medium such as paper, canvas, etc., or a parodic recreation of an advertisement or other form of consumption culture. You may want to see AdBusters for some classic examples of this form of criticism. To do this you will need to understand the context for your act of protest and some important information about the corporation, government, or other organization that you are protesting and/or parodying to understand how to best subvert them. Your creation can take any (non-destructive) media form that you would prefer: image, magazine/newspaper, video, podcast/radio, etc. You do not have to have high quality software or production values to do well on this assignment – these are not intended to be professional art creations. You will be graded on creativity (ideas and production), incorporation of course concepts, and appropriate use of protest and/or parody given the source. Your written statement should explain your intent and point to the context for your act of protest (include a citation for any original works you may parody). The statement and any image files can be submitted as usual on Moodle but audio & video files must be submitted as external links (you can use a private YouTube video, for example). If you feel comfortable sharing, please post your creation to the discussion for this week as well so we can all enjoy and appreciate your hard work. 

Image Journal                                   20%             

            Every week you will collect an image related to that week’s topic and based on a prompt that I will provide. Each image will be accompanied by a brief description (minimum 2-3 sentences) describing the image, its origin, and how it fits the topic/prompt. After collecting all 10 required images, you will provide a final write-up (approximately 1000 words) that discusses the images, your choices, and the ways in which they connect to the course content. This write-up should be an overview of your curated collection rather than an image-by-image description or discussion. Think about why you chose the images, how they connect to the content we have covered, and if there is any connection between the images for you.  

Final Essay                                        35%              

            This is a typical argumentative essay of approximately 1500-2000 words. This is a research essay that critically engages with current issues related to visual culture and the concepts discussed in this course. For this paper I’m asking you to develop a case study that will help you illustrate a specific topic and argument. Your case study could be a specific image, film, YouTube video, sculpture, etc. Your essay will draw on at least one of the concepts from one of the weeks of this course such as:

Intersectional perspectives and/or visual culture; “high” art vs. “low” art; audience engagement; visual culture of the everyday; media panics; video games as art object; curation and globalization; gender and looking; the “male gaze” and its variations; consumption culture; culture jamming; protest art; self-branding; digital minstrelsy; streaming vs. cinema

            More specific information regarding this assignment will be discussed in lecture and provided as we get closer to the due date.