Introduction To Visual Culture PDF

COMMUNICATION, CULTURE AND CULTURE CARE TO SHARE… What is the relevance of traditional jeepney to our communication, culture and society? INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE RHYAN P. MA...

COMMUNICATION, CULTURE AND CULTURE CARE TO SHARE… What is the relevance of traditional jeepney to our communication, culture and society? INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE RHYAN P. MALANDOG INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Tell me something about the photo. J Describe the photo. What is the message of the photo? Is there any underlying message? Source: Sunstar Cebu INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Tell me something about the photo. J Describe the photo. What is the message of the photo? Is there any underlying message? Source: rappler.com INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Tell me something about the photo. J Describe the photo. What is the message of the photo? Is there any underlying message? Source: Business World Online INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Tell me something about the photo. J Describe the photo. What is the message of the photo? Is there any underlying message? Source: Business World Online INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Tell me something about the photo. J Describe the photo. What is the message of the photo? Is there any underlying message? Source: Yahoo News INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Tell me something about the photo. J Describe the photo. What is the message of the photo? Is there any underlying message? Source: Village People and Tatler Asia INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE VISUAL CULTURE is a term that refers to the tangible, or visible, expressions by a people, a state or a civilization, and collectively describes the characteristics of that body as a whole. Although most seamlessly applied to an architectural construction or artistic creation, the evidence of visual culture is not necessarily limited to the most obvious and direct forms of visual expression. The term is most useful for what specific aspects of the visual culture of a people reveal about the people themselves. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE VISUAL CULTURE Visual culture is a way of studying a work that uses art history, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. It is intertwined with everything that one sees in day to day life - advertising, landscape, buildings, photographs, movies, paintings, apparel - anything within our culture that communicates through visual means. When looking at visual culture, one must focus on production, reception, and intention, as well as economical, social, and ideological aspects. It reflects the culture of the work and analyzes how the visual aspect affected it. It focuses on questions of the visible object and the viewer - how sight, knowledge and power all are related. Visual culture analyzes the act of seeing as 'tension between the external object and the internal thought processes'. (Georgetown Inventory of Visual Culture) - Leah Houston INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE VISUAL CULTURE is concerned with visual events in which information , meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology. - Nicholas Mirzoeff visual technology means any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision, from oil painting to television and the internet. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE VISUAL CULTURE To define visual culture, it is necessary to breach the modern discussion of aesthetics as it pertains to cultural studies. Ian Hunter divides aesthetics into two domains: 1. What is considered beautiful: the technical discussion of style and concepts which lead to the greater philosophy of art. 2. What is considered ideal: “a socio-ethical doctrine centered on an ideal mode of life and order of society.” INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Oral Culture, Speech, and Written Culture Speech itself is a kind of code, a way of expressing perceived experience in sounds that have conventional meanings. All the forerunners of writing were based on pictures — what is called pictographic, or writing that is pictorial in character. Eventually, words came to be expressed in conventional signs, and logographic writing, or writing in which individual signs represent individual words, was developed. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Oral Culture, Speech, and Written Culture Oral culture predated written culture. In preliterate societies, the ancient lore and legends, as well as the knowledge necessary for carrying on human life and affairs, were passed on orally. In these societies, the most important roles, next to the ruler's, were those of the poets and storytellers who passed on the lore of the culture through recitation of oral tradition, dance and picture-making. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Oral Culture, Speech, and Written Culture In other places phonetization—the division of words into phonetic parts—occurred, eventually making possible the development of alphabets, or signs for phonetic parts. From this came the development of writing based on alphabets, or a system of about thirty or fewer letters or characters. Written language is a code too, a second-level code, if we consider speech to be first-level. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Oral Culture, Speech, and Written Culture The development of writing and written language had its shortcomings and did not please everyone. In one of his surviving letters, Plato for example, expressed a definite preference for oral communication because he had strong reservations about the ability of the written word to convey the true and complete understanding of what he wished to say. In addition, because writing was difficult and depended on laborious hand-copying, written materials were scarce and reserved for the few. For that reason, until much later, cultural gatekeepers—kings and princes, priests, scribes, the educated few—could and did control the messages that were delivered to the many. Literacy itself was available to the few. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Oral Culture, Speech, and Written Culture The work of Johannes Gutenberg in creating the printing press further cemented and expanded the role of writing, literacy, and word-based culture in Europe of the fifteenth and following centuries. Gutenberg's invention and work made books and printing cheap, plentiful, and accessible to common people. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Three Technological Innovations (Technological Change, Motion Pictures, Television) 1. Photography 2. Kinetoscope or Motion Picture 3. Television INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE The Human Brain and Written versus Visual Culture From neurological investigations done in this century, we now know that there is an asymmetry in the human brain. The left brain controls the right side of the body, and the right brain controls the left. Moreover, at least in right-handed persons — meaning about 90 percent of us — studies of split-brain patients have shown that the left brain controls speech and abstract thinking, willing, analysis, logic, discrimination, and numeracy (our ability to calculate and work with numbers). INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE The Human Brain and Written versus Visual Culture In contrast, the right brain deals with spatial perception, facial recognition, and music appreciation. The right brain seems to be more visually oriented, "synthesizing multiple converging determinants so that the mind can grasp the senses' input all-at-once [italics in original]," INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Multichannel Visual versus Monochannel Verbal Perception Visual perception is multi-channeled in the human mind, while verbal perception is single-channeled. If you hear several voices or different pieces of music simultaneously, unless you attend to only one the result is cacophony — you are unable to perceive anything but noise. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Multichannel Visual versus Monochannel Verbal Perception Visual perception is different. In 1968 a movie called The Thomas Crown Affair was released, directed by Norman Jewison. It depicts a rich Boston tycoon (Steve McQueen) who, because he is bored, masterminds the perfect bank robbery, and the insurance company investigator (Faye Dunaway) who works to catch him. This film is noteworthy in that it uses a split screen to show multiple actions taking place simultaneously. Although not the first film to use this technique, it was the first commercial Hollywood film to do so. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Multichannel Visual versus Monochannel Verbal Perception Jewison has written, "I realized that the eye is able to take in more than one image at a time as long as the viewer is not distracted by dialogue." He explained further, "The technique enables you to convey a tremendous amount of information very quickly – we were able to tell five different stories simultaneously." ("Chess With Sex," 58, 59) The eye can absorb that many different things at once without confusion or overload, but the ear’s inability to take in multiple soundtracks — multiple dialogues — at the same time is further evidence of the greater power of visual perception compared with perception of aural (word-based) communication. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE The Centrality of Television A sea-change in the culture occurred in the presidential election of 1960, with the televised debates between the candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Most people who heard these debates on the radio (verbal culture) thought Nixon had won. Nixon's performance in the debate corresponded to linguistic, left-brain rules. But Kennedy realized — either intuitively or consciously — that the rules of TV are different, and his performance corresponded to the nonlinguistic, right-brain rules that apply to TV. He looked better than Nixon on TV, and looking better meant that, by the standards of visual communication, he had won the TV interchange with Nixon. Since the country had by then entered the TV age, this meant that, after all, Kennedy had won the debate. At least partly because of this, he went on to win that (very close) election. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE The Centrality of Television INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE The Advent of the Computer Screen A fourth technological development in the rise of visual culture has now come into our lives and consciousness and become more-or- less ubiquitous: the computer, along with the computer screen, computer-based video games, and digital imaging and digital processing of text, images, and sound. Computers were invented as early as the mid 1940s but came to full prominence with the development of the digital personal computer in the 1970s and '80s and began their rapid ascent to today’s prominence in the 1990s. As before, an enormous industry has arisen based on this technology. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE The Digital Imaging and Visual Culture An extremely important recent development, beginning near the end of the twentieth century but coming into flowering and prominence in the twenty-first, is digital imaging. Most photographers now use digital cameras — cameras that process the image as a digitized computer file instead of producing the image on film — and many cell phones now have digital imaging capability. Most picture agencies now use digital images, and most publications have gone digital in that they use digital images and digital files even for text (words). All Internet pages, including text, images, sounds, and whatever else occurs on the page, are made up of digital files. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Questions. Clarifications. Reactions. INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Back Bay Books. 2007. ISBN 9780316010665 Jewison, Norman. "Chess With Sex," Sight and Sound (May 1999): 58—59. Logan, Robert. The Alphabet Effect. St Martins Pr. 1987. ISBN 9780312009939 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964. With a new Introd. by Lewis H. Lapham, Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 1994. ISBN 9780262631594 Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography. Museum of Modern Art, New York, distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, Vintage/Ebury. 1982. ISBN 9780436305085 Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Viking, 1998. ISBN 9780140196016