Entire Readings for week 1-3
GE 20
Big Picture in Focus:
ULO-a. Demonstrate deep knowledge on the definition, elements, and importance of reading
visual art.
Terms and operational meaning of Reading Visual Art
1. Reading. A particular form of visual practice; is both an active and a creative
process;
2. Reading the visual. We draw on our general and specific knowledge, tastes,
habits, and personal context.
3. Visual Culture. The study of genealogy and practice of visualization of modern
culture. Its concentration is on the interface between images and viewers rather
than on artists and works. It is concerned with visual events in which information,
meaning, or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual
technology.
4. Visual studies. It is an interdisciplinary field with close links with humanities and
social sciences-philosophy, sociology, and literary studies.
5. Capital-A Art. It is one discipline that provides many useful techniques for
anyone studying visual culture and is one of the important fields of social
understanding, history, and culture.
6. Spectatorship – is the production of social media, especially digital media.
7. Visual matter. It is considered beautiful or appealing.
8. Semiotics. It is an analytical approach and a research methodology that examines
the use of what we are called signs in society.
9. Sign. It is a basic unit of communication; it is just something that has some
meaning for someone; means something, and not one thing.
10. Text. The name of a group of signs- a collection of signs organized in a
particular way to make meaning.
11. Context. This means the environment in which a text occurs and communication
takes place.
Essential Knowledge
To perform the aforesaid big picture (unit learning outcomes) for the first three (3)
weeks of the course, you need to fully understand the following essential knowledge
that will be laid down in the succeeding pages. Please note that you are not limited to
refer to these resources exclusively. Thus, you are expected to utilize other books,
research articles, and other available resources in the university’s library e.g. ebrary,
search.proquest.com etc.
1. Reading the Visual
The Activity of Seeing
What are the differences between these two activities?
1.1 Seeing as Reading.
What can you describe in this illustration?
3 Main Points in Seeing as Reading
1. We see things we are actively engaging with our environment rather than
merely reproducing everything within our line of sight.
2. Every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not seeing-some things that
must remain invisible if we are to pay attention to other things in view.
3. The extent to which we see, focus on and pay attention to the world around
us. (Three actions are inextricably linked, depends upon the specific context
in which we find ourselves).
Context- means the environment in which a text occurs and communication takes place.
Contexts are extraordinarily dynamic and variable because they incorporate everything
involved in that environment: the people, their history, current events, similar texts
with which they are comparing this one, and so on.
While the process of making and negotiating the visual (whether driving a car
or taking a photograph) is always informed by the notions of attentiveness,
selection and omission, and context, there are other issues which we need to
consider, such as when we do focus on, attend to and see something, and
why do we see things differently over time, or from other people?
We can carry this insight further by suggesting that when we see, we are, in
effect, engaged in the act of reading (the visual). When we read a book, we
try to follow, consider and understand the material at hand (the words, the
sentences, the story), and we end up making both meanings and connections
between different meanings.
Suggestion (Please refer to the PDF Reading the Visual pp. 14-32 in the
Blackboard Open LMS for further details)
1.2. Seeing in Context
Activity: Film Viewing
Students will watch the movie “The Hobbit- The Fellowship of the Ring.”
Simple Recall: In the film “The Fellowship of the Ring, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins is represented
as an inoffensive, generous, and altogether nice type who seems untouched by desire, passion,
or greed. But he has a secret: he owns a ring that can cast an evil spell on him (binary of things).
Habitus- can be understood as a set of values and dispositions gained from our cultural
history that stay with us across contexts (durable and transposable). These values and
dispositions allow us to respond to cultural rules and contexts in a variety of ways (they
allow for improvisations). Still, these responses are always determined-regulated- by
where we have been in culture.
Cultural Literacy- refers to a general familiarity with, and an ability to use, the official
and unofficial rules, values, genres, knowledge, and discourses that characterize cultural fields.
In this sense, it is not just familiarity with a body of knowledge; it also presupposes an
understanding of how to think and see in a manner appropriate to the imperatives of the
moment.
Our situation in that what we see is inextricably linked to and is a product of our cultural
trajectories, literacies, and context.
We can exemplify this by returning to Verlaine’s reference to the ‘actor’s advice’ about
things needing to happen twice. What this means is that we sometimes fail to see the
significance of something until we are aware of what we could call a pattern
To sum up, how and why people see in particular ways, and we have referred to habitus,
cultural trajectory, and cultural literacy as the most important factors in determining
what we see.
(Read further the PDF Reading Visual about Seeing in Context for further details)
1.3. Techniques of Seeing as Reading
Compare and contrast the picture of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci:
1. Important techniques for reading the visuals are:
Selection and omission, framing, and the evaluation-every act of looking and
seeing is also an act of not seeing. (see figure1.3, pp. 30-reading the visual)
Selection, omission, framing, and evaluation produce a visual text.
Text- are produced or created; this process of production is an ongoing one.
The status of signs and texts is always relational and contingent.
2. Two important factors here are attention and focus. If we are attending closely or
carefully to an event, person, thing, or scene, we will create a text made up of what we
call contiguous elements.
(Read further the PDF Reading Visual about Techniques of Seeing as Reading for
further details)
1.4. Seeing in Time and Motion
Several elements contribute to or facilitate the process of suturing the world to
make a text.
a. Color
b. Shape
c. Movement
d. Texture
e. Distance
f. Light
Analyze the picture of Zeus using the following elements.
(Read further the PDF Reading Visual about Seeing in Time and Motion for further details)
1.5. Text and Intertextual
1. Sign- is anything that is treated as a meaningful part of the unit that is the text.
Intertextuality-the use of other texts to create new texts.
2. Genre-is term for text-types
These two concepts inform or influence visual activity.
Sample for an activity only.
Describe each picture and the genre each picture belongs.
Reference only. (Refer to pp. 27, Reading the Visual- pictures provide an example
of the relational character of signs and texts)
1.6. Text and Genres
Genres- text-types that structure meanings in certain ways through their
association with a particular social purpose and social context.
We normally think of genres in terms of cultural fields and mediums such
as fiction or film- for instance, detective, science fiction, or romance
novels; and action, horror, or erotic films
Each of these genres is identifiable in terms of its content, narratives,
characterization, discourses, values, and worldviews.
Like intertext, genetics do not provide us with special access to visual
reality; rather, they are frames and references that we use to negotiate,
edit, evaluate, and in a sense, read the visual as a series of text. How
socio-cultural fields and institutions categorize people, places, events,
and texts in terms of certain genres is often based on or associated with
evaluative binaries orients and disposes us to see and read the visual
world in particular ways.
Text and Genres Activity:
Can you tell what particular place each picture belongs and describe the genre each picture
belongs to?
(Read further the PDF Reading Visual regarding Text and Genres)
2. Visual Technologies
In this lesson, we take up the mechanics of visual perception, more specifically.
This includes the apparatuses and technologies people have developed over the
centuries as aids for seeing.
2.1. Tacit Seeing
How would you describe this image?
Pierre Bourdieu writes, “The relation to the world is a relation of presence in the
world, of being in the world, in the sense of belonging to the world.”
So we see and perceive not because we are looking at the world from the
outside, as it were, but because we are part of everything within our gaze.
This ‘everything’ includes our habitus (our background, tastes, tendencies, and
dispositions), as well as our physical aptitude and status.
The principle of constancy states that ‘past experiences of the viewer will
influence what is perceived.’
(Read pp. 41, for further details.)
2.2. Seeing as Literacy
What comes out into your mind upon gazing at the picture below?
Tacit seeing is fine if we simply want to get through the day’s responsibilities and
activities, but it is insufficient if we want or need to make sense of what we are
seeing.
As an analogy, consider the processes of communicating in the language.
The school system trains children to develop sophisticated literacies in the
various components of written language-we, learn the shapes of letters, learn
the look of words, we learn grammar and syntax- and with these literacies (and
discipline-specific training), we can write or read anything from abstract
philosophy to shopping list.
(Refer to pp. 42-45; Reading Visual Art PDF for further reading)
2.3. Arresting reality
What makes photography very important to you?
Arrested image- is most often associated with photography because
photographs perfectly freeze time and motion in a way that no other art form
achieves.
(Refer to pp. 45-47 of Reading Visual PDF for further details)
2.4. New Technologies of Seeing
Why is technology played an important role in visualizing reality?
Technology is defined variously, of course. We understand it to be a range of
objects (tools, and other instruments and devices), and we understand it as a
sort of knowledge-know-how and skill.
Technology can also be understood as an organizing principle and a process. The
way society constitutes itself and its formations bring people and machines
together to produce goods and services.
The current era is marked by an incredible range of visual technologies, using all
the senses of the term presented above. It includes older forms of films, video,
and television; the newer ones of computers, the internet, and virtual reality;
and the ‘scientific’ mechanisms of microscope, telescope, and digital imaging.
We can take from this that technology is not just know-how or designed devices;
it is also a verb, a principle of action.
Note:
A) This additional readings is intended of your preparation to your 1st Exam on Friday
Aug. 27, 2021.
B) Quiz to be uploaded anytime this afternoon and questions are based of this
readings.
God bless!!!!
M. yanie
