These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.

These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.

Navigating Visual Culture: Theoretical Perspectives on Visual Media brings together an eclectic collection of theory-driven readings to help students understand and navigate the visual culture in which they live. The selections in Section I explore the nature of the visual and how people identify what they see around them, ranging from basic color to visual codes translated by the brain. Section II features readings that address the way people interpret, explain, and understand visual culture, while the readings in Section III give an overview of the various ways people participate in visual culture, whether as members of a particular media tribe, consumers of advertising, or users of personal computers. Each reading is framed by an original introduction that explains its place and relevance in visual culture, and discerning questions to facilitate classroom discussion or serve as writing prompts. The anthology also provides recommendations for supplemental reading and viewing. Navigating Visual Culture is well-suited to undergraduate courses in mass media, and can also be used for upper division and graduate courses in visual culture and new media.

Most of our expereince is visual. We obtain most of our information and knowledge through sight, whether from reading books and newspapers, from watching television or from quickly glimpsing road signs. Many of our judgements and decisions, concerning where we live, what we shall drive and sit on and what we wear, are based on what places, cars, furniture and clothes look like. Much of our entertainment and recreation is visual, whether we visit art galleries, cinemas or read comics. This book concerns that visual experience. Why do we have the visual experiences we have? Why do the buildings, cars, products and advertisements we see look the way they do? How are we to explain the existence of different styles of paintings, different types of cars and different genres of film? How are we to explain the existence of different visual cultures? This book begins to answer these questions by explaining visual experience in terms of visual culture. The strengths and weaknesses of traditional means of analysing and explaining visual culture are examined and assessed. Using a wide range of historical and contemporary examples, it is argued that the groups which artists and designers form, the audiences and markets which they sell to, and the different social classes which are produced and reproduced by art and design are all part of the successful explanation and critical evaluation of visual culture.

These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.

Drawing on interviews, responses to questionnaires, and oral histories by U.S.

As if John Berger's Ways of Seeing was re-written for the 21st century, Alexis L. Boylan crafts a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture in this concise introduction. The visual surrounds us, some of it invited, most of it not. In this visual environment, everything we see--art, color, the moon, a skyscraper, a stop sign, a political poster, rising sea levels, a photograph of Kim Kardashian West--somehow becomes legible, normalized, accessible. How does this happen? How do we live and move in our visual environments? This volume offers a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture, outlining strategies for thinking about what it means to look and see--and what is at stake in doing so.

" This collection of classic essays in the study of visual culture fills a major gap in this new and expanding intellectual field. Its major strength is its insistence on the importance of three central aspects of the study of visual culture: the sign, the institution and the viewing subject. It will provide readers, teachers and students with an essential text in visual and cultural studies." - "Janet Wolff, University of Rochester""" Visual Culture: The Reader provides an invaluable resource of over 30 key statements from a wide range of disciplines. Although underpinned by a focus on contemporary cultural theory, this reader puts issues of visual culture and the rhetoric of the image at centre stage. Divided into three parts, The Culture of the Visual, Regulating Photographic Meaning, Looking and Subjectivity, this reader enables students to make hitherto unmade connections across art, film and photography history and theory, semiotics, history, semiotics and communications, media studies, and cultural theory. The key statements are from the work of: Visual Culture: The Reader sets the agenda for the study of Visual Culture and will be an essential sourcebook for researchers and students alike.This is the reader for the module "The Image and Visual Culture" (D850) - part of The Open University Masters in Social Sciences Programme.

Bringing the research of musicologists, art historians, and film studies scholars into dialogue, this book explores the relationships between visual art forms and music. The chapters are organized around three core concepts – threshold, intermediality, and synchresis – which offer ways of understanding and discusssing the interplay between the arts of sounds and images. Refuting the idea that music and visual art forms only operate in parallel, the contributors instead consider how the arts of sound and vision are entwined across a wide array of materials, genres and time periods. Contributors delve into a rich variety of topics, ranging from the art of Renaissance Italy to the politics of opera in contemporary Los Angeles to the popular television series Breaking Bad. Placing these chapters in conversation, this volume develops a shared language for cross-disciplinary inquiry into arts that blend music and visual components, integrates insights from film studies with the conversation between musicology and art history, and moves the study of music and visual culture forward.

The notion of time travel marked by both possibility and loss: making the case for cultural research that is oriented toward the future. Visual Cultures as Time Travel makes a case for cultural, aesthetic, and historical research that is oriented toward the future, not the past, actively constructing new categories of assembly that don't yet exist. Ayesha Hameed considers the relationship between climate change and plantation economies, proposing a watery plantationocene that revolves around two islands: a former plantation in St. George's Parish in Barbados, and the port city of Port of Spain in Trinidad. It visits a marine research institute on a third island, Seili in Finland, to consider how notions of temporality and adaptation are produced in the climate emergency we face. Henriette Gunkel introduces the idea of time travel through notions of dizziness, freefall, and of being in vertigo as set out in Octavia Butler's novel Kindred and Kitso Lynn Lelliott's multimedia installation South Atlantic Hauntings, exploring what counts as technology, how it operates in relation to time, including deep space time, and how it interacts with the different types of bodies—human, machine, planetary, spectral, ancestral—that inhabit the terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds. In conversation, Hameed and Gunkel propose a notion of time travel marked by possibility and loss—in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery and in the moment of mass illegalized migration, of blackness and time, of wildfires and floods, of lost and co-opted futures, of deep geological time, and of falling. Copublished with Goldsmiths, University of London