Course Overview
Visual culture is not just part of our everyday lives it is our everyday lives. This course introduces students to the practices, technologies and knowledges through which visual imagery is constructed. It aims to provide students with the tools for analysing and communicating with various kinds of visual images and objects. These may include brands, logos, informational graphics, photographs, advertisements, promos, paintings, cartoons, comics, emoji, films, maps, architecture and architectural diagrams. The course begins with the physiology of seeing and the way our brains process visual images. We then move on to examine the different theories of visual communication (gestalt, constructivist, ecological, semiotics and cognitive theory) and principles of visual composition. We also consider how important seeing is for truth and knowledge and why and how we get pleasure from seeing. The second half of the course looks at different ‘regimes’ of the image: painting and photography, film and television, comics, digital images and advertising.
Overall, the course encourages students to interrogate their culturally specific visual competencies and refine their skills in visual literacy while addressing issues of visual textuality and composition, identity, ethnicity, nation, class, gender and communicative inter-relationships more generally.