Visual Culture

3 units

In this interdisciplinary course, we explore this long history of vision and visual representation from antiquity to the present so as to shed light on how people at different moments have understood vision, have seen their own seeing and have encoded this seeing in different artifacts and media. More specifically, we explore the role of the visual in the historical production of subjectivity and collectivity; the political, religious, and ideological uses and abuses of vision; the relation of images to words and stories; the implication of sight in competing systems of truth, enlightenment, and scientific progress; and the function of seeing within different media of art, entertainment, and virtualization-from ancient cave painting, medieval icons and early modern church designs to modernist paintings and motion pictures.