Lecture Notes

Is to look at the world to know it? The best way to understand? Or simply a short-hand or heuristic?

Private and academic realms - universal 'language' crossing society/academy, private/public lives - even cross-cultural?

-e.g. Sapir and Worf theory (linguistic anthropology) that learning a language informs our perception and understanding of world around us - gives us our structure for a world view -corollary: vision is more immediate - less mediated by language or cultural filters

• Popular media - since development of 'magic lantern' (1671?) - daguerrotypes (1839) - photography (Eastman 1884) - cinematography (Lumiere Brothers 1895)
• Acceleration and Augmentation of our visual intake of information on a popular level with advent televisual media and esp. with advent of computer and internet
• Frames - Windows - Screens - Friedberg and her the rise of the virtual window

*#Despite explosion of visual media - we essentially operate within the same ambit of the Alberti 'window' - so in information age we still have a 'window' - or screens - which open onto virtual worlds in popular media and on internet

1. 3-D bodily immersion in future media may finally break the metaphoric and technological hold of the 'window onto the world'

• Stafford - explosion of 'optical information' in society and academy
  1. yet much of this visual information is disparaged as secondary or 'pornographic' - images often associated with 'vice' (e.g. marketing campaigns, duplicity of contrived images for consumption, etc.)
  2. need in academia for 'interdiscipline' to study the use of visual information across divides - of disciplines and schools (humanities/sciences) - e.g. Journal of Information Visualization, Journal of Visual Culture, Information Design Journal, etc.

• James Elkins What type of visual images are used in the university? It turns out that images are being made and discussed in dozens of fields, throughout the university and well beyond the humanities. Some fields, such as biochemistry and astronomy, are image-obsessed; others think and work through images.

• Ancient debate - classical tradition - re: whether rays were emitted from the eye-out and 'touched' the phenomenal world; or whether things emitted rays which were picked up by the eye

• Leon Battista Alberti - De Pictura (1435) - father of optical geometry - "window" as metaphor and technique for painting - to generate single-point perspective realism - what we have inherited as realistic depiction through subsequent realism painting tradition
  1. discarded old debate - but relied upon Euclidean Geometry - and focused on assumption that visual rays extended b/w phenomena of world and eye of beholder = a physical exchange which conformed to mechanical laws - e.g. straight lines
  2. Key ingredients: 1. immobility of viewer (late called single point perspective) 2. rectangular frame which selects phenomena for viewing - a metaphoric "window" (see Locke too) 3. human figure as standard of measurement within the subject of the frame
  3. rectangular frame can be divided up into smaller, regular rectangles to maintain consistency and perspective

• John Locke - father of empiricism and natural philosophy - An essay concerning human understanding (1690)
  1. We acquire knowledge via external sensations - true knowledge - basis for epistemology - the mind functions like a dark room/camera obscura through with external sensation enters by which "light is let into this dark room" (1690, II.11.17) - gives rise to ideas, memory and thinking - visual technology is metaphor for how we acquire all knowledge - fundamental and primordial
  2. Disparaged language - words = "mist before our eyes" - not transparent in the way sense impressions entered the mind's window

camera obscura

• Scientific revolution - rise of instrumentation to augment and expand the range and acuity of our vision - indeed, allow unseen phenomena be seen through technical prostheses

• Establishment of technology as faithful register of external world - even if this cannot be verified within the limits of human vision

• Key Ways in which visual functions in human sciences: 1. Capture 2. Storage 3. Retrieval 4. Distribution

• This idea of visual evidence as faithfully mimetic to objects of external reality held in academy until influence of post-modernism, post-representational thought - much of which drew upon movements in visual arts which challenged the assumed 'normality' and 'naturalness' of realism
  1. e.g. the Cubists (~1910-20) fractured the image to render the effect of multiple perspectives upon the object world simultaneously - we see parallels to cubist perspective in the multiple 'windows' of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI's) on computers

• For academy and archaeology in particular - language has still dominated scholarship - esp. humanities - indeed a 'textual turn' in archaeological theory in the 1980's - but arguably, tandem with the changes in larger society over last century, we are witnessing a visual turn in scholarship
• Rise of Internet and digital technologies - more and more information is mediated by machinic processes and computer run algorithms - we often must take our technologies for granted - based upon the tradition running through scientific revolution in instruments, back to Alberti's verisimilitude of the window onto reality
  1. Ubiquity of media - convergence of media (Jenkins) creates a new cultural logic - one of mixing - so with our handheld mobile device or PDA's or on our computer with flash programs, etc. we have more and more intermedia which combine more intricately the visual with sound, text and moving image
  2. This has necessitated multi-tasking multiple modes of information all at once and quickly - this is the widgets theory of information - creates less time to be critical of visual information
  3. Yet the 'digital turn', while facilitating the primary functions listed above, is also inherently open to modification/alteration which is not immediately apparent to the researcher - or in public media the viewer of an ad campaign - So poses possibilities as well as a need to be critical of digitized information
• Yet most of this visual information which is generated by technology - such as Topographic maps/GIS maps, chemical composition charts, etc. - functions very differently from Alberti's idea of realism for the viewer
  1. More difficult to know if the visualization of the information is correct - more than ever, need to make research transparent and open to scrutiny

See Wikimapia and applications of Google Earth.

• We must think critically about the technologies with which we mediate the objects/artifacts of the world for visual display. The visual is a verb!