Week 10
Question 1:
Would you agree that in post-modernity Westerners are intertwined with— and in a sense have become— visual images, the visual culture? Imagine not seeing a plethora of advertising boards, videos on YouTube, fashion magazines, or not having a photo site online to upload the pictures you took, no Google Earth to see your friend’s backyard; how would that change the way you perceive, interpret and make sense of the world you live in? Rose divided the images in our world between vision (what the human eye is capable of seeing) and visuality or scopic regime, how vision is constructed in various ways, culturally or otherwise. How can things in this “world on display” be differentiated between what is real and what is manipulated to appeal to certain social ideals?
Question 2:
Is there such a thing as overanalyzing what you see? Rose quotes Michael Ann Holly on this matter, “To me [studying visual culture for the sake of only critiquing] is neither good ‘research’ nor serious understanding.” What lies beyond the theoretical framework of analyzing pieces of visual culture? Do you have a poster on your bedroom wall just for the sake of methodological discourse and critique? Where and what are the emotions that make an audience feel “moved” by a movie or painting? Explain what Rose is referring to when said that, “culture—understood as cultural meanings and practices— may not be an adequate term to address fully all aspects of visualities.”
Question 3:
North Korea is one of the most isolated nations in the world. How do we in our visual culture interpret what we see as oppression in a Communist country? In some pictures we see tons of people lined up in the public square marching and singing praise to Kim Jong-Il, while in others we see families starving, scrounging on empty streets and no lights, no electricity in the capital of Pyongyang. Rose goes into detail about social conditions and the effects of visual objects, and how social categories aren’t natural but constructed in different societies. With visual images being multimodal, in what ways do we make sense of what we perceive is North Korea in relation to other things, written and visually? What other places around the world do we have a limited view of their ‘way of life’ that we use to define the country as a whole? Are all our visual images limited in some way?
Question 1:
Would you agree that in post-modernity Westerners are intertwined with— and in a sense have become— visual images, the visual culture? Imagine not seeing a plethora of advertising boards, videos on YouTube, fashion magazines, or not having a photo site online to upload the pictures you took, no Google Earth to see your friend’s backyard; how would that change the way you perceive, interpret and make sense of the world you live in? Rose divided the images in our world between vision (what the human eye is capable of seeing) and visuality or scopic regime, how vision is constructed in various ways, culturally or otherwise. How can things in this “world on display” be differentiated between what is real and what is manipulated to appeal to certain social ideals?
Question 2:
Is there such a thing as overanalyzing what you see? Rose quotes Michael Ann Holly on this matter, “To me [studying visual culture for the sake of only critiquing] is neither good ‘research’ nor serious understanding.” What lies beyond the theoretical framework of analyzing pieces of visual culture? Do you have a poster on your bedroom wall just for the sake of methodological discourse and critique? Where and what are the emotions that make an audience feel “moved” by a movie or painting? Explain what Rose is referring to when said that, “culture—understood as cultural meanings and practices— may not be an adequate term to address fully all aspects of visualities.”
Question 3:
North Korea is one of the most isolated nations in the world. How do we in our visual culture interpret what we see as oppression in a Communist country? In some pictures we see tons of people lined up in the public square marching and singing praise to Kim Jong-Il, while in others we see families starving, scrounging on empty streets and no lights, no electricity in the capital of Pyongyang. Rose goes into detail about social conditions and the effects of visual objects, and how social categories aren’t natural but constructed in different societies. With visual images being multimodal, in what ways do we make sense of what we perceive is North Korea in relation to other things, written and visually? What other places around the world do we have a limited view of their ‘way of life’ that we use to define the country as a whole? Are all our visual images limited in some way?
