MACS 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Visual Culture

• School: University of Illinois
• Department: Media and Cinema Studies
• Course: MACS 100
• Professor: kozma

Document Summary

Visual culture is culture expressed in visual images. Ocularcentrism: the centrality of the visual to contemporary western life. An over reliance on the visual to know, understand, and order the world around us. Vision: what the eye can see biologically. We process visual culture through our own scopic regimes. Seeing an object/subject represented in visual culture forces the viewers to both absorb and make meaning around it. When a camera is pointed at you, you might change the environment, yourself, or the way you represent a community. Images, and your interaction with them, are never neutral. Nothing in a film or tv show are placed there accidentally. Positionality: the specific conditions that help create and mold an individual"s position on any matter of topic (social, political, cultural, economic, etc. ) If you are watching a film that speaks a language that you don"t understand and you uses subtitles, you lack the nuance of their tone.