1.A particular society at a particular time and place; "early Mayan civilization" 2.The tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group: all the knowledge and values shared by a society 3.Acculturation: (Biology) the growing of microorganisms in a nutrient medium 5.Polish: a highly developed state of perfection; having a flawless or impeccable quality; "they performed with great polish"; wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn. Culture

6.The accumulated habits, attitudes, and beliefs of a group of people that define for them their general behavior and way of life; the total set of learned activities of a people. ww.geographic.org/glossary.htmlww.geographic.org/glossary.html

Visual culture encourages reflection on the differences between art and non-art, visual and verbal signs, and the ratios between different sensory and semiotic modes.

Visual culture entails a meditation on blindness, the invisible, the unseen, the unstable, and the overlooked; also on deafness and the invisible language of gesture; it also compels attention to the tactile, the auditory, a haptic, and the phenomenon of synesthesia.

Visual culture is not limited to the study of images or media, but extends to everyday practices of seeing and showing, especially those that we take to be immediate or on mediated. It is less concerned with the meaning of images than with their lives and loves.

There are no visual media. All media are mixed media, with varying ratios of sense & types.

The disembodied image and the embodied artifact are permanent elements in the dialectics of visual culture. Images are to pictures and works of art as species are to specimens in biology

We do not live in a uniquely visual era. The visual or pictorial turn is a recurring trope that displaces moral and political panic onto images and so-called visual media. Images are convenient scapegoats, and the offensive eye is ritually plucked out by ruthless critique.

Visual culture is the visual construction of the social, not just the social construction of vision. The question of visual nature is therefore a central and unavoidable issue, along with the role of animals as images and spectators

The political task of visual culture is to perform critique without the comforts of iconoclasm.

What voice do you hear? No hearing at all, just abstraction Hearing a specific voice associated with one’ past, including our own voice Hearing an internal voice that is an internal voice we regularly use We have a default voice

Definition of a sign Something that stands to someone for something in some respect or capacity. (C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, 2.228)

SYMBOL A symbol bears an arbitrary relationship to its signified. STOP sign/green GO sign Push/enter signs Signature “lion”

INDEX An index is a sign whose occurrence implies the existence of something else. The index can be the cause or consequence of what is signified, or it can simply be correlated with the occurrence of the signified. Humidity is sign of rain Sound of alarm is sign of trouble Facial expression as sign of a mood Gesture of pointing is a sign to look

ICON An icon is a sign that resembles what it stands for Sign language Money Religious sign [cross] looks likes [bunny picture] looked like a bunny—ears

Question: Icon, Index, or Symbol?

Concepts to know how to use Denotation Connotation Representation Signifier Signified Referent

Signifier Signified “ king of beasts ” Referent lion

To understand an image you must distinguish between signifier signified and referent and avoid permitting your knowledge of the referent to substitute for the other two.

McCloud’s Conjecture Identification Empathy

Can you experience your face as a mask?

The face you see in your MIND is not the same as OTHERS see!

I’m just a little voice inside your head. A concept.

I’m practically a blank slate! It would never even occur to you to wonder what my politics are, or what I had for lunch …

Do you agree? When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of ANOTHER. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see YOURSELF

The vehicle becomes an extension of our body. It absorbs our sense of identity. We become the car.

In every case our constant awareness of self flows outward to include the object of our extended identity

Analyze: All the things we experience in life can be separated into two realms: the realm of concept the realm of the senses

not show or discussed in class --What is vision? --What is a visual image? --What is a visual medium? --What is the relation of vision to the other senses? To language? --Why is visual experience so fraught with anxiety and fantasy? --Does vision have a history? --How do visual encounters with other people (and with images and objects) inform the construction of social life?