THEORY OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION
COURSE CONTENT
This course introduces you to key elements in visual communication. Starting with an
introduction on the centrality of vision and visual forms in human life across places and times,
the course will proceed with different theoretical and methodological insights into how to
approach the world of visual communication. You will learn about the basic discoveries
regarding the functioning of vision and of the eye and how these translated into the creation
of specific visual technologies and media. You will hence travel between stone carving,
Etruscan, and Egyptian tombs, between Renaissance paintings and the invention of the
photographic camera, from cinema to television and digital screens all the way to the
Metaverse. You will then learn the fundaments of semiotics, iconography, political analysis
(including gender and race) and phenomenology and learn how to apply them to the terrain
of photography, film and digital visuality. You will be introduced to documentary film (a key
practice in the terrain that connects art, cinema, and science) and finally learn elements in
image composition (both in the fields of painting, photography, and digital arts) and in film
analysis.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
You will learn:
• key elements in the theories that characterise the field of visual communication
• to address the cultural history of visual communication in the Western world and by
contrast also beyond it.
• to apply the theoretical perspectives that have been taught to a variety of fields of
visual communication
• to apply such knowledge to specific case studies.
• to analyse images
• to analyse photographs according to different theoretical paradigms
• to conduct film analyse
• to identify different types of documentary films
• to write short critical essays on the topic address conduct a small-scale visual project
• to conduct group work around specific questions in the field of visual communication
STRUCTURE OF THE CLASSES AND TEACHING METHOD
Every class is composed by frontal lectures followed by group-work and discussions. During
and/or after every lecture you will be asked to discuss takeaways, concepts etc. in small groups
and then present your findings to the rest of the class. Groups will be created during the first
class.
EVALUATION METHOD
The course will be evaluated by means of a group portfolio that sums up the 9 tasks that you
will have to execute during the semester and a final exam. The portfolio amounts to 40% of
the final mark, the final exam to 50% and 10% for active participation during classes and
discussions.
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, 1. INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE – WHY THE VISUAL MATTERS
We open up the course with an introduction to its structure, goals, content, and teaching philosophy. We will then
reflect on the role of visual culture in human life exploring how much is there in the act of looking and seeing. We
address how rich the field of vision is and how meaningful images are in the making of human life. Today, we
basically introduce the key terms and topics that will make up the backbone of the course.
Vision is central to how we see the world, but it is also something that is culturally defined,
it’s not neutral and not necessarily something natural. We need to be critical of it and have
this attitude towards it that can deconstruct is a little bit.
Key Readings:
• Plato. The Simile of the Cave. Visual Culture Reader pp. 25-29
• Fanon, F. The Fact of Blackness.
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, 2. ONE VISION – A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE EYE
This week we travel back in time and also sideways in space, trying to understand how humans have historically
tried to make sense of vision. Starting with the various theories regarding the functioning of the eye (from ancient
Greece to the Arab Golden Age and European Renaissance) we try to understand the key approaches that have
inspired the work of scientists and artists in different epochs and cultures. We will also enquire into the meaning
of terms such as visual culture, visuality, visualism, etc. Why is visual culture much more than just the study of
images?
WHAT IS VISUAL CULTURE?
“How we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the
unseen therein”. (Foster, 1988)
We are made to see something. We see something but reinterpret because of the beliefs we
have. This is how imagination and vision come together (the surface and beyond the surface).
We see with our mind way faster than we see with our eyes.
ð Struggling between the mind, the soul and materialists who say that everything is real.
Intersectionality: the way people perceive the world or move in the world is not determined
by one aspect or characteristic of their lives but by a combination of aspects (class, gender,
race, culture, sexuality).
Race does not exist, it’s a myth that says that the behavior of someone is dictated by the
way someone looks. What exists is skin-color, which we apply characteristics to (e.g. darker
skin-color will be marginalized from society).
WHY THE VISUAL MATTERS
Who are we? When you look at the map, of the world, doesn’t it raise a question?
We are taught to look at the world with Europe in the
centre. Europe is actually really small in this map, which
makes you rethink about schoolbooks and history books.
The visualization of the world is a matter of power, there
is nothing objective about it. The visualizations are a
mirror of politics.
Today we associate this idea to visual hypertrophy.
We have an overload of visuals, and we think “we never have been as visual as now”. But that’s
not true, we have always been visual.
e.g. In the times of Baroque there were so many paintings that were extremely visual as well
e.g. Etruscan paintings in a tomb: a lot of strong contrasts and color within the tomb
e.g. Swedish rock carvings
e.g. Light and shadows are often used as decoration in Deli: darkness and shadows are not
seen as something bad; it’s being seen as an invitation to go to the light
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,The visual is central in our daily lives (e.g. virtual reality, google maps…)
4 aspects of visual communication
• Space is constructed visually (e.g. people look for directions in a city by looking at
buildings, when you want to find the central point in a city, you will need to look for a
church or use instructions: go straight until you hit the green tree, then go left)
• Time is constructed visually (e.g. the future is in front or ahead of you, you point
forwards. But in Japan the future is behind their back)
• The functioning of our bodies and minds too come to us visually (e.g. a smartwatch
to run and record your time, a watch to record your sleep)
• Power: vision is power, politics.
o In premodern time power had to be seen; the king had to be seen
E.g. the panopticon by Bentham: where the king is seated at the very centre of
the prison and looks into the lives of the prisoners.
o Where is power today? with 5 multinational companies
§ Distributed form of control because of camera footage everywhere
§ Power sees rather than being seen
ð Vision is something strictly political, don’t take it for granted, question it.
EXERCISE MONA LISA
Open and close your eyes a few times. What happened?
- Seeing more details
- Seeing less details
- Feeling like you’re being looked at by the picture
You think you know the painting but there are elements that you never
even noticed were there or you constructed differently in your mind. Stuff
emerges in the interaction between vision and memory.
When you start engaging with an image, you realise that there is much more to know then
you think, and you cannot control that image. You think you know what’s happening because
you’ve seen this icon so many times, but you don’t because our vision is constantly generated
at the interface between functioning of the eye (what is out there) and the functioning of the
brain (what is in here).
An image is way more mysterious than we think. It contains many more layers of meaning,
beyond the historical meaning (who painted it and not). We can’t really be sure about what
we see from one moment to another. Vision has to do with your eye scouting.
An image about which one can say nothing, is generally an image which one hasn’t taken the
time to look at attentively. But this time is long, and I will say it again, it takes courage
– Georges Didi
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,E.g. painful images (catastrophes, the war in Ukraine)
Normally we have a relation to the war through images, the image is a fundamental tool
through which that comes to us. But the image does not exist apart from an active subject
viewing it. The viewer and the view come together. That image gathers meaning in relation to
an active subject that related to it. Every time you look at the image, it will have a different
meaning.
Today, one can no longer talk about war, without talking about the presentation of war.
How can such a small organ be able to capture the vastness of the world in front of us?
We go back to the Greeks.
The eye, as Simon Ings suggests, by building upon the theorising of Theon from
Alexandria (335 - 495 AD), is “always on the hunt” (p. 153)
– shooting arrows (Theon)
The eye is an active agent, hunting for information. It’s scanning around the surface trying to
grab what is there to know. The eye is not a passive entity (just receiving stuff from the
outside) but an active one: focusing and refocusing, the moving outwards and inside, the
contextualizing what we see into broader space.
e.g. Hinduism: a lot of eyes in their images
The most important division in the study of the eye: extramission ó intramission
EXTRAMISSION
Plato (4th century BC)
• the eye is an active agent (a hunter) that conquers what it sees
• objects are reduced in size and brought into the eye
• the world was made up by the existence of pure, universal forms, archetypes to which
all elements and objects that make up the world must, to a certain extent adhere
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,Democritus (460-370 BC)
• similar principle to Plato but he materialised this process
• matter is composed of atoms that are carried to the soul to be viewed
• objects make copies of themselves which contract in size until it is sucked up by the
pupil
• objects emanated (spread out) a thin pellicle (the eidola = a reduction of an object into
its minimum component that the eye could suck up) that would enter the mind by
travelling through the eye
Empedocles
• matter is 4 elements (earth, air, wind, fire)
• vision is related to fire; light radiates from the fire within the eye
• he took Plato’s idea of the hunt and Democritus’ idea of the
materiality and gave it shape through the idea of the fire
• the eye illuminates the world with its own spirit “as when a human
being going out at night lits up a lantern” (Ings 156)
Galen (born 129 AD)
• Galen was interested in the lens
• he was already capable of doing cataract surgeries and discectomies
• he created the first real scientific understanding between the eye and the brain, but in
a spiritual turn
• he started studying the function of the optic nerve (the nerve that connects the eye to
the brain): it is hollow and conducts visual spirits
• he couldn’t quite explain the existence of information. Information travels from the
outside through the eye into the brain because the world is populated by spirits (key
essences). He said that those spirits clam into the eye because the nerve is open, it’s
hollow inside and allows information to come into the brain of an individual
® flow starting from the brain and developing through the hollow optical nerves
• flow was centred around the notion of the pneuma, “a vaporous substance which is
formed in part by the inspired air and in part by the vaporization of the arterial blood”
(Ierodiakonou p. 10) ® He starts theorizing that there is a liquid that somehow brings
what is air (the information out there) in contact with blood (which is the carrier for
some kind of information).
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, • pneuma was for him hence at once
o ‘vital’: material
o ‘psychic’ / ‘spiritual’: he couldn’t explain it
• the latter (psychic) was for him central to the capacity to perceive colours and shapes,
to have cognition and acquire knowledge. In his view this was “the first instrument of
the soul that resides in the brain” (ibid.9)
You’re not always active, you’re also passive (you’re also being looked at). There’s an
interplay between the agency of the subject and the agency of the object.
Agency = the freedom of choice of a person to act.
INTRAMISSION
Aristotle (385-323)
• objects are visible only insofar as they are lit. Objects need light to
be seen: the closer objects are to a source of light, the better the eye
can see them.
• lights come from fire (at night you can only see an object if it stands
next to a fire)
• the eye is a receiving organ rather than an emanating organ (because
if the eye was emanating light, than we would be able to see at night)
Simon Ings: “He managed to explain the way in which distant objects too can be perceived
instantly and also why objects are visible only during daytime and not during night-time.”
(p. 159).
Simon Ings
He was inspired by Aristotle but also by Euclid (4th century): geometry and
straight lines and angles. He combined the two: light emanates in straight
lines (the sun emanates straight rays of light).
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, REPRESENTATION
How can such a small organ bring so much information into the consciousness of the human
being? This brought thinkers to start relating to this principle in terms of representation. This
brings us of course back to the experiment of the cave.
Greek civilisation was hence busy interrogating itself on how such a small organ could actually
bring into the consciousness of a human being the vastness of the world…
It is in the midst of these debates that a key notion (that would stay alive for generations to
come) would set its roots, is the notion of representation.
e.g. Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s intuition: a feeling was born that the way in which things
appear, is different from how they actually are.
The inmates only see the surface of things but not the pure form,
which is instead what a philosopher does. The latter is capable of going
beyond the illusion (i.e. the shadows seen by the inmates) and fully
grasp reality.
When the inmates managed to escape, they were finally seeing the sun and realizing they only
saw shadows. Plato used this allegory to metaphorize the way in which the human condition
is caught in a phenomenal state, caught in the senses that it is unable to grasp the true sense
of reality, the realm of pure “form”.
For Plato a liberation was possible by substituting the perception with the workings of the
mind (by measuring, counting and weighting, Republic, X,602C-3B) hence laying the grounds
for another key assumption in Western epistemology, the cartesian divide between the
mind/soul and the body:
PHANTASM (illusion)
simulacrum, deprived of ground in reality (Plato) body vs. soul
ó
sensorial instrument to grasp abstract concepts (Aristotle) humans exist as unified whole,
body-soul complex, reality vs. copy
Representation comes into the debate only to be further unpacked by Descartes.
MEDIEVAL ISLAM
A part of the knowledge on vision was developed and crafted in Greece, but the strongest
contributions were also made in what is now called the Middle East.
Baghdad Golden Age (8th to 14th century AD): seat of a cosmopolitan project
aimed at making science and art prosper.
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