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summary of Theory of visual communication P.Favero
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TVC: SAMENVATTINGINFO EXAMEN: 50% EXAM, 40% PORTFOLIO AND 10% PARTICIPATION
• 12 mpc with multiple select: more answers are possible
o Partial points if you don’t select all the correct answers when more answers possible
• 1 open question: short essay max 1,5p: you don’t have to cite exactly from what you’ve read
• Readings are the base: you should know what the author writes about and who the author is
• Task 3: “explain why and how images can be political in a 500-word report”= possible exam question
PART 1: VISUALITY
INTRODUCTION
Why is visual culture much more than just the study of images?
• Back in time & travel in space: trying to understand how humas have historically tried to make sense
of the concept of vision
• Various theories: ancient Greece to the Arab Golden Age and European Renaissance)
• Key approaches that inspired the work of scientists and artists in different epochs and cultures
• Enquire the meaning of visual culture and visuality
DISCUSSION TASK 1: PLATO AND FANON READINGS
Discuss the following questions:
1. As a group, what are your takeaways from the texts?
2. What are the key concepts discussed in the texts?
3. Why are these readings meaningful for visual communication?
• What we see isn’t necessarily reality: everyone has their own reality (f.e. black vs white, the conflict
Russia vs Ukraine)
• Seeing the light = escaping ignorance
• There is no real reality but only interpretations of the reality: this is based on how we see things and is
influenced by our identity
• “How we see, how we are able/allowed or made to see and how we see this seeing or the unseen
therein”
o How: vision based on our own background/context = own point of view
o Able: physical abilities
o Allowed/made politics and forced to see things by power structures
o How we see this: cultural interpretation of vision and how we think about seeing
o Unseen: things we can’t see/ are hidden (by power structures)
• There is diversity in how we see things due to factors like culture and politics (= power structures)
• Seeing is a natural thing but how we see depends on other factors:
o Our mind sees faster than our eyes:
▪ What we see is influenced by our mind
▪ Vision and imagination go hand in hand
o The surface and what’s under the surface:
▪ We believe that the truth is deeper and hidden from us
▪ Everyone has a different perception due to context (f.e culture) or because our
bodies work differently
pag. 1
, o Two visions about vision:
▪ Materialism: everything we see is real
▪ Nihilism: nothing we see is real
▪ Prof places himself in between these two
o Intersectionality:
▪ The way people perceive and move around the world is determined by different
aspects such as skin colour, gender, …
▪ We can use different things to interpret things
o Objectiveness:
▪ Vision= always subjective to a certain extent because of intersectionality (=the ways
in which different aspects of a person's identity can expose them to overlapping
forms of discrimination and marginalisation)
Fanon: People internalise someone else’s gaze, you become what other people
see you as (self-fulfilling prophecy). Individuality doesn’t exist, we are taking
on a different role depending on the situation, we are “individuals”.
WHY DO VISUALS MATTER
• World map: We are conditioned to see the world with Europe in the middle but in other countries this
is not always the same. School and history books or visuals are a mirror of politics and beliefs, so not
neutral.
• Visual Hypertrophy: We tend to think we live in the most visual time but Baroque, Tuscan,…
architecture was also visual
o Visuality is of all times and cultures
o Approaches to visual differ between time and space
▪ Tuscans used a lot of contrasting colours, Muslims us shadows in Mosques
• Visuals are central in our daily lives: thanks to the digital world there is more visual
• Space is constructed visually: Cities are often built around certain key visual references (f.e. church)
o We socialise our social lives around visual references
o F.e. Palace of justice Brussel: is higher and looking down on the city
• Time is constructed visually: We refer to time in directions
• The functioning of our bodies and minds comes to us visually:
o Information comes visually (f.e. scans)
o Vision is part of many aspects in life, that’s why it’s important to study it
• Vision is power (Politics)
o Power sees: having vision is having control and power, being seen is not
▪ Design of modern jail: central point to overlook the prisoners
o A centralised power that sees others instead of a central power that we see (<> kinds in the
dark ages)
• Power today?
o Big tech companies: get info about all of us all the time and gain power by it
o Vision is strictly political
pag. 2
,WHAT IS VISUAL CULTURE?
INTRODUCTION
The Tibetan mediation:
• Use in neuroscience
• How: look at image, close your eyes, let the image appear to you and repeat
• Experience: image gets clearer after you repeat → more details become visible
• Why useful?
o Because you analyse it you realise you do not control the image but our vision forms an
image of different elements. This doesn’t mean that what you see is complete/ correct
Indian approach to images: Images looks at you
Images are often a connection we have to something:
• F.e. pictures of war
• Images aren’t separate of the reality, they are portraying and represent different things
Our Eyes:
• Focus and defocus all the time
• Natural frame: rounded
o Things on the edge of the scope are out of our focus
• Functioning of the eyes (history starts at Greeks and Egyptians)
GREEKS AND EGYPTIANS
Alexandria- Egypt-The Arabs: Eyes are scanning for information: what is there to be known?
• First idea of the eye:
o Eye= a hunter
o Focus and defocus
o Contextualise what we see in the broader space
o Simon Ings: The eye is always on the hunt (build upon the theory of Theon from Alexandria)
Two visions:
1. Extramission (= looking for control)
• Dominant in neuroscience
• Plato: eye is an active agent that conquers what it sees. It reduces objects in size and brings them into
the eyes.
o All objects have a pure, universal form (archetypes: basic, minimal shapes)
o All objects and elements that make up the world must adhere to a certain extent
• Democritus: Matter composed of atoms that are carried to the soul to be viewed
o Objects make copies of themselves which contracts in size until it is sucked up by the pupil
o Objects emanated a thin pellicle (the eidola) that would enter the mind by travelling through
the eye
o He believed: eyes reduce what we see to something our eyes can see. Our eyes are limited
and this is a problem (tegenstrijd met Plato)
• Empedocles: 4 elements (water, air, fire, earth) → first to relate light to seeing
o Vision is related to fire because of light that radiates from the fire within the eye
o Combo of Plato’s hunt and Democritus materiality
• Galen: spiritual turn
o Founder of optical nerve= nerve that connects the eye to the brain
▪ Research on dead people
o Base of connection between eye and brain in spiritual way
▪ Explanation of how info could travel from the eye to the brain: “This is because of
spirits that live in the world that go inside of the eye and travel to the brain through
the nerve.”→ Nerve is hollow and conducts visual spirits
▪ Brain = soul and make people into what they are
▪ Pneuma: liquid that transfers air by making contact with blood to images
➢ Physic and spiritual
➢ Key aspect of capacity to perceive colours, shapes, cognition and acquire
knowledge
pag. 3
, 2. Intramission: (= image are in control over us)
• Aristotle: objects need light to be seen → closer to light= clearer
o Eye= receiving organ
o We can’t see at night so the eye doesn’t emanate light
o Humans exist as a unified whole body-soul complex (tegenstrijd Phantasm and Plato)
o Euclid: lights emanate in straight lines
GENERAL: THE EYE IS AN ACTIVE AGENT LOOKING FOR CONTROL (EXTRAMISSION) BUT IMAGES ARE ALSO
IN CONTROL OVER US IN A CERTAIN WAY (INTROMISSION)
• Hoffman (today’s time): Humans have developed to not question what’s real and what isn’t
o Emanating information: Evolution has conditioned to see things and scan information we
already know something about to help us survive
The debate about eyes as an organ sparks a debate about representation
Representation
• Plato’s cave:
o Things in the cave appear in a different way from what they actually are
o People in cave:
▪ only see the surface of things but not in pure forms
▪ only see past the surface once the escape forms the cave
o Philosophers: are able to see beyond the illusion of the surface
o The cave is a metaphor for the way humans are caught in a phenomenal state because of our
senses
o Liberation is possible thanks to the workings of our mind: shows the divide between mind,
soul and boy = Phantasm
MEDIEVAL ISLAM
Bagdad Golden Age (8th to 14th century AD): Strong base for science, philosophy and art
• Al- Kindi (801-873 AD):
o Active in many disciplines
o Eye emanated rays: When we read, we only read what we focus on (focus-defocus:
extramission)
o First theory about radiation: The importance of light for a functioning vision is the base of
today’s knowledge
• Alhazen Basra/ Ibn al-Haythal (1021 AD):
o “An afterimage is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one's
vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased.”
o Created the first camera obscura while experimenting with lights
o Discovered afterimages:
▪ Illusion you see when you can still see images after exposure to the original image
has been ceased → the eyes have the capacity to retain light after exposure
▪ “The shadow image left in the consciousness whenever a human being closes the
eyes after having observed an intense light”
o Concluded: light enters the body (Intromission)
o Correspondence between working of the eye and lenses in a camera
▪ Dark room with small hole: projects image upside down
➢ Confirms that light emanates in straight lines (Aristotle Intromission)
▪ Wondered why we don’t see the world upside down → because of the brain and the
optic nerve that connects eye and brain
o Light produces images and humans produce machines that do what the eye can do
o Second discovery/ contribution: Visual pyramid
▪ Our eye views things as a pyramid: we have 2 lenses, camera has 1
➢ Pyramid is the foundation of the Renaissance and the camera
o Drawing images of the eye that are accurate
pag. 4
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