Visual Culture Courses

Visual Culture Visual Culture is an interdisciplinary programme at the University of Otago. It seeks both to understand visual artifacts (including, for example, documentary photographs, diagnostic imaging, fashion and cityscapes) and to analyse 'vision' as a social and cultural process.

Visual Culture examines the technologies by which images are produced, circulated and received, as well as the theories of seeing that make the visual world intelligible. So, rather than concentrating primarily on images themselves as objects, it addresses the relationships between images, discourses, societies, and persons.

Much of the research in Visual Culture is concerned with the ways in which images inform our sense of ourselves as subjects, the nature of the society we inhabit, and our imagination of the world.

Visual Culture might be conceived of in terms of the domain of the subject in the field of visual signification. As such, it is a form of communication which probes the act of looking, not the materiality of the "object." The increasing spectacularization of Modernity (and now pre-postmodernity) almost demands that modern and disciplined cultural subjects know how to navigate the various signs circulating between them and their environment, for as Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, "visual culture does not depend on pictures themselves but on the modern tendency to picture or visualize existence."*

Visual Culture intersects productively with a range of other subjects, including Anthropology, Art History, Design, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, History, Information Science, Performing Arts Studies, Physical Education, and Psychology.

The Visual Culture major is organised around three core papers, supplemented by a range of cognate 'approved' papers.

*Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. P.5

100 Level

• MFCO 104 Introduction to Visual Culture
• MFCO 304 Technology and the Visual Imaginary