SO, last
week we looked at cultural theory and linguistically approaches to decoding images. These theories (semiotics, discourse theory,
general cultural theory) are valuable tools
for understanding the role of images in our culture, how we may be influenced by them, and how to better bring to SEE them
and understand them.
As we
noted with the “gorilla” exercises, we are not always aware of what we are seeing and usually don’t consciously analyze it.
This week
we will learn something about how our brains perform the feat of seeing and where in this process image interpretations of
different types occur. ON the one hand,
we’ll see that , in a way, it’s ALL interpretation, and that, as the author of
VI claims, we actively construct our visual
world. On the other hand, we’ll see that this does not mean that reality is subjective or possibly non-existent.
We’ll
start with some past and present theories of vision, proceed to some topics you’ve probably heard of, if not studied, such as
figure-groudn distinctions, and then dip
into the lower-level “rules” described in the VI book.
Finally,
we’ll assess this way of looking at images in terms of the Framework proposed by Gillian in the VMs book.