Learning to Look, Looking to Learn

Catalog description

The act of looking is fundamental to visual studies, and to human meaning making and experience. Looking is a central piece of multisensory learning that we employ often“without thinking”, and yet making cognitive leaps all the while. Looking can be more than an involuntary action, but a perceptual, creative and intellectual tool that we can seek to better understand and hone. In this course, we will learn to look, and look to learn. We will visit sites of interest to the practice of looking, including local art museums and galleries. Through weekly exercises, we will observe our own observational proclivities and challenge our looking habits. We will consider how looking engages with power, politics, and identity, and how it informs belief. Drawing from visual studies, art history and theory, cinema and media studies, anthropology and philosophy, we will consider concepts of looking (such as: the gaze, verisimilitude, the invisible, surveillance, double consciousness). Methodologies of slow looking and visual analysis, semiotic interpretation and ekphrasis will be employed, along with various modes of reporting and recording. This class is experiential, experimental, collaborative, creative and discussion-centered. There will be a number of trips on and off campus. There will be weekly readings and written responses, and expressive prompts (that some might call “art assignments”). Major projects will include a research presentation and a visual essay. This seminar serves as an excellent foundation for those interested in visual studies, art, art history, media, design or communications fields, as well as neuroscience and psychology.