Visual Culture: reading images devoid of context
Material Culture: objects as value
Design Culture: the production of meaning through cultural symbols
— what's the connection?
Visual Culture — way of looking. Authors "explain their discomfort and inability to deal meaningfully with the functions [what functions?] of ceontemporary design." pp. 65
"...proliferation of images becaome a characteristic of modern social organization."
"Commodities and services needed to be made more self-consciously visual in order to advertise and market them to a wide, anonymous audience." pp. 65 In discussion of Victorian era. In addition to "new visual technologies such as film, animation and photography.
No clear distinction between literary era and visual era.
"all media are hybrid, 'impure'." "They do not merely engage one expression—visual, tectual, aural, material—but are dissolved within their mediatory contexts. (One cannot talk of the Internet in terms of either visual or textual cultlure but, perhaps, as screen culture.)"
Essentialist view that the visual is the medium of our times ot a Complex view where the visual is intrinsic and important social and cultural expression.
Visual Culture "disembodies images from their primary contexts of encounter. Adverts or photos are quite lieterally cut out of newspapers and magazines for analysis" which removes them from the very culture and place which has given birth to them. Example would be Colour magazines advertising.
Martin Jay provides three steps for visual analysis of renassaince painting.
1. Static position of viewer
2. obvservational empiricism revels in surface detail
3. viewer must piece objects together into narrative
This is useful for exploring the beginnings of r adesign object and environment but doesn't take into account it's place within cultlure.
Scott Lash notes, "Culture is now three-dimensional, as much tactile as visual or textual, all around us and injabityed, lived in rather than encountered on a separate realms as a representation." — cultlure encompasses all. And architectonic perspective. Design is "more than just the creatiuon of visual artifacts to be used or "read." It is also about structuring of suystems of enouncter within the visual and material world." pp. 67
"Systems are orchestrated and routinized for maximum perceived efficiency, leaving the consumer as a passive participant." Also the term"the tourist gaze" which accepts "tourism as a form of spectacular consumption in which sites are arranged for visual pleasure. Tourist spaces are produced and viewed as an alien 'other'".
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