Reflections on Practices of Looking

The Panopticon and Diorama compared to modern cinema:

The Panopticon, a building designed to illuminate what was happening in cells of a prison, was created to show the truth of what was happening without revealing the viewer. In opposition to the Panopticon, the Diorama was designed to create illusions for the viewer. In modern cinema these two concepts, though seemingly polar opposite in purpose, are combined to take the viewer to other worlds that maybe complete fiction of similar to life but yet are not actual reality. Yet the viewer in unseen by what is being viewed, they are free to move about and comment without the fear of being judged or seen. So although the modern cinema is like the Panopticon in that the viewer in unseen by the viewed, it is more like the Diorama because what is being viewed is not reality. What is being viewed is a recording, and what was recorded was chosen by someone else.



Panoramas and the patrons of today:

Preceding the Diorama and introduced to the public just after the Panopticon was theorized, the Panorama was a 360-degree painting intended to make the viewer feel displaced. It was a popular form of entertainment, particularly for those who couldn’t afford to travel. A patron of a panorama could walk around and view as many different vantages as he desired, but over time, as forms of entertainment became more realistic, viewers were constrained to seats. There is even less demand on the viewer from a mental standpoint, because the more real something appears, the less work the brain has to do to suspend its disbelief.

With vast improvements to special effects, movies have constantly raised the bar of realism over recent years. Watch a movie from the 1950’s like Brigadoon or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and it’s painfully obvious that those mountains or heather-covered heaths are painted on a backdrop just meters from the actors. Some thirty years later, a movie-goer can believe without a visual doubt that those actors are on the Titanic or in World War Two. Yet with all this believability, there is a desire in some visual culture consumers to see something that the mind is less ready to accept.

For example, Disney’s first full-length animated feature in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is still recognized as one of the hundred greatest American films of all time. It was wildly successful, and even though it is now possible to reach new heights of realism with computer animation, there is still a large fan base for traditional animation, so obvious in its artificiality.

It is also interesting to note a certain “artistic” trend to major motion pictures, a bit of artificial flair. This is evident from films like the Matrix, The Cell, Kill Bill, Sin City... The list goes on. The reception of these movies generally is proof that people are looking for the fantastic, the deliberately deceitful. After all, it’s entertainment, pure and simple--it’s just $11.95 now instead of a tuppence.

Extra link: Stephen Wiltshire drawns a panorama of Rome from memory

- Sydne Smith, Chelsea Schulz

new blog Jeremy Jeresky

In the last class ( Mon 24 Sep ) of vis cult we talked about an aspect of veiwing, speceficaly of cinema, or cinematic elements, which envolve being a passive entity. Essentialy, we come into a movie theater and watch images within a narrative context that do not watch back. Pretty much the same thing as watching TV. Which is something I am actually suprised we didnt talk about in our last class. TV viewing is way more prolific and way more at arms legnth than cinema. In a way, it is alot more immediate in that we can turn it on and off, or flip to any channel of our choosing. We have a lot more control of when and what we decide to see.
So Does that make us passive viewers? or just passive individuals?

And beyond these questions, what is a passive viewer? What does it mean to be passive in the viewing context ? Is it a nessesarily negative thing?
I mean, lets face it, most of us spend our days either at work or at school, either way, for the most part, during the day we bust our ass! we work, we do stuff, we have to be on! yo! So, when we choose to entertain ourselves via TV or the movies, I would think for the most part, we do not want to not think too much about what we are seeing, and be, just that, Entertained.

Is viewer passitivitey within this context a negative thing? I mean, it's just spare down time. Entertainment, a suspention of disbelief for a moment in our work a day world of stress and deadlinment.

Yet, paradoxally, what we see on TV or the movies are esentially diarythmic, highly constructed conventions relegated by those with power. Capitals of industry or media conglomerates to be exact. From Friends to Seinfield to Hockey night in Canada, these programs are onTV, or movies like Shriek and Harry Potter serve a higher purpose to be sure.

Distraction and entrapment!

Fun and entertaining nontheless, But mabey too captivating.

Mabey it is time to relevate our discussion into ways that we can use these mechanisims to look into our own condition of passive complacency? If such a condition even does exist.

Visual culture in the news, pt. I

Here are a few recent news stories I've come across this week relating to visual culture:

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cologne (Köln), Cardinal Joachim Meisner, recently sparked controversy when he said (in a sermon on the inauguration of a new museum housing the art collection of Cologne's Catholic archdiocese) that when art becomes estranged from worship, culture becomes 'degenerate.'
The scandal lies not so much in the surface sentiment expressed, but by the Archbishop's choice of words, 'degenerate,' German 'entartete' : the exact term used by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime to smear modern art (Expressionism and Dadaism, in particular) as anti-German, bolshevik, Jewish, and dangerous, as in the 1937 exhibition of modern art organized by the Nazis in Munich under the title Entartete Kunst (or degenerate art)... See the BBC article here.

Meanwhile, in a kind of repeat of last year's protests and calls for assassination over the publication of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq publically called for the murder of a Swedish cartoonist who published a cartoon in a Swedish newspaper depicting Muhammad with a dog's body. A reward of $100,000 is offered to anyone who undertaking to kill the cartoonist. See the CBC article here.

And, closer to home, a controversy surrounding the announcement last week that Muslim women wearing the veil (niqab, burqa) would not be required to remove it to show their faces at federal polling stations, brought to light some interesting questions about identity and visibility.

Welcome!

This blog is a collective work-in-progress by the students and instructor of SOSC.200A at the Alberta College of Art + Design, Fall 2007. In addition to required posts related to course readings and content, students are encouraged to comment on the material found here, and to post materials related more broadly to topics and issues in Visual Culture. Enjoy...!