visual journal assignments

SOSC 200
Visual Journal Assignments - Visual Journal due Dec. 3/07

Assignment 1: Showing Seeing

In his essay “Showing Seeing: A critique of visual culture,” (in the Visual Culture Reader), WJT Mitchell describes an experiment he calls ‘showing seeing.” The problem is this: you are an ethnographer from a culture that has no concept of the visual field, or of visual culture (no familiarity with color, line, eye contact, cosmetics, fashion, facial expressions, mirrors, glasses, voyeurism, pornography, television, photography, painting, film, and other ‘visual media,’ etc…). Having spent a number of years in our culture, you are now returning to your own culture and are faced with the task of presenting the idea of ‘seeing’ to your fellow citizens.

In approximately 1 typed page, describe how you would ‘show seeing’ – how would you describe the visual field and its importance in our culture, to someone who had no concept of a ‘visual culture’? For the purposes of the assignment, you can assume your audience has been fitted with prosthetic optical devices that allow them to see you. What object, artifact, work of visual culture would you choose to support your argument? Why? Include any relevant images in your report.



Assignment 2: Exercise in Voyeurism

Conduct an experiment in voyeurism by going to a public space (the bar, the cinema, the mall, etc.), and exercise your own voyeuristic tendencies by actively looking at the public, noticing how they may or may not return your gaze. Or, conduct some observation of the nature of the gaze in any other way of your choosing; how do looking and the gaze operate in public space? Are some spaces more or less conducive to the gaze than others?
Reflect on your experiment and conclusions in approximately 1 page.



Assignment 3: Of Other Spaces

In “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault describes what he terms “heterotopias”: real spaces where the typical hierarchical classifications of space – family, social, commercial, leisure, public, private – begin to break down. Such spaces, which include the prison, the hospital, the brothel, the cemetery, colonies, hotels, ships, trains, sacred spaces, and so on, are “in relation with all other sites,” but are also ‘different’ or ‘other’ sites, both within and outside of the social and spatial contexts in which they are found.

The BDGBLG interview with Michael Cook, “Drains of Canada,” describes a practice of urban archaeology, ‘draining.’ That is, explorations of the subterranean infrastructure of drainage systems, waterways, sewers and utility tunnels – “spaces that exist at the boundaries of modern control…debris left by economic transition, evidence of the transient nature of our place upon this earth.”

For your visual journal, complete one of the following assignments:

1. In approximately 1-2 pages, describe a space personally known to you. Using Foucault’s five principles of heterotopia, explain how this site is heterotopic: to what extent and in what ways does it conform to or deviate from his notions of heterotopia?

2. Undertake an urban exploration of your own. This can take any form (i.e., not necessarily draining). Attempt to find an ‘other’ space within (below, behind) the spatial fabric of the city. Discuss your experience/findings/conclusions in 1-2 pages.



Assignment 4: (Un)Natural Bodies

In our discussions of cosmetic (or ‘fashion’) surgery, body modification, and the body in general as a site of visual presentation and identity, we continue to come up against the idea of the ‘natural’ (or ‘normal’) body, its parameters and practices. Drawing on any combination of course readings and films, class discussion, popular visual culture, or personal experience, consider the value, or danger, in maintaining a concept of the ‘natural’ body against which other bodies might be measured. Is there such a thing as the natural body? What would this be? What might be gained (or lost) by abandoning this concept? Your reflection should be roughly 1 page, apart from any images you might include.



Assignment 5: Cultures on Display

Our readings on race and globalization brought up questions concerning the nature of displaying or exhibiting culture: from the use of specific cultural imagery in advertising, movies, and so on., to artists appropriating imagery or styles from specific cultures in their work (your own work?), to aspects of fashion and bodily ornament (tattoos taken from other cultures, haute couture borrowings from non-western fashion.), to the body and its markers (skin pigmentation, ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ bodily features) as a site of cultural display, to practices of collecting and display in museums, to the movement of cultural trends from one site to another (hip-hop moving from black urban culture to white suburban culture, etc.).

In approximately one page, examine one such case – be specific – and reflect on the ways in which it puts culture ‘on display,’ and how the context changes, or produces, meaning.