VISCR606 GE: Sites

Ever-increasing globalization brings with it the sedimentation of culture into specific places. This course investigates how place and placelessness, site and nonsite shape culture and cultural identity in the work of artists, architects, and designers. How do complex institutional, geographic, and spatial contexts, boundaries, and forces organize the display of images and their viewing? How are sites inflected by travel, tourism, migration, displacement, and capital flow into often messy and contradictory, yet vibrant, landscapes? This course will raise broach important questions about how we perceive and live within our contemporary built realm: from where do we look at the world (space/place,) who are we when we are looking into the world (subjectivity,) and at what do we look when we view the world (landscape)? The study of visual culture does not simply encompass how and what we view, but we must also factor into our understanding the places in which we dwell such as tract houses, bookshops, and websites and the spaces through which we move such as air terminals, freeways, and T3 lines. We must take into account the many different phenomena affecting our physical context and perceptual capacity, these would include tourism, migration, and globalization - namely the movement of goods, peoples, and ideas across space. These conditions and others flood our lives with powerful, ideologically charged visual imagery. This course will review contemporary insights on our visual landscape offered by a range of disciplines: cultural studies, architectural theory, art history, geography, film studies, technology studies, planning, and philosophy. Core theorists and scholars include Henri Lefebvre, Karl Marx, Elizabeth Grosz, W.J.T. Mitchell, Rosalyn Deutsche, Gilles Deleuze and Jacque Lacan. We will also review the "siting" of these theories by considering how architecture, art, film, and new media explore these same themes. This seminar will be run as a series of discussions, and therefore all students are responsible for completing all reading assignments. These discussions will be jumpstarted by the observations of student presenters each week and augmented by commentary from the professor. In addition to the presentation, students will be required to submit short reviews analyzing some key aspect of a reading or readings assigned for the week. Students will also be required to turn in a long paper that will expand on the research related to seminars themes.