VISST300 Visual Realities
June 2–July 3, 2008

The advent of virtual reality has called into question the status of photographic images and sense-based perceptions. Artists, who have long coopted new methods of perceiving and representing the world, have adopted virtual reality's immersive techniques in diverse ways. To place visual reality in historical context, this course examines how artists' images have adapted and responded to new concepts of individual perception and the senses. Since the championing of perspective as a new model of pictorial representation in the Italian Renaissance, images have addressed viewers in ways that have called attention to the viewer's own gaze. Although artists long re-created a position of individual observation, the creation of space was not always based on an objective model of vision. Maps allowed for new methods of representing space. The camera obscura in the seventeenth century, followed by new visual media in the nineteenth century, such as the panorama, stereoscope, photograph, and screen, transcended human perceptions, impacting the nature of visual representation yet again. This course provides the tools to discuss the emergence of new 'spaces' for observation that combine virtual and real points of view - from the history of the museum as a model of ordering visual artifacts to the internet and other recent visual databases. As well as writing two short papers, students present a final project on how computational and digitized images, from weather maps to video games to Google Earth, create new visual skills in a society defined by the proliferation of images.