Visual Arts

• Reading

  A particular form of visual practice; it is both an active and a creative process.
• Reading the Visual

  We draw on our general and specific knowledge, tastes, habits, and personal context.
• Visual Culture

  Its concentration is on the interface between images and viewers rather than on artists and works.
• Spectatorship

  Is the production of social media, especially digital media.
• Visual Matter

  It is considered beautiful or appealing.
• Semiotics

  It is an analytical approach and a research methodology that examines the use of what we called signs in society.
• Sign

  It is a basic unit of communication; it is just something that has some meaning for someone; means something, and not one thing..
• Text

  The name of a group of signs- a collection of signs organized in a particular way to make meaning.
• Context

  This means the environment in which a text occurs, and communication takes place.
• Planning and taking a photograph is like many human activities, an intensely visual experience, so is driving a car, where we are constantly visualizing and making sense of the space though which we are moving.
• Driving a car is relatively unreflective activity and even below the level of consciousness, while taking a photograph is usually conscious, deliberate and self-reflective.
• The visual arts embody physical, cultural, and spiritual aspects of life. They function as an important communication system through which meanings are construed in ways that are different from other language systems.
• Seeing's context exhibits focus on how the environment affects the way we see everything - even things as fundamental as color and brightness. How do you really tell whether something is dark or bright?
• Seeing as Conscious or Unconscious

  The techniques we will consider include

  1. Selection
  2. Omission and Frame
  3. Signification and Evaluation
  4. Arrangement
  5. Differentiation and Connection
  6. Focus
  7. Context
• It is important to keep in mind that there is no necessary temporal distinction among these techniques; they are part of the same process of making the visual, and one cannot be conceived without regard to the others.
• Selection and Omission


  The first and most important techniques of reading the visual as we pointed out that every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not seeing.
• The selection of these details (and the omission of the others) helps to constitute and make the visual.

  This is productive in two ways. Firstly, it suggests a set of relationships between, and stories about.

  Secondly, it establishes a (usually temporary) hierarchy regarding the potentially visible; that is to say, whoever took this photograph or observed this scene decided (at a conscious or unconscious level) that this content within this space at this time was interesting or worthy of attention.

  In other words, they made an evaluative decision.
• Acts of selection, omission, framing and evaluation produce a visual text.
• A 'visual text' is usually just a fancy way of saying 'an image' when it's related to English and analyzing texts. Basically, it means that whatever you're analyzing is a visual medium - think book covers, picture books, posters or still frames from movies!
• Visual texts are images or pictures that don't move. They may or may not have words that add to the meaning. You can analyze images, meaning you can look closely at images to figure out information.
• Attention and Focus


  These are the two important factors if we are attending closely or carefully to an event, person, thing or scene, we will create a text that is made up of what we can call contiguous elements..
• A few elements contribute to or facilitate the process of suturing the world to make a text:

  Colors

  Shape and movement

  Other elements (such as texture, distance, and light)
• Color


  help us to differentiate elements within our purview.
• A sign


  is anything that is treated as a meaningful part of the unit that is the text.
• The use of other texts to create new texts is called intertextuality, and the term for the text-types is genre.
• Genre


  can be defined as text types which structure meanings in certain wats, through their association with a particular social purpose and social context' (Schritao and Yell 2000:89)
• Genres then, like intertexts, do not provide us with special access to visual reality; rather, they are frames and references that we use to negotiate, edit, evaluate and in a sense read the visual as a series of texts.