First Post: Introduction to Visual Studies

Hi, this is the first of my OCA Learning Log. This is the first time I have ever done anything like this, so I am very excited!

I am taking part in the distance learning course Visual Studies 1: Understanding Visual Culture. I feel an understanding of visual culture will give me a deeper understanding of Film Studies and the course will be a springboard for further study and research.

I have just finished reading the course material and believe my learning log is a place where I record and critically reflect on what I have learned. Hopefully, through carefully planning, I will structure my evidence and this will show a clear development throughout the course.

Yesterday (10/09/10) I emailed my tutor who suggested to set up a blog. I understand, from his attachment of the “Welcome” letter, that I should send in my assignment first assignment in 6-8 weeks. This works out as roughly one project a week.

At the moment I am sourcing copies of: Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas 1900-2000 (ed. Charles Harrison, Paul J. Wood); Art History (Basics) (Grant Pooke, Diana Newall); Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Raymond Williams). I am also going to have a look through my own collection for relevant texts.

My goal for next week is to complete “Project 1: Modernist Art: The critic speaks”.

I also have a deep interest Film Studies. I am using this year to recover my health (I am currently re-applying for Univeristy) and I aim to develop my passion for film through private academic study, especially surrounding the areas of aesthetics and film history. I have an interest in the work of Ken Russell, Sergei Eisenstein, Douglas Sirk and Josef Von Sternberg.

It’s interesting that on the September 25th I begin an Open Studies Module, Introduction to Film and Cinema Studies, with the University of Warwick. It would be nice to see if these two courses
complement each other.

Structure of the OCA course

For the causal viewer of my blog, here are the contents of Visual Studies 1: Understanding Visual Culture with the Open College of Arts. It is so you are able to understand the basic structure of the course and have insight on where I am along it.

Part one: Introducing visual studies

Project 1: Modernist art: the critic speaks

Project 2: Fetishising the object of your eye

Project 3: Base and superstructure

Project 4: Ideology and interpellation

Project 5: Art as commodity

Project 6: Photography: the new reality

Project 7: The Flanneur

Assignment 1: The interaction of media

Part two: Ways of seeing

Project 8: The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Project 9: Barbarous taste

Project 10: The society of the spectacle

Project 11: The thorny subject of taste

Assignment 2: The displaced image

Part three: Of signs and symbols

Project 12: Rhetoric of the image

Project 13: Mini-project on structuralist analysis

Project 14: Myth is a type of speech

Project 15: Author? What author?

Project 16: Deconstruction

Assignment 3: Decoding advertisements

Part four: Looking and subjectivity

Project 17: Freud, Oedipus and castration

Project 18: The mirror phase

Project 19: Looking, observation or surveillance?

Project 20: Gendering the gaze

Project 21: Images of woman

Project 22: Two fried eggs and a kebab

Project 23: Black

Project 24: White

Assignment 4: Visualising the ‘other’

Part five: The concept of reality

Project 25: Illusion only is sacred, truth profane

Project 26: Ecclesiastes misquoted

Project 27: Being and its semblance

Project 28: Lacan’s prose is notoriously remote

Project 29: Buffy the Freudian

Assignment 5: I’m a visual studies student; get me out of here