MAKE

Learn by making. You'll be able to experiment with making comics, digital photography, video, collage, animation, or whatever medium you choose. We focus on process, not perfection. This is a chance to stretch outside your usual creative form.

 

UNDERSTAND

Visual culture refers to what has traditionally been thought of as the fine arts (like painting and sculpture) as well as more popular forms such as comics, advertising, photography, television, film, animation, decorative arts, video, installations, performance art, music video, video games, and digital and new media art.

SEE

Class meets frequently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We see the works in the museum and consider how the museum frames our experiences of them. We also sketch and draw at the MFA and in class to look more closely and see more fully.

 

 

APPROACH

This course explores multiple approaches to visual culture from the perspectives of art history, cultural studies, media studies, aesthetics, art practice, technology, and design.

 

 

LVIS 333:

 

Approaches to

 

visual culture

professor lori landay

If you want to experiment with making and understanding visual culture, this course is for you. Visual culture refers to what has traditionally been thought of as the fine arts as well as more popular forms such as comics, advertising, photography, television, film, animation, decorative arts, video, installations, performance art, music video, and digital and new media art.  This course approaches visual culture from the perspectives of art history, cultural studies, media studies, aesthetics, expression theory, cognitive theory, technology, art practice, multi- and inter-disciplinary art, and design. 

Students make creative projects in the medium of their choice (such as comics, photography, drawing, collage, video, sculpture, or animation), and critique their own and classmates’ projects.

Students will make weekly entries in a Sketchbook that respond visually to ideas encountered in class.

Class meets frequently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Always bring your sketchbooks to the MFA, so we can do "See by Drawing" activities.

FALL 2017: SPECIAL FOCUS: The Body & 3D Space

Required Books

Understanding Comics

Ways of Seeing

I Love Lucy

Canson Mix Media Pad

LORI LANDAY

  • Lori Landay is Professor of Cultural Studies at Berklee College of Music. She teaches Visual Culture and Interactive Media. More info: lorilanday.com

  • Lori's recent focus is on virtual reality, augmented reality, and cultural reality. Work she began in her 2015-16 sabbatical project on animation and automation, The Animated Self expanded her previous work on virtual worlds, avatars, interactive media experiences that loop actual and digital artifacts (ShadowLoop interactive art installation), inquiry into seeming and being (NEH Enduring Questions Grant for "What Is Being?" 2010-12), and scholarship on contemporary culture (LEGO, Minecraft, gender and comedy).