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Seeing Visual Culture - Coggle Diagram

- - - - “In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is —as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.”
      - “Practical exercises demonstrate through color deception (illusion) the relativity and instability of color. And experience teaches that in visual perception there is a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect.”
        The exercises of making one color look like two and two colors look like one show that colors are deceiving. One color can look different behind two different backgrounds. In some situations, two colors can start looking like the same color. It is hard to decipher what is the true color. Colors can be misleading
    - - "The shadow was master now, and the master became the shadow."
        This is a cautionary tale about a man who befriends his shadow, and his shadow deceives and betrays him. The shadow takes over his life.
        The shadow represents the darkness and deceptiveness in each person. A shadow is a distortion of the actual person. If one lets its shadow or soul wander, something bad will happen. One will loose control of one's life.
    - - “For the most part, Frege, too, used color sensations as an obvious example of subjective mind -- of mental representations that notoriously varied from person to person, like pain” (281).
        Color is relative and subjective. If you ask a group of people to point out something red, everyone's answers will be different. Everyone has their own perception, and everyone sees colors differently. Colors can be deemed deceptive because for each color name, there is no one true color. Each person believes that a different hue of red represent the color red. There isn't one shared definition.
    - - “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determined the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, it unreliability.”
        The Santa Ana winds are known to bring about supernatural occurrences. It brings about dangerously strong winds and fires. People start feeling uneasy due to these winds. Didion explains how anxiety and depression increases during these times. There is a loss of control when these winds pass Los Angeles.
    - - Hans Blumenberg, “Light as Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by D. M. Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30–54.
        
        “Light can be a directed beam, a guiding beacon in the dark, and advancing dethronement of darkness, but also a dazzling superabundance, as well as an indefinite, omnipresent brightness containing all: ‘letting-appear’ that does not itself appear, the inaccessible accessibility of things”(Blumenberg 31).
        Light is supposed to illuminate and make things seen. Blumenberg claims light is a metaphor for truth. Light reveals objects to the world, and it makes everything clear. Light is also associated with goodness in most cultures. There is also a co-dependence of light and darkness. Light is known to overpower the darkness. It intrudes dark spaces. I think there is a superiority of light over darkness.
      - Le Corbussier, “A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin,” in Color, 82-84.
        
        “The white of whitewash is absolute, everything stands out from it and it is recorded absolutely, black on white, it is honest and dependable” (83).
        Whitewash is seen as clean, pure, and truthful. White makes dirt visible. White makes things perfect. White is also associated with intelligence.
  - - - “The perspective of the northeastern coast of Honshu being pulverized and the sight, for hundreds of miles, of towns and villages being engulfed, devastated, and washed away may remain engraved in our memories, but what turns out to be the most perturbing are the barely visible details on the side, in the margins of media coverage and the largely invisible (or not-yet-not-fully-becoming-visible) scope and consequences of nuclear threat” (Minh-ha 133).
        In the bird's eye view picture of the 2011 tsunami hitting Japan, the viewer knows more than the people on the sidelines of the image. These are boundary events where cameras have freeze a moment before the catastrophe has truly struck; it feels like the catastrophe never ends.
    - - Censorship is all about who has control of the images being shown to the public. In China, China’s communist party cut out stories/references to the Dalai Lama, so based on the cut outs Tibetans knew how much the papers were talking about the Dalai Lama. This action gave more power to the absent story.
    - - The empty chair and absence becomes an act of political resistance.
- - - - Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
        
        “The shoes I am wearing at the moment should be sufficient to walk me out of life”(Jarman 123).
        This film is an image of a blue rectangle with a narration of Jarman's losing battle to AIDS. He doesn't rely on images or a story to describe this experience because he wants us to truly understand how the experience felt. When I watched the movie, the absence of images made me feel uncomfortable. It made me suffer a little. I was waiting for the screen to change like Jarman is waiting for his death. Jarman didn't show images of people suffering from AIDS because he did not want the viewers to separate themselves from the victims. He wanted to represent an invisible illness. Blue represents lingering, waiting, and remaining. The blue is essentially washing, cleaning, and erasing the dead. People who died from AIDS in Jarman's time were not memorialized. There were so many layers of deaths piled on top of each other that the actual people essentially disappeared. Jarman is only free from the never ending waiting game when he dies.
      - Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” excerpted in Color (MIT, 2008), 37-38.
        
        “It is that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?"(38).
        White is not a color; white reflects light. Melville describes white as never-ending, and he uses violent language to describe white. It is like a hidden danger because no one expects white to be harmful.
        
        “Though in many natural objects, whiteness refining enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognized a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title [...] above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion [...] and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe" (37). White is known to make things more beautiful. It is associated with purity and royalty. There is a superiority associated with white. However, Melville claims there is something deceptive about white. He associates white with terror.
      - Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztov Kieslowski, 1993) (On Kanopy)
        
        This film follows Julie's journey as she mourns for her late husband and daughter. The images of blue in the film like the lollipop, the pool, the notes on the unfinished score, and the character of Julie represent Julie's lacerating pain and suffering. She is stuck in her sadness, and she cannot let the loss go. The swimming pool becomes her place of refuge and solitary. She can experience her sadness in peace; she has emotional liberty here.
      - Carol Mavor, excerpt from Blue Mythologies (Duke University Press, 2012)
        
        "Julie claims she does not want to hold onto anything. But after swallowing Anna's lollipop, after making this blue tomb for her daughter inside herself, she decides to take with her the curious mobile composed of blue glass crystals that once hung below the light of her daughter's blue bedroom"(136).
        Julie holds onto her sadness and entraps the blue within her. She ingest her daughter and buries her within herself. Julie keeps going back to this loss by holding on to certain objects. The sadness is never ending.
    - - “It’s as if someone is stabbing her in the forehead. She immediately puts her hands over her eyes, and the sensation vanishes. “That’s the light!” they tell her. ‘That’s seeing!’ ‘So that explains it,’ she thinks. If these people are walking around constantly bombarded by this sensation, no wonder they’re so strange.”
        This blind woman got a surgery done to give her the ability to see. When she does see, she feels suffocated and trapped by sight. The light is too much for her because she has lived in darkness for so long. Her vision is overexposed. The doctors expect her to enjoy seeing because seeing is the norm. However, it is very hard for her to adjust.
- - - - David Batchelor, “Whitescapes,” in Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), 9-20.
        
        "Whiteness is woven into the fabric of Culture. The Bible, again: 'Though you sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow'"(19).
        White symbolizes the virtue of purity and cleanliness. White covers things to make it opaque. It also has the power to pull back and strip down.
      - Derek Jarman, “Into the Blue,” from Chroma: A Book of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 103-124.
        
        "Blue protects white from innocence/ Blue drags black with it/ Blue is darkness made visible"(114).
        Jarman uses a collection of short phrases to describe different uses and meanings of the color blue. He claims that blue has no boundaries. Blue makes white darker, and blue makes black lighter. It reverses the effects of each color, and it taints their original meanings.
      - Hilaria Loyo, “Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Femininity, and Stardom” in Questions of Colour in Cinema, ed. Wendy Everett (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 179-196.
        
        "Colour as a visible physical characteristic has a range of symbolic connotations but it has also been used to signal racial difference.These senses of colour (hue, skin, symbol) interrelate in particularly unstable ways in the case of 'white'" (179).
        Loyo actually claims that racial identities are masks and displays. Therefore, if you can put on whiteness, white purity is just something exterior. Whiteness is established against blackness to prove whiteness is superior.
      - Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings (1951)
        
        This is a series of canvases painted entirely white. They are intended to be pure, pristine white surfaces. On these surfaces, we are supposed to detect the changes in light and the effects of shadows.
    - - The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, 1939)
        
        Dorothy dreams of a world “somewhere over the rainbow”, and she lands up falling into this world of color. There is a relationship between color and fantasy/dreams. Color creates this magical world that could never exist in real life. The redness of the ruby red slippers makes us believe that it is magical. Color is also associated with danger. For example, the color red is deceptive. Dorothy is drawn by the red apples on the tree, which take her off her path. Then, the tree starts violently throwing apples at her. Dorothy and her friends fall into a field of red poppies, and Glinda saves them by making it snow. The whiteness of the snow saves them from color. At the end, Dorothy returns to her black and white home, and it seems like everything returns back to normal. Black and white is safe and normal.
    - - Blonde Venus (dir. Joseph von Sternberg, 1932)
        
        This film follows Helen Faraday's rises and falls in her roles as a housewife, cabaret singer, and prostitute. Racial identities are masks and displays. In one scene, Faraday is in an ape costume, and then she emerges as a white African queen. She uses Blackness to become a star. This film forces us the see white and whiteness. It links whiteness with shining and fame. Her whiteness makes her superior.
  - - - "In my early adolescence, about 1940, I was told by a man whose responses I cared about that he did not like movies to be in color because that made them unrealistic" (90).
        It is interesting that people see movies with color as unrealistic because we see everything in color in real life. I would think it makes it more realistic. Black and white movies were considered the norm back then. They had some superiority, and people felt that they made films more dramatic.
    - - The colourless multi-colouredeness of whiteness secures white power by making it hard, especially for white people and their media, to ‘see’ whiteness. This, of course, also makes it hard to analyse. It is the way that black people are marked as black (are not just ‘people’) in representation that has made it relatively easy to analyse their representation, whereas white people - not there as a category and everywhere everything as a fact - are difficult, if not impossible, to analyse qua white” (459).
        White has become the norm. It is everything, so people have never tried to analyze whiteness. However, people analyze blackness because it is considered different. White has some superiority because it is the norm.
  - - - “Black is what you get when all the primary colors are present equally in the mix. It is what you get when there is equality among colors” (5).
        Black is inclusive because it incorporates all of the primary colors equally. Morris notes how we tend to avoid black and darkness.
    - - "Eradicate bias from the training data, the logic goes, and algorithmic operations will be decidedly less racist than human-human interactions."
        Since visual culture has shifted to remove humans from machine to machine contact, there could be less bias. Humans do not have the chance to intervene and judge the data in their own way. This could take away white superiority. However, machine to machine contact also implicates privacy concerns. The meaning and ambiguity is lost in machine to machine visual culture.
    - - “What these blind authors have in common is an urgent desire to represent their experiences of blindness as something besides the absence of sight. Unlike the Hypothetical, they do not feel themselves to be deficient or partially–sighted people minus sight – but whole human beings who have learned to attend to their non-visual senses in different ways.” (187).
        Blindness is not about being able to see and being subordinate. There are many more aspects to blindness like how blind people are able to understand the world using their other senses. The blind can contribute to visual culture without sight. Since sight is the norm, people believe that one cannot do anything without it.
  - - - This is a piece of art that exemplifies the depth of blue. Simpson uses a process of layering to create a collage, and then she inks over the surface. The collage is filled with images of icebergs from old National Geographic magazines and images of Black women. These images represent how indigenous bodies in the north have been overlooked. White bodies have colonized the north. There are many interpretations and many layers to this piece. It also represents the weathering of female bodies. Black women have had to face inhospitable conditions, and living in America right now feels like living in a darkening era.
      - Othering
        
        David Batchelor, “Chromophobia,” in Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), 21-49.
        
        “The union of design and colour is necessary to beget painting just as is the union of man and women to beget mankind, but design must maintain its preponderance over colour. Otherwise painting speeds to its ruin: it will fall through colour just as mankind fell through Eve”(23).
        Color is deemed unnecessary and dangerous. It’s associated with feminine, non western, primitive, childish/infantile, vulgar, pathological(diseased), and queer. All of these groups are a part of the others. They are looked down upon, and they do not have much power in society. Batchelor believes that color should be contained and subordinated. It is inferior to white.
        
        Maria Popova, 19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion, The Atlantic (2012)
        
        “Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally.”
        Popova does not agree with Batchelor, and she claims that color is actually essential to how we experience the world. Colors have an effect on our emotions, which allows us the perceive different colors differently. For example, blue is seen as cold and gloomy while reddish-yellow is seen as warmth and power.
        
        Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita, “A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita,” Cabinet 24.
        
        “The representations of the battle with one’s shadow shows once more that in the West’s old symbolic culture, the shadow was the enemy and the other.”
        A shadow is seen as dark and ugly. It is a projection of a person's inner self. Shadows have a negative connotation. They are seen as the other and a projection of one's inner darkness.