vcc midterm Flashcards

Question

Sign (signifier)

Answer 1

- signifier (sound, written word or image that represents) - signified (the concept evoked by the signifier)

Answer 2

- shape of trees

Answer 3

- The signifier denotes - First-level analysis - Literal Example: - A group of forests in a meadow with a patch of dead trees on the lower right of the image

Answer 4

- Cultural or emotional association that a visual carries - Subjectively understood by people who share the same cultural code - Deforestation is destroying the Earth and contributing to climate change

Answer 5

as used by Roland Barthes: - cultural values and beliefs that allow the connotative meaning to appear denotative - hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings appear universal - Universal greatness of French nationals - Without discrimination, all subjects of the French Empire serve the nation faithfully

Answer 6

resemble their objects in some way

Answer 7

bear no clear relationship to their objects

Answer 8

coexisted with their objects in the same place at some time

Answer 9

shared set of values & beliefs where people live out their complex relations to many social networks - produced & affirmed through social institutions in a given society - often appear to be natural or given aspects of everyday life, like Barthes’s myth - reproduced and created by images Can include wide-ranging concepts such as: * Nationality * Good and evil * Heterosexuality * Freedom * Family

Answer 10

image refers to something (or someone) outside of its individual components & has great symbolic meaning for many - conveys iconic meaning across many different contexts (often through simplicity) - circulates through visual networks - reworks aspects of original into new images - believed to hold universal meaning (though actually always contextual)

Answer 11

- distortion of reality created by capitalism - those who owned the means of production also controlled the ideas and viewpoints circulated in society - Came from wanting to understand why the oppressed many did not rise up against the powerful few - His view of ideology is about domination - His view of ideology is no longer considered valid

Answer 12

- Ideology is constantly negotiated by different groups - Originated the idea of cultural hegemony - Dominant ideologies appear as “common sense” - Dominant ideologies are always in tension with other forces and therefore always changing - Ideas became influential in visual and media studies in the 1970s and 80s

Answer 13

- Ideology is what connects human unconscious to external reality - Wrote that without ideology, humans would have no way of thinking about or understanding reality - Representation is a vehicle for ideology - Related to theory of “interpellation” - sometimes critiqued as not leaving room for individual choice

Answer 14

A process where the dominant group exercises ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ throughout society by winning the ‘consent’ from people - No longer tied to the means of production - Explains the way in which the domination of a power group in modern capitalist societies is secured - Requires complicity from classes that are not dominant - Also explains how the dominant order can be challenged and contested through popular resistance directed in various cultural forms and practice -Gave rise to the theory of counter hegemony: - Movements or subversive cultural elements that emerge to question the status quo

Answer 15

- interpretation and valuation of images depends on constantly fluctuating cultural codes. - Counter to Aesthetics: branch of philosophy concerned with judgments of beauty - “good” taste entails cultural education about value - Connoisseur: someone with educated taste - Cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu): cultural knowledge that allows for social advantages - originally understood to “trickle down” from upper, educated classes - cultural values and tastes move in variety of directions

Answer 16

awarded monetary, social, and political value in particular social contexts

Answer 17

- authenticity and uniqueness - reproducibility and role in popular culture - previous ownership (little to do with artist)

Answer 18

- responsible for valuing of art works - communicate value through display - shape looking practices

Answer 19

- Institutions enact power passively through education, cultivation of taste, and daily routines - Viewers can be encouraged to see the politics of the museum itself

Answer 20

-Emergence of mass markets and audiences, national media cultures - Workers found escape in new “leisure culture” - factories dangerous, apartments cramped - many consuming same products - Skyscrapers built as monuments to progress and capital, dominated urban skyline

Answer 21

The available ways of being/conceptualization of the self

Answer 22

Cartesian Dualism, named after René Descartes - basis of the Enlightenment notion of the individual with agency that is capable of acting upon the world - Mind/Body divide

Answer 23

Psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud - how the mind works that emphasizes the role of the unconscious and desire Capitalist alienation, theorized by Karl Marx - social relations in Capitalist societies alienate individuals from their full potential

Answer 24

Mirror stage, theorized by Jacques Lacan - phase of development where the infant first experiences a sense of alienation Foucault’s theory of power - Power is not made by individuals, but through them in discourse, which is an institution’s rules and concepts

Answer 25

theorized by Jacques Lacan - Psychoanalysis: understanding spectatorship & unconscious processes supporting looking practices - gaze of the other degrades ‘my’ being-for-oneself and transforms it into a being-for-others - Shows viewer’s on trend in a social and contextual field of looks, objects, and other sensory information - Made famous in cinema studies - 3 male gazes - 1 the way the camera looks in any filmed situation is voyeuristic, most films are made by men -2, gaze of men within a particular film, is structured making women appear as objects; - 3, gaze of the actual male spectator - Scholars working on race, ethnicity, class, and queer theory complicated Mulvey’s work by looking at an intersectional gaze.

Answer 26

made by Jeremy Bentham as a proposal for model prison architecture - Central observation tower inside circular building means all prisoners can be fully and constantly seen by prisoner guards - complete lack of privacy would enforce standards of behaviour - Describes modern social subjects’ regulation of their own behavior

Answer 27

describe consciousness as a power struggle - some theorists described alienation in late modernity - Frantz Fanon: 1952 Black Skin, White Masks - From Postcolonial theory: a body of scholarship that analyzes how Western discourses have constituted the human subjects of non-Western locations as lacking agency or voice

Answer 28

an academic discipline in the West - The term was transformed by Edward Said in his book title of a book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978) - Argues that Orientalism (the academic discipline) aided imperial domination - West created an “Other” through its cultural representations of Islamic civilizations - This “Other” is often depicted as backward, irrational, sexually deviant, menacing, etc

Answer 29

- in given time and place subject to contestation, often levied powerfully in visual expression of political movements - Sometimes tied to ethical ideas about accuracy

Answer 30

a 19th-century style documenting true conditions of immigrants and working class to prompt social reform

Answer 31

- geometric abstraction that represented changing social life of modernizing Soviet state - valued industrial materials took multiple forms in public spaces rejected by Stalin as too abstract for majority of populace

Answer 32

- classical pictorialist realism used in USSR, promote government ideologies - citizens seen as happy in cheerful colour palettes - other views and styles seen as disservice to state despite danger Constructivists continued their practices

Answer 33

French film style influenced by Surrealism - dramatized social conditions of working class, often by focusing on tragic antiheroes

Answer 34

Italian film style that captured untrained actors in urban ghettoes of Rome on grainy, black-and-white film

Answer 35

Michel Foucault’s Oder of Things (1966) - There can only be one episteme at a given time - Not a body of knowledge itself; rather, the set of conditions that make knowledge possible - “everyday reality” is itself grounded upon a dominant episteme

Answer 36

- signifier of ‘the real’ across different periods - suggesting physical depth not inherently more realist approach to organizing image field - often single, fixed spectator position - signifying scientific progress

Answer 37

Filippo Brunelleschi: picture as window where sight is organized - first used instruments to measure distances accurately Leon Battista Alberti: linear perspective as geometric system - perspective derived from nature itself Rationalism: knowledge of world from reason space knowable through measuring with tools that correct human perception perspective system displaces individual with mechanical device Cartesian space: a physical, three-dimensional space that can be mathematically measured

Answer 38

Techniques for rendering space advanced at different pace from those for rendering body as dimensional - Potentially distorting or deceptive aspects of viewing systems have been understood differently over time

Answer 39

technique used to make the body appear to recede in space

Answer 40

- affirms empiricism’s basic tenets - found in artists’ studios as drawing instrument

Answer 41

- Human vision more complex than world organized around system of lines - eyes in constant motion when we look sight is composite of different views and glances - Many modern artists working after invention of photography defied perspective - Impressionism: painting style that depicts same scene many times to evoke changes in light over time

Answer 42

- Many modern artists questioned organization around Cartesian subject as fixed center of pictorial world abstract expressionism: artistic style that records the artist’s emotions and physicality during painting process conceptual art: artistic practice in which concept is more important than visual product

Answer 43

- Many perspectives on a multiplicity of virtual worlds in the same screen Often emphasizes the phenomenological experience of the body “Player” connotes embodiment, interaction with active world beyond limited experience of looking

Answer 44

- Lacks visible horizon -Modular -Flattened -Virtual space: an electronically made space that resembles physical space but cannot be measured

Answer 45

Lines converge to vanishing points to the right and to the left, and objects in the image appear to move off toward points on either side of the horizon line

Answer 46

Receding horizontal planes perpendicular to the depth axis moving horizontally at different speeds to simulate the effect of watching something move along an open vista. The further a plane is away from the viewer, the more slowly it moves across the screen.

vcc midterm Flashcards

(70 cards)