AHT 213 Art and Ideas: Exploring Vision
This course has two components, one empirical and the other historical/cultural. The empirical section treats notions of blindness and internal vision: what does it mean not to see? How are seeing and touch interrelated? How can art be communicated to the blind? Do we have an optical unconscious? The historical sections depart from the question if vision is simply what the external world imprints on our retina or if it is a historical/cultural construct? Is it purely physiological or can we speak of a history or histories of the eye? How do culture, science, and ethnicity influence what we see and how we see it? Keeping these questions in mind, the course studies aspects of perception in the arts from a historical point of view: the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance, the invention of the Baroque theater, gender and gaze in modernity, optical instruments in the Enlightenment as precursors for photography and film, and contemporary technologies, such as AR, VR, and digital manipulation programs. The course addresses all aspects and approaches of the Art Histories, Ecologies, and Industries major.