General Information
Course Description
9528 - A Cultural History of Vision - The act of seeing appears to us effortless, immediate, and primitive in all its aspects. The knowledge and control of its links to our anatomy and physiology, at least until very recent times, satisfied all we needed to know about this tool so powerful in selection and survival. But very simple questions have to be answered in order to catch the "meaning" of this function. What is the difference between seeing and looking? Which are the priorities in the act of seeing? What does recognition really mean, and, more cogently, how has vision had an impact on the lexicon, the grammar, the syntax, of our verbal communication? On our writing conventions, styles, metaphorical contents? A very rich historical hunting territory is the domain of the images produced by us during the last twenty thousand years: what is their link to the act of vision? Has vision "changed" during these millennia or has it remained "exactly" the same?
Pandora's box is open: the colors and the music, architecture and visual illusions, drawing and binocularity, poetry and blindness, sculpture and shadows, photography and prosody, theatre and artificial illumination – and more.
