GE 20 (2101)

Let’s Check
Activity 1. Now that you know the important concepts of reading the visual let us check
how well you understand the topic. Read the following sentences carefully. Write TRUE if
the statement is correct and FALSE if otherwise.
TRUE 1. Reading is both an active and creative process while reading the visual
draws our general and specific knowledge, tastes, habits, and supernatural
contexts.
FALSE 2. Visual culture is a field of study and a set of ways of understanding these
physical and social phenomena.
FALSE 3. Semiotics is an analytical approach and a research methodology that
examines the use of what we are called visuals in society.
TRUE 4. Text is a collection of signs organized in a particular way, too devoid of
the
meaning of visual art.
TRUE 5. Habitus is a set of values and dispositions gained from the cultural history
that stay with us across contexts.
FALSE 6. Cultural history and trajectories naturalize certain values and ideas, and
effectively determine worldviews.
TRUE 7. Cultural literacy presupposes an understanding of how to think and see in
a manner that is inappropriate to the imperatives and context of
artworks.
TRUE 8. Things needing to happen twice means that we sometimes fail to see the
significance of something until we are aware of what could call a pattern.
FALSE 9. If we attend closely or carefully to an event, person, thing, or scene, we
create a text made up of continuum elements.
TRUE 10. Genres are text types that structure meanings in a certain way through
their associations with a particular purpose and social context.
Let’s Analyze
Activity 1. Guided by the lessons on the introduction of reading visuals, it is best to note that you can
articulate the sub-topics in a manner of explanation. Now, it is your chance to explain the following
briefly.

1. Text and Genres

A text genre is a type of written or spoken discourse. Texts are classified into
genres on the basis of the intent of the communicator. Several features distinguish legal
texts from those with general language and other specialized texts. Avoiding the use of
standard textual norms in favor of ‘deviant’ options is not arbitrary. Still, it derives from
the main pragmatic principles typical of the legal field. The most important of these
principles concerns avoidance of ambiguity and precision of interpretation. A text genre
is a type of written or spoken discourse.

2. Text and Intertext

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. The
interconnection between similar or related works of literature reflects and influences an
audience's interpretation of the text. Intertextuality is the relation between texts that are
inflicted through quotations and allusion.

3. Seeing as Reading
Indeed, of merely replicating everything inside our line of sight, we actively
engage with our surroundings when we observe things. Every act of looking and seeing is
simultaneously an act of not seeing; some things must remain unseen in order for us to
focus on the things that are in front of us. The level to which we see, focus on, and pay
attention to the world around us is determined by the situation we are in.

4. New Technologies of Seeing

The technologies of vision encompass everything from the viewer's neurological
system to our embodied dispositions, the effect of the world on us, the effect of our own
habitus, the perspective from which we view an image, the lines, textures, and color of an
image, and the use of optical instruments to render the world in a specific way. By
offering frames, focus, and both monocular and linear viewpoints, these latter devices,
which have been produced from the ancient world to the twenty-first century, have
revolutionized the way we see and perceive ourselves and/in the world.
5. Tacit Seeing

Our eyes are always drawn to something new across the road. Our attention is
readily diverted by noises and other sensations and our moods and prejudices color what
we see. Tacit knowing, or tacit seeing, permits us to function while being continually
distracted. Our habitus (our upbringing, likes, proclivities, and dispositions), as well as
our physical aptitude and status, are all part of this "everything." The ability to see and
the methods in which we make meaning of what we see. However, what we choose to
look at and observe and where we focus has a different genesis, which is impacted by
individual likes and dispositions and the cultural framework in which our beliefs, values,
and habits are established.

6. Techniques of Seeing as Reading

We've focused on understanding how and why people see in certain ways, citing
habitus, cultural trajectory, and cultural literacy as the most influential variables in
influencing what we see. Selection, omission, and framing will be addressed, as well as
significance and evaluation, arrangement, distinction, connection, focus, and context. It's
vital to remember that there's no need for a chronological separation between these
techniques: they're all part of the same visual-making process, and one can't exist without
the others.

7. Seeing as Literacy
A set of vision skills that a person can acquire via seeing while also seeing and
integrating other sensory experiences. A set of skills that enables a visually literate
individual to recognize and interpret visual activities, objects, and/or symbols in the
environment, whether natural or man-made. We are able to communicate with others by
putting these skills to creative use.
8. Arresting Reality

As pictures completely preserve time and motion in a way that no other art form
can, the paused image is most typically linked with the field of photography. When
paintings and sculptures do not freeze time like photographs do, they successfully depict
the impression of movement. Paintings, sculptures, and woodblock prints, on the other
hand, rely on the viewer's eye movements to portray the illusion of movement. Our eyes
are constantly moving; time, too, is constantly moving, as are the physical objects on
which we stare. We treat the halted motion as a falsehood and act as if the movement in a
painting is ‘true' because the camera freezes a moment, reminding us that time is
arresting reality continually passing, yet we treat the arrested motion as a fraud and act as
if the movement in a painting is ‘true.'
 9. Seeing in context
Our cultural trajectories, literacies, and contexts are inextricably related to, and a
product of, what we see. This holds true even when we are witnessing something for the
first time. Given our cultural frames of knowledge, thinking, and seeing, a really "fresh
visual experience" is nearly hard to envision. Even if we were abducted by aliens and
transported to another planet, we would still see using the categories and manners of
judgment that characterize seeing in the context of habitus. This would happen partly
because humans create and use distinctions like human/alien while never visiting a 'real'
alien life form.

In a Nutshell
Activity 1. Base on the essential terms and operational definition of concepts in the study of
reading visuals, please feel free to write your arguments or lessons learned below.

1. What's crucial to remember when thinking about how we read visuals is that we're also
authors, picking, editing, and framing everything we view. The majority of the time, this
work is unconscious, but even when we are aware and attentive, we will still make what
we see with the same tactics (such as selection and omission) and be limited in what we
see by factors like context, habit, and cultural literacy.

2. We've looked at a variety of perception technologies to try to explain some of the

physical and cultural factors that influence how we perceive. Given the variety of
possible characteristics and technologies that inflect our visual field, the fact that we see
at all coherently appears fairly remarkable. But, for the most part, we do, and we do so by
making meaning of—or rendering ‘real'—what we perceive.

3. One of the new critical possibilities in cultural studies is the growth of visual culture. We
live in a world that is increasingly being remade, a world that has been transitioning for a
long time from the certainty of modernity to the flows, transformations, and moral
disturbing of what has come to be known as postmodernity. A transformation in the uses
and understandings of the visual has followed this, according to the vi series editor's
prologue. Visuality is being remade, from the fetishistic emphasis on consumerism to the
rise of spectacle to digitization to the decentring of the ‘individual' and their senses.