COMM4621/5621: Visual Communication - University of Colorado, Denver
We are bombarded daily with images – photos, film, emoticons, T-shirt designs, websites, landscape, advertising, comics, art, television, graphics, etc. Information is increasingly transmitted through images molding both what and how we think. This course is a survey of some of the major conceptual themes in visual communication and visual literacy. Although a definitive definition of visual literacy has been hotly contested, at its core visual literacy deals with the development of communicative skills to read (decode), interpret (critique), and create (encode) images in a meaningful way.
To develop these skills, students will be reading from a diverse range of fields – rhetoric, semiotics, art history, film studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology – to give each one a more holistic understanding of the phenomena of visual communication. The readings in this course will focus on the sense of sight and the various ocular patterns that dominate U.S. culture, as well as the different ways we use images in our everyday lives. This focus will give students a foundational understanding of different ways of seeing as well as the fields of sight they create along with a critical self-reflexive turn regarding how we use images in our everyday lives to gain perspective on the ways imagery functions in US culture. The syllabus for this course can be found here and feel free to check out a practice blog some students created called The Ocular Regime. |