Visual Culture

To get to these questions, it is important to first consider what we each bring to the visual. What are the experiences, emotions, and positions or stabilities we seek when we look at or see things? To get to what visual culture is, we must first consider what we want from it.
As even that very short list suggests, as viewers we want a lot from the visual. It could be argued that humans have, in fact, for a long time wanted way too much from the visual. There are traces of this wanting on the walls of caves, in carved sculptures, in stacked stones, and in traces drawn around human hands. The wanting intensified as skills, tools, and technology to produce—and reproduce—images became more sophisticated. Whenever we can, wherever we are, we want images. We crave representation, repetition, and the possibility of making our mark. As much as we hunger for some images, we also want very much not to see others. We desire to see and we reject seeing. In this sense, little has changed since our ancestors began stacking stones, creating scrolls, and first pondering the creative abilities of artificial intelligence.
What is it, then, that pulls us—in all places, at every time, in each stage of life, and in ever-increasing varieties—to images? Perhaps we seek solace, or to communicate emotions, fears, and ideas we find difficult to put into words. We want to confront death, we want to avoid death, we want to stop time, we want beauty, we want to see suffering and how brutal life can be, we want to be converted, to drop to our knees and cry with joy, we want to see the land, we want to see the land we cannot see, we want to see the stars and beyond them, we want to laugh, we want to see how meaningless we are, we want to know how important and full of grace we are, we want to imagine who or what made us, we want to see how little we can see. The depth of our wanting is bottomless and our reasons endless. The only stable constant across space and time is the wanting itself.