My Road to Visual Literacy & Pedagogy Part 1
In 2010, I went to Parsons the New School for Design (it’s probably called something else by now) as a BFA Illustration major. I grew up with Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, and Project Runway so duh obvi aka Parsons. Full disclosure I haven’t watched most of them so emphasis on with. But I did endlessly slow-mo replay walking down 5th Ave with wind blowing down my hair. Oh, the gold and glittery allures of New York City. I was good at illustration but when a hobby turned into a potential life time job, the pressure sucked the fun out of it all. I don’t exactly remember what made me want to switch to photography, but my roommate at the time who was a “starving” NYU theater major told me I should if I wanted to even if that entails I’ll “starve to death”. So I did. And it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made in life - for me. Am I starving to death? No. I just finished half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s so no… Also did you know photographers have the highest job satisfaction? 😏
Just Do What You Want To Do (Smartly) ((because you’ll eventually end up doing what you want to do anyway))
Now that I’ve been out of school for some time, I do understand why the majority of people would regard it ludicrous to pay that much tuition for an art degree. Okay - but seriously, that doesn’t mean every art and humanities degree leads you right down the path to poverty. If you believe that money = time & energy, then why not choose what you want to do on the first go instead of getting your Doctor of Dental Surgery degree and coming back when you’re 40? I had that friend in freshmen year, so it’s a true story. I mean you do you - who’s to say my friend wasn’t happy as a dentist? And that must have allowed her to financially make the decision to go back to school for another degree. My point being, it’s not so much about whether it’s a right or a wrong decision, but more so of what we all can do with what we’ve got at the moment. Yes, profession and salary factor into how much money you (quickly) save, build credit score, etc. Indeed. You can’t ignore that. But most financial literacy books will tell you it’s more about your money mindset, what you invest in (early), and how much you follow through with your lifestyle. Even high earning software engineers or financial analysts are vulnerable to carrying high credit card debt. Artists just have to be extra smart. That’s the hard part but boy isn’t it hard for everybody?! Honest to god every art school - all schools - should have financial literacy classes. I have no idea why they don’t. Maybe they’re scared it’ll doom/awaken the students to reality and they’ll lose their clients? I should just start my own podcast called “Cut the BS: Just Tell me How You Artist You”. Interview Jeff Koons on where he gets the money to change all the flowers for Puppy, a 43-foot-tall living plant sculpture, every season. Although I’m not sure if it’s Jeff Koons or Guggenheim Bilbao who’s paying for the upkeep.
I digress.
My journey to ‘visual literacy and pedagogy’ started one summer, when I went back to South Korea and mentored middle school kids for summer camp. One girl quietly came to me and asked for my advice regarding coming out to her family. This was very, very brave of her because South Korea is heteronormative. I asked her how she came to the decision, and she said because she likes and shares girls undressing on Facebook. I was silent, shocked, and racking my brain over what I learned in Gender Studies a semester before. I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded. But I remember being deeply impressed by the sheer power and influence images and social media have over our identities.
Trevor Paglen, Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, 2017Around that time, I took a class called Mode of Seeing taught by Gordon Hall, which in hindsight was a visual studies class. My burgeoning theory was that images have its own language with a grammatical structure which you can deconstruct and reconstruct. Visual literacy = language of imagery. (I use imagery instead of images to include stills, video, 3D, VR, AR, etc.) Images are powerful because it can be discrete when it chooses to. It can be deceptive if it wants. It is crucial to understand that images are constructed part by part by another sentient being with emotions and irrational tendencies (or an AI which… is all the more the reason why visual studies needs to be widespread asap.) Regarding AI and imagery, Trevor Paglen had a show at Metro Pictures in 2017 called A Study of Invisible Images. In one of his series - Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations - he trained one AI by feeding taxonomy images while with that data, the second AI generated its own composited interpretation of frankensteins. Without reading the press release, you’d never know in a million years it was “painted” - composited - by an AI.
What Do Pictures Want? W. J. T. Mitchell
Back then, I didn’t know about structuralism, semiotics, etc. and that for centuries there have been scholars, theorists, philosophers, artists who have dedicated their lives to these theories. For a class, we read an excerpt from W. J. T. Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want? and it blew👏my👏mind👏. It was as if Mitchell the god himself came down to scratch my itch ten thousand miles under the ocean floor. Via iconology, the book explores the fundamental and deceptive forging of image and desire. I coin it “image desire”. This also branches into image politics and image violence. The question Mitchell throws out is “What do pictures want?” But in the end, you start questioning whether the picture is wanting or if it’s we humans wanting pictures to want.
Visual Literacy, James Elkins - What does it mean to be visually literate?
I was hooked on this investigative hunt over what W. J. T. Mitchell was writing about. But what do you call this thing? Discipline? Theory? Subject? I had no idea what to type in the search engine to get more similar results. So I typed visual literacy on Amazon books, and the only result was James Elkins’ Visual Literacy. A Visual Literacy symposium was held in Europe and this book is a compilation of invited theorists’ answer to the editor’s question, “What does it mean to be visually literate?” It was particularly fascinating to have the book venture out beyond the realms of art history and explore visual literacy in sciences and law. I knew I was on the right track as by coincidence Chapter 1 - Visual Literacy or Literal Visualcy? - was written by W. J. T. Mitchell.
Dilemma #1 -What’s the definition of visual literacy/visual studies?
By then, I’m in my senior year and I had to know more about visual studies. But I was noticing it was really hard to find universities that offer a visual studies degree. It seemed courses different institutions were offering were so varying in discipline that it was quite confusing. (Are they talking about the same thing?) This I realized is the biggest dilemma of visual studies and visual literacy. Almost every book you read regarding visual studies/visual literacy starts by defending the author(s)’(s) definition of visual studies/visual literacy. Its parameter is obviously unclear because of its inherent transdisciplinarity. This debate’s been going on since the 70s and it still pretty much is. But that’s what makes visual studies/visual literacy so alluring and beautiful. Language of imagery reflects the very essence of human complexity. Visual Studies is usually under the umbrella of Media Studies, Communication Studies, Film Studies, but not Visual Studies as a stand alone. These are all well and good but they have a tendency of focusing on medium i.e. television, film, screens than message. I knew these options were not what I wanted, but I didn’t know what it was that I wanted.
What to study in Visual Studies?
So I brainstormed what I wanted to learn and what I thought should be included in Visual Studies. In order to put my on-going research into a visual format, I made a prezi presentation which you can see at the very top as well.
Visual Culture, Visual Studies, Visual & Critical Studies (even the names are different from institution to institution)
Visual Literacy and Art Education
Media & Communication Studies
Film Studies
Photography
Information Science
Semiotics / Social Semiotics
Multimodality
Linguistics
Critical Theory & Discourse Analysis
Cognitive Neuroscience
Art History & Aesthetics
Elements & Principles of Art & Design, Color Theory
Museology
Gender & Sexuality Studies
Ethnic Studies / Sociology / Anthropology
Contemporary Art & Law
Violence, War & Image Politics
Now obviously this is a fanciful thinking - a Visual Studies degree which you can learn/research everything on this list. But still, I was curious if there was a place where I could.
Dilemma #2 - Visual Studies or Education?
But I also had another dilemma - I wanted to teach how to read images. The pedagogy part of visual literacy. How to build curriculums specifically for K-12 so visual literacy can be taught according to each developmental stage. Babies learn how to navigate phones and iPads before learning alphabets. It’s normative. But weirdly enough, learning how to read images isn’t. So it’s my dream to have a VL (visual literacy) class just like Bio or Algebra in K-12. Or at least one VL specialist in one school at the minimum. As a teaching artist, I’ve been asked to teach a How to Be a Youtuber class most often. Digital natives understand that content creation is currency. They want to create, express/explore their identity, speak their truth, and pave their own way in this world through content creation. Teaching visual literacy will empower students to create stronger, better, more precise, and more controlled content. This requires both technical abilities and visual language fluency. Imagine having programming (python, java), software (adobe suite, davinci, autocad), apparatus (photography, film, sound engineering) classes in school paired with a visual literacy class that could function as a thesis cohort with critiques.
This doesn’t have to be expensive and is totally doable if decentralized credit system is implemented. Nadav Zimer was invited to one of the book clubs on meetup.com to discuss his new book, Education in the Digital Age: How We Get There. He’s been doing some pretty cool stuff at Harlem Renaissance High School, turning around one of the “poorest-performing” schools by the DOE into a school of highly increased graduate and college admissions percentage. I liked his proposed ideas of getting rid of standardized testing and decentralized credit system the most. He was building a platform that hires artists and programmers so students can take these available classes as credits, learn, get graded by the artists/programmers AND the school teacher. And the artists and programmers get paid by the number of credits and students enrolled. This is such an incredible idea.
Back to my dilemma of whether I choose visual studies trajectory or education trajectory. After extensive research, there’s only one graduate program that combines both as far as I know - Nordic Visual Studies and Art Education (NoVA) at Aalto University, Finland. But they only accept students in two year bases. More on that on Part 2.
International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) & Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS)
With all this information in mind, I reached out to James Elkins and asked his opinion on what I should do. He directed me to International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA). “International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) is a not-for-profit association of researchers, educators, designers, media specialists, and artists dedicated to the principles of visual literacy.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I was hoping it’ll help me decide whether I should choose visual studies or education as my future career. So in 2017, I went to IVLA 49th Annual Conference at Lesley University. It was there that Philip Yenawine, co-founder of Visual Thinking Strategies, was the key note speaker. So I bought the book, looked into VTS, which led me to the Beginner Practicum certification program I wrote on my blog. VTS was exactly the tool I was looking for regarding teaching visual literacy.
My Journey to Visual Literacy & Pedagogy Part 2 will dive into which universities offer what kind of Visual Studies degree. And how almost after a decade, I finally was able to decide and was accepted to go to Columbia Teachers College with an Art and Art Education with Initial Certification in fall 2021.
Are there any Visual Studies fanatics out there in the ether who’s struggling like I did? I hope you find this post and it’ll save you a lot of time.
