Visual Culture Center reaches across academic fields

Tucked away on the fifth floor of Memorial Library in a monastic faculty study room are the digs for the recently created Visual Culture Center. The limited square footage and unglamorous address, though, haven’t prevented center leadership, in just a few years, from developing and presenting a robust program of courses, research initiatives, presentations, lectures and conferences in a field of study that is the new kid on the academic block.

The study of visual culture is an emerging, transdisciplinary academic field, says Jill Casid, director of UW–Madison’s Visual Culture Center, one of three Visual Culture Cluster hires and associate professor of visual culture studies with a home base in the Department of Art History.

“Visual culture studies allow us to change how we think about what we see and how visuality affects our habits and institutions. Psychology, neuroscience, perception, politics, literacy, brain cognition, imagination — they’re all included. It’s kind of a metafield with many tentacles,” says Casid.

Casid says visual culture studies started coming into its own in academic circles in the 1990s. It shakes up the way the visual is studied and regarded. By analyzing not just what we see but how we see, faculty and students work to better address such concerns as the consequences of new media, the role of visualization in the construction of knowledge, how power works through the visual, and cross-cultural variations in how we see and imagine, including the overlap of the visual with other senses.

The field of visual culture studies is concerned with the full range of aspects of culture that communicates through visual means. This includes virtually everything we see, have seen or may visualize — from visual art to mass media, from the digital imaging, maps, graphs, and charts of science and social science, and from the material of our everyday lives to the forms of our fantasies and dreams. But visual culture as a field is not limited to the “objects” of visual culture; it also explores how vision, perception and sense-based cognition work.

The Visual Culture Center is actually just a few months old; it was recognized as an official research center in October. The center grew out of the cluster hire initiative begun in 1998, which was designed to foster collaborative research, education and outreach by creating new interdisciplinary areas of knowledge that cross the boundaries of existing academic departments.

The Visual Culture Cluster was established in 2001 as an interdepartmental coalition of faculty with related research and teaching interests, but not from or located within any one department. This arrangement is fitting for an academic discipline that draws from so many different fields. Today, the center links 75 affiliated faculty from 40 different departments in nine schools and colleges whose research or teaching focuses on some aspect of visual culture.

In addition to Casid, the cluster hire brought Lisa Nakamura, in the Department of Communication Arts (no longer at UW–Madison) and Preeti Chopra, in the departments of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Design Studies, to campus. The cluster is currently conducting a search, and the new hire will broaden the research expertise and range of its participating faculty.

“Visual culture studies is not easily slotted into individual departments or disciplines. At most universities, visual culture studies is department-based — usually in art history, art, film studies or some bridge,” says Casid. “UW–Madison’s program has a high profile nationally because opportunities here are high. This is because interdisciplinarity is built into the structure of the cluster system. With the support of the hiring departments, there is the opportunity to innovate courses and push work wherever we think it should go and not be bound by disciplinary constraints.”

That interdisciplinary approach can be seen in an extensive archive of stand-alone and co-sponsored events. Just a few of the topics from 2007 and 2008 include “Islam, Religion and Visual Culture,” “Visual Theory: Interruption, Interference, Intervention” and a conference on “Visualizing Science,” which explored the possible intersections between the visual and science, part of an ongoing conference series on new directions in visual culture.

Receiving an official designation as a research center will allow the center to apply for internal and external financial support. It also bestows a mantle of academic formality and longevity on the center — a final stamp of academic arrival and acceptance that guarantees that events, research and colloquia on visual culture studies continue.

Looking ahead, Casid and center faculty are working on creating a doctoral program in visual culture that would be housed in the center and distinguished from other such doctoral programs in terms of its broad-based structure across the arts, humanities and sciences. The center is also planning to build an image database for the study of visual culture and hopes to launch an online journal of visual culture. Casid says next year they will partner again with the Eye Research Institute on a conference to explore how much of what we see is a function of physiology and neuro-chemistry and how much is culturally and socially constructed.

Eventually, the center will move from its library space to the University Club, which will also house the Arts Institute, the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities, further strengthening collaboration and transdisciplinary opportunities.

In the near future, the center will present a conference April 9–11 on “Interdisciplinarity and the University Art Museum.” The conference includes a public lecture by Alan Shestack, deputy director and chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as a workshop and a research colloquium. Also as part of the conference, Amy Lonetree, University of California, Santa Cruz, will present “Visualizing our Stories: Museums, Decolonization, and Telling the Hard Truths.”

An exhibit currently at the Chazen Museum of Art, “Sighting Knowledge: Photography in the Lab, the Museum, and the Archive,” was curated by two students in conjunction with the “Interdisciplinarity” conference. Casid sees the exhibit as an example of how curatorial lab space could be included in the museum’s planned expansion. For more information on the conference, visit Visual Culture.

“Visual culture studies is more relevant than ever. With new technologies and new media, we need to study how to navigate the world of the screen and we need to be teaching students about global and cultural differences,” Casid says. “By making things seeable, we make them knowable — and that’s knowledge production.”