Vital Signs 2: Keynote speakers- Gillian Rose
Thursday 9 September 2010, 2pm, Cordingley Lecture Theatre
Inhabiting spaces, seeing things: complex visualities and the making of private spaces
It is commonplace in visual culture studies to hear the argument that we (those of us who live in the global North) live in an everyday that is ocularcentric: images saturate our lives, urban life is increasingly spectacular, and sight dominates other senses. This claim has generated a significant literature which has challenged many of its assumptions. Much research has explored the ways in which everyday life is not only visual but also permeated by touch, smell and sound; and much work has been done to establish the multisensory nature of urban life. Valuable and necessary as this work is, this paper will suggest that the visual has been left under-examined. It is often still assumed that contemporary visuality is complicit with a distanced and objectifying worldview, with surveillance, and with seduction by the spectacle. This critique is directed particularly at those urban spaces that have been redeveloped and appear 'public', but in fact are privately owned. This paper will argue that we need a much richer vocabulary than that for understanding the everyday visualities of such spaces. It will develop its argument by exploring the ways of seeing that take place such privatised urban spaces, and in particular will reflect on the relation between those spaces and certain kinds of domestic space. The argument will depend on evidence from recent research projects looking both at how a shopping mall space is experienced by its inhabitants, and at how domestic space is created in part by the visual and other affordances of family photographs. The paper will explore both relations and differences between those two spaces and the objects that travel between them, to argue that more attention should be paid to the complex modalities of everyday ways of seeing.
Presentation Recording
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