week 7

My biggest takeaway from the week is that the ways that we look at and see the world are always already mediated by invisible structures. Our gaze is always being guided invisibly - where to go, how to see, what to look at etc as Kevin Tavin reminds us. Artist Jiabao Li describes this as being like wearing glasses - after a while we are used to them, comfortable, and may even forget they are there even though they alter the way we see the world. I liked how she referred to her artistic interventions as ways to make people aware of these mediated lenses, like when a scuff appears or dirt gets on the glasses lenses. Her talk, along with reading Hito Steyerl’s interview, drove home the point of how Important it is to incorporate contemporary artists into our art teaching practice in order to help push students' thinking and help them understand how they can create things to respond to the world around them. These artists model different modes of creating and thinking about visual culture and how it relates to our lives. This mediation is of course not a neutral phenomenon but deeply tied up in power and politics. Kevin Tavin quotes Donna Haraway: “the visual is always a question of the power to see and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”.