Introduction

This site seeks to address how visual culture and technology inform one another. In a very real sense there would be no visual culture without technology, a broad claim that one can argue of just about anything. However, it is the particular nature of both visual culture and technology to situate themselves in tandem with one another.
The history of visual culture and its assertion as a discipline can very much to traced back to the 1996 October journal questionnaire, which posited four assertions that were then responded to by a host of theorists ranging from Susan Buck-Morse, Johnathan Crary, Svetlana Alpers, Keith Moxley and others. This is not tot say that visual culture was not already organized as a discipline, but rather, this questionnaire marks its maturity. Among the responses, Michael Blaxandall is cited more than once as creating the term ‘visual ‘ But it is the prevalence of citing media and its effects on subjectivity, culture and most importantly, visuality that become the qualifiers for visual culture.   As Christopher Wood writes… “Visuality is shorthand for the idea that vision is an active, interpretive process strongly governed by communities and institutions rather than innocent openness to visual stimuli.” Here, Wood is taking a predominant position on the nature of visual studies that is the visuality of an object of study must be analyzed through the humanities. Or to put it more precisely, Margaret Dikovitskaya proposes in her book Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual at the Cultural Turn that visual studies… “pays close attention to the image but uses theories developed in the humanities and the social sciences to address complex ways in which meanings are produced….” In a sense, the discipline of visual culture depends on two things, the prevalence of analysis of the visual through the humanities that then analyses the visuality and the convergence of disciplines and media. In particular, the convergences of media and technology have helped to establish ‘visual culture’.  As Lisa Cartwright states, visual culture is about… “both the outcome and a response to the broader conditions of media convergence.” In a sense it is this convergence with culture, and for the purposes of this site, with technology that help to define visual culture.
Technology is never really new, and as the texts reviewed in this site exemplify, the ideologies present in technologies of the 18th century and before create our understanding of how contemporary technologies function. From the camera obscura, to the Virtual Reality, technology presents a particular underlying philosophy that aligns itself with visual culture. By this I mean, the analysis of technology as a cultural metaphor, which is present in these essays belies the fact that technology is never just about the material aspect of the technology. In Heidigger’s The Question Concerning Technology, he states
“Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this Conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.”
            Thus, Heidigger posits that technology is never really about the technological, but rather is about the relationship of essences, or rather, how we interact and interpret that technology becomes revealed through its essence. Technology, becomes for the sake of this site, the context in which to understand visual culture. And in particular this site focuses on the technology of visuality. The technologies of visuality, the screen, the Internet, the film, virtual reality etc. is prescient to understanding t he underlying principles of visual culture. It is visual cultures ability to analyze the visuality of an object, and thus by extension, the technological visuality of an object to reveal its essence in relation to culture that is the relevant within each of these essays.
            By no means is this site a complete chronology; rather it is the beginnings of an investigation into technology and visual culture and in particular visual technology and visuality. The essays chosen reflect the biases inherent in the site author, and do not even begin to delve into the rich diversity of visual culture and technology, especially when questions regarding embodiment, identity, gender, and materiality are thrown into the analysis. However, this site does provide a concise introduction of visual culture and technology.