Abstract
“Art does not read like a sentence,” declares a billboard on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. Achille Varzi, drawing on a distinction between images and language, makes a similar claim for images more generally. His argument rests on pointing to the syntactic density of images compared to that of sentences. In this paper, I will argue for the continuing relevance of Kant’s theory of imagination in image-making. His central thought that we rely on mental maps–representations–as we navigate a world that we know is finite, but one that we can never apprehend as such in perception remains relevant to thinking about pictorial representations. Not surprisingly, conventionalism guides reading images just as it does sentences. This is true not only for symbolic art but even of those images we take to be the most literal of pictorial representations-maps. Drawing on cartographic examples, I argue for normativity as constitutive of the use of imagination in the making and reading of images and related pedagogies.
Presenters
Pradeep DhillonAssociate Professor, Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2020 Special Focus: Visual Pedagogies: Encounters, Place, Ecologies, and Design
KEYWORDS
Normativity, Imagination, Kant, Cartography
Digital Media
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