Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Debates around visual research methodologies are persistent within creative arts discourse and beyond to other fields that seek practice-based, visual approaches to research. There is also a need for early experience in research-based activity and framings of practice-as-research in art and design education. This paper contributes to these debates and pedagogical challenges by presenting an approach to critical visual thinking that draws on the possibilities of ‘visual-contextual research’. A method of facilitating research engagement at undergraduate level has been developed that interprets visual contextual research as a kind of ‘field research’ with an associated set of observational and interpretive tasks to be undertaken. This includes methods for the creation of visual materials as ‘data’ and methods related to the interpretation of found/generated material. This pedagogical practice in-action reveals the significance of the visual in fostering the intellectual capacities of associative thinking, working with complexity, tolerating ambiguity and that highest form of applicable intelligence – intuitive thinking. These outcomes are discussed with reference to critic Katherine Hayles’s ideas on the epigenetic changes in the way we read images associated with the proliferation of digital technologies. These include a shift from close, diagnostic reading to fast, more casual ‘hyper reading’ (Hayles, 2012).