2022 Seeing across Disciplines

Cognitive Empowerment Kamal Oghly The International Cultural Academy, Syria Abstract Due to the exceptional situation left by the war in Syria, a huge number of Syrian refugees are lacking the proper education. As a result, the International Cultural Academy has decided to take the initiative to design a special program based on the elements and tools of visual language to help these refugees raise their awareness and capabilities and thus compensate for the severe shortage in the knowledge field. This training program is designed in an unconventional way, so that it is dealt with interactively, and there is still a room for development. We started working on this program short time ago relatively, through workshops that included refugee women from several countries, and the result was very positive, but we still need more time so that we can evaluate performance and accurately monitor the results. Keywords: Visual Literacy, Visual Language, Education for Syrian Refugees. Read the chapter here

The Holding Project Ashley Pryor The University of Toledo, USA Barbara Miner The University of Toledo, USA Lee Fearnside Independent Artist, USA Abstract The authors argue that community-engaged arts practices like The Holding Project can and should be brought into closer alliance with each other and can be mutually beneficial. We suggest that the 2011 Visual Literacy Competency Standards are entrenched in a Western Enlightenment worldview. While the values undergirding these worldviews may be valuable in some contexts, they are not universally shared and serve as an inadequate foundation for collaborative, community-engaged arts projects. Further, the 2011 Standards and the proposed “Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education” (ACRL-VLRT, 2021) currently under review may not go far enough to model a more inclusive and egalitarian approach to community-engaged work. We hope that by calling attention to the implicit Eurocentric bias inherent in the 2011 standards, we can make a small contribution to the ongoing efforts within the visual literacy community to support “social justice through visual practice” (ACRL-VLTF, 2021). Keywords: ACRL, Community-Engaged Art, Competency Standards, Eurocentrism, The Holding Project Read the chapter here

Game Projects in Multipurpose Museums Nikolay Selivanov Studio of art designing, Moscow, Russia Abstract Great Museum Game (GMG) are short-term art educational projects carried out directly in museums in the context of museum collections. GMG is a synthesis of tabletop and role-playing game forms designed to immerse participants in creative activities, providing mobilization of cognitive motivation and creative will, activation of imagination. The games have no competitive purposes. The participants create their own artistic reality in the context of the museum, give birth to new ideas, metaphors, and images. The games are aimed on motivated teenagers from 14 to 18 years old, engaged in artistic activities on a permanent basis. Five GMG-format projects will be presented in this research. Keywords: museum pedagogy, game technology, immersive projects in a museum, contemporary art in a traditional museum, creative education, epistemological constructivism Read the chapter here

Learning to See Differently Eric Zeigler University of Toledo, USA Aaron M. Ellison Sound Solutions for Sustainable Science, USA Abstract Visual literacy takes for granted that humans are the main perceivers and decipherers of visual stimuli into meaningful information. The focus of this paper is to introduce the idea of a non-anthropocentric visual literacy and explore how it could help us better understand the myriad species that coexist with humans on Earth, their interactions with one another, and our interactions with them. Our work attempts to visualize the world beyond our vision — in the infrared and the ultraviolet. Using photography, we have imaged our world to translate what is visible to non-humans into the visible for humans. The information contained in these images reveals “hidden stories” about how organisms interact and make decisions, perhaps helping us to envision a more responsible future not only for our own species but also for the tens of millions of other species with whom we share the Earth. In sum, we propose that learning to see the world as other organisms do should be a part of visual literacy study and practice. Keywords: Anthropocene, cognition, photography, non-visible spectra Read the chapter here

Public Library (2021) Eric Sung Providence College, USA See the full description here

Young Boy (2021)  Deborah Orloff University of Toledo, USA See the full desciption here

Stems (2021) Susan Jane Britsch Purdue University, USA See the full description here

Sonder, Seclusion (2021) Faizan Adil, Independent Artist, Pakistan See the full description here

Cloud and Rain behind the Glass (2021) Daniele Bongiovanni, Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata, Italy See the full description here

Brookshire: Borderlands (2021) A metaphorical representation of migrants in Texas De Ferrier Independent Artist, USA See the full description here