School of Visual Culture

We are constantly told that our capacity for attention is diminishing. In a world where we are constantly distracted by the phones in our pockets and by the screens in our lives, it is hard to pay proper attention. One of the challenges that we take on in the School of Visual Culture is to pay deep attention to things, to events, to places and to each other. Our students – on our masters programmes in Design History and Material Culture, and Art in the Contemporary World and our BA programme in Visual Culture – spend much of their time paying close attention, researching deeply to produce new and critical understandings of the world about us. Skilled writers and thinkers, they share their ideas about art, design and everyday life in texts, podcasts, publications and exhibitions.

Our graduating BA Visual Culture students have chosen to call their collective installation, Exhausting the Unnoticed. It is a nod to the French writer Georges Perec who attempted to ‘exhaust’ Paris in his 1975 book, Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien. Exhausting did not mean to deplete: rather, it meant to pay attention to every possible aspect of a situation or a thing, to trace causes and effects, to track lines of movement and stubborn blocks, and to find ways of communicating one’s experience to others. Paying attention in this way is a way of knowing the world and is, perhaps, what is required if we are to change it for the better.

Professor David Crowley
Head of the School of Visual Culture