Tutor reports

Please click here for tutor reports on Assignments 1-5.

Feedback from Assignment 5

The feedback was very positive: "this was a very impressive submission, which I have judged as outstanding across all four criteria."

Tutor note how I have progressed from an "intelligent cynicism about the course to an understanding of how you might use it to enhance [my]  appreciation of everything from contemporary cinema to [my] partner's poetry and from your experience of a visit to the Tata to an analysis of your own photographs"

This one paragraph does summarise very well an eleven month journey grappling with some difficult concepts, and trying to be open-minded while endeavouring to understand. It is easy to give up, to blame the message rather than one's understanding thereof. There has always been a slight tendency to see the light side of things - 'wry humour' tutor calls it - as an antidote to the complexity of the concepts and the ways in which they are enunciated. 

Tutor expands on some of the concepts, noting how Farid and Turkle set out that new technology is somehow a new phenomenon. It isn't; as tutor says, the printing press was a major trigger of the Reformation. I would add that the camera was a (emphasize 'a')  precursor of Modernism as artists moved away from copying visual reality.

Two things really came home to me in this chapter and the Assignment:

1. How all pervasive the concept of reality is. I watched the first in the series The Secrets of Quantum Physics on BBC4 recently. The presenter sets out the differing views of Einstein that there is an objective reality, as against Niels Bohr's contention that there is no reality until something can be measured or observed (Schrödinger's Cat experiment discussed in this section set out to debunk the Bohr theory. This really gets ot the nub of existence itself;
2. As a corollary, how important it is to visual culture. The course did not explore children's TV or cartoons, but of course the latter (entirely) and the former (mostly) are all about exciting the young viewer's imagination of an alternative world, as were books by the likes of Lewis Carroll on which many of the films and series are based. In a less obvious way, I wish to explore this further in Photography 2. Landscapes are, prima facie, as close to an objective reality as you can get, but our portrayal of landscapes is anything but. 

This was a high on which to finish, very pleased with reports generally and this one in particular.