ARTH 398 - The View From Above: Landscape Perspectives From the Renaissance To Google Earth

• M&W - 12:15-14:45
• EV-1.615
• INSTRUCTOR: TRACY VALCOURT, Department of Humanities

This course examines landscape from the aerial perspective, now widely considered the new dominant visual paradigm through which we understand our world. Interested in the tension between “ground-level truth” and satellite data, and using landscape images as the focal point supported by art historical and geographic discourses around landscape traditions, this course examines case studies in visual culture by posing questions around conceptions of space, place and representation as interrogated by contemporary artists. Examining tropes such as surveillance, globalization and climate change, the course will begin with an overview of perspective beginning in the Renaissance, followed by an art historical genealogy of the rising viewpoint, arriving finally at the military or God’s eye’s perspective of drones and Google Earth.