Visual Futures: Exploring the Past, Present, and Divergent Possibilities of Visual Practice (New edition.)

In our everyday lives, we navigate across a vast sea of visual imagery.

Yet, we rarely consider in any systematic way, how or why we derive meaning from this sea of the visual.

Nor do we typically contemplate the impact that it has on our motivations and actions as individuals and collectives.

The book proposed here is a collection of thoughtful and incisive examinations of the ways in which we interact and engage with the visual elements of our environments.

This edited collection is an outgrowth of an interdisciplinary gathering of academics and practitioners who met in May, 2018 at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto for the inaugural "Visual Futures Think Tank." The organizers of the event asked participants to ruminate on two central questions: 1) how are visuality and the visual provoking a new kind of encounter or cultural exchange; and 2) what are the relationships, intersections and collisions between visuality and/or visual practices and one (or a combination) of the following: embodiment, spatial literacy, emerging languages, historical reflection educative practices, civic development, and social development.

The resulting collection brings into conversation perspectives from biology, film, drawing, urban graffiti, architecture, visual literacy, critical pedagogy and education, in order to innovatively challenge current perspectives, norms, and practices.