Field guides are reference books you take with you. They illuminate hidden or unknown features of... more Field guides are reference books you take with you. They illuminate hidden or unknown features of the world, allowing you to identify and articulate names for unfamiliar phenomena or ephemera in situ. This, of course, is not a typical field guide. CVSN Field Guide to Color is an experimental publication from the Critical Visions program at the University of Cincinnati. Meant to provide provocations more than answers, this book functions as a way of de-familiarizing and re-familiarizing the reader’s sense of color and place.
The twelve main essays and creative projects—along with eight interstitial ones—emerged out of a semester of thinking through, with, and about color. We visited local galleries and print shops, talked to scientists who study the genetics of human pigmentation, created our own color deception studies, watched and re-watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” and took deep dives into the histories, connotations, and contemporary uses of significant colors in art and society. Students re-examined their daily routines, neighborhoods, and recent events they thought they knew.
As a collective, we were adamant that the book not address color in a broad or abstract way, but rather root it in local, embodied, and affective experiences. The projects reflect this, exploring how color is multisensory and moves, while at the same can be rigid, used to police boundaries, code language, and obfuscate reality.
Cincinnati has a complicated relationship to color, especially regarding race. Bordering Kentucky, it was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, yet remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Similarly, Ohio is neither a red state, nor a blue state. The city embodies the fractured tension between the two.
Drawing on this history and present reality, the first section, Locations, examines how color shapes the memory of a place. Working across geological and historical time, projects in this section explore local politics of greenwashing and the limits of human perception. They examine the city’s color line and how the built environment, and its colors, reinforces these boundaries. Moving from the once-toxic nature preserve on the city’s outskirts to the rapidly gentrifying downtown neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and finally, back up to UC’s campus, the projects here offer glimpses of how color structures local history and ways of moving through this place. The interstitial projects in particular examine how paranoia and fear are refracted through color and color names.
The projects in the second section, Expectations, explore the embodiment of color and color hierarchies, highlighting the connections between color and personhood. Navigating scales of families, nations, and global brands, the projects here examine the affective and relational dimensions of color. They offer alternative frameworks for critiquing color expectations and provide examples of how to do this: from social media activism and brandalism to historical deconstructions of race and kinship. The interstitial projects in this section likewise test the limits of color categories, reimagining Carole Jackson’s iconic Color Me Beautiful for dogs and exploring the non-fashion uses of optic yellow.
The third section, Integrations, examines how colors are mixed, both literally and figuratively, across sensoria, technologies, and modes of being. They draw on aural metaphors of noise and harmony, philosophical considerations of absence and presence, and non-visual ways of interacting with color. By showing how things fit together, the projects in this section provide methods for disassembling and reconfiguring color relations. In so doing, they question the social, ethical, and political implications of these new articulations, which are also examined in the minor projects on the transnational circuits of indigo and colors of urban renewal.
The final section, Disassociations, explores the limits of color as a symbolic system. These projects deconstruct spectrum thinking, the boundary between adulthood and adolescence, and the chromatic politics of avant- garde and Blaxploitation films. Offering new ways for thinking about sex, gender, race, and age, the work in this section explores themes of creativity, subjectivity, and inversion. They and the interstitial projects here offer new juxtapositions and propositions for the reader’s relationship to color.
This is the fifth year of the Critical Visions program. In that short time we have grown tremendously, piloting a graduate track, working with new co- and associate editors, and partnering with Special Collections Press to ensure the longevity of CVSN. As we continue to explore new genres with the publication, the core of the program remains the same: to challenge dominant forms of seeing through critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. We invite you to join us in this endeavor and to explore color in the field.
CVSN, vol.2, is produced by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati, a... more CVSN, vol.2, is produced by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati, all born between 1991 and 1993. We represent a microgeneration and refuse to be defined by inaccurate generalizations that criticize us as unmotivated, overindulgent, and addicted to technology. Projections figure millennials as both the dream and nightmare of the future. Through critical theory, social analysis, and creative work, our publication invites readers to rethink and subvert these and other dominant forms of seeing.
***
CVSN is published periodically by the University of Cincinnati with funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost and support from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. It is produced as part of the Critical Visions Certificate program. The Critical Visions Certificate program is a joint endeavor between faculty from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The goal of the cross-college undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice.
Seeking to increase students’ understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices, the program also fosters the development of new artistic, media, or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. It is directed by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in the Department of Anthropology and Jordan Tate in the School of Art.
American Anthropologist 120(1): 153–162.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Vi... more American Anthropologist 120(1): 153–162.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students “write and make from day one,” the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: “Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other.” The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging “dominant forms of seeing,” the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines. This essay describes the origins and development of the program and its biennial publication, CVSN, as told by the founders and directors of the program and two recent alumni. It is written in two parts. The first, traces the practical, pedagogical, and institutional concerns of establishing and running the program to demonstrate how faculty can navigate university structures to create spaces for these kinds of collaborations. The second, details the kinds of labor and practices that go into creating these publications and how this has shaped students’ thinking and future work. Throughout the essay, and in these multiple voices, we reflect on key choices we made in designing and developing the program and what it means to work in this unsteady in-between.
Field guides are reference books you take with you. They illuminate hidden or unknown features of... more Field guides are reference books you take with you. They illuminate hidden or unknown features of the world, allowing you to identify and articulate names for unfamiliar phenomena or ephemera in situ. This, of course, is not a typical field guide. CVSN Field Guide to Color is an experimental publication from the Critical Visions program at the University of Cincinnati. Meant to provide provocations more than answers, this book functions as a way of de-familiarizing and re-familiarizing the reader’s sense of color and place.
The twelve main essays and creative projects—along with eight interstitial ones—emerged out of a semester of thinking through, with, and about color. We visited local galleries and print shops, talked to scientists who study the genetics of human pigmentation, created our own color deception studies, watched and re-watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” and took deep dives into the histories, connotations, and contemporary uses of significant colors in art and society. Students re-examined their daily routines, neighborhoods, and recent events they thought they knew.
As a collective, we were adamant that the book not address color in a broad or abstract way, but rather root it in local, embodied, and affective experiences. The projects reflect this, exploring how color is multisensory and moves, while at the same can be rigid, used to police boundaries, code language, and obfuscate reality.
Cincinnati has a complicated relationship to color, especially regarding race. Bordering Kentucky, it was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, yet remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Similarly, Ohio is neither a red state, nor a blue state. The city embodies the fractured tension between the two.
Drawing on this history and present reality, the first section, Locations, examines how color shapes the memory of a place. Working across geological and historical time, projects in this section explore local politics of greenwashing and the limits of human perception. They examine the city’s color line and how the built environment, and its colors, reinforces these boundaries. Moving from the once-toxic nature preserve on the city’s outskirts to the rapidly gentrifying downtown neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and finally, back up to UC’s campus, the projects here offer glimpses of how color structures local history and ways of moving through this place. The interstitial projects in particular examine how paranoia and fear are refracted through color and color names.
The projects in the second section, Expectations, explore the embodiment of color and color hierarchies, highlighting the connections between color and personhood. Navigating scales of families, nations, and global brands, the projects here examine the affective and relational dimensions of color. They offer alternative frameworks for critiquing color expectations and provide examples of how to do this: from social media activism and brandalism to historical deconstructions of race and kinship. The interstitial projects in this section likewise test the limits of color categories, reimagining Carole Jackson’s iconic Color Me Beautiful for dogs and exploring the non-fashion uses of optic yellow.
The third section, Integrations, examines how colors are mixed, both literally and figuratively, across sensoria, technologies, and modes of being. They draw on aural metaphors of noise and harmony, philosophical considerations of absence and presence, and non-visual ways of interacting with color. By showing how things fit together, the projects in this section provide methods for disassembling and reconfiguring color relations. In so doing, they question the social, ethical, and political implications of these new articulations, which are also examined in the minor projects on the transnational circuits of indigo and colors of urban renewal.
The final section, Disassociations, explores the limits of color as a symbolic system. These projects deconstruct spectrum thinking, the boundary between adulthood and adolescence, and the chromatic politics of avant- garde and Blaxploitation films. Offering new ways for thinking about sex, gender, race, and age, the work in this section explores themes of creativity, subjectivity, and inversion. They and the interstitial projects here offer new juxtapositions and propositions for the reader’s relationship to color.
This is the fifth year of the Critical Visions program. In that short time we have grown tremendously, piloting a graduate track, working with new co- and associate editors, and partnering with Special Collections Press to ensure the longevity of CVSN. As we continue to explore new genres with the publication, the core of the program remains the same: to challenge dominant forms of seeing through critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. We invite you to join us in this endeavor and to explore color in the field.
CVSN, vol.2, is produced by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati, a... more CVSN, vol.2, is produced by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati, all born between 1991 and 1993. We represent a microgeneration and refuse to be defined by inaccurate generalizations that criticize us as unmotivated, overindulgent, and addicted to technology. Projections figure millennials as both the dream and nightmare of the future. Through critical theory, social analysis, and creative work, our publication invites readers to rethink and subvert these and other dominant forms of seeing.
***
CVSN is published periodically by the University of Cincinnati with funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost and support from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. It is produced as part of the Critical Visions Certificate program. The Critical Visions Certificate program is a joint endeavor between faculty from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The goal of the cross-college undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice.
Seeking to increase students’ understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices, the program also fosters the development of new artistic, media, or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. It is directed by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in the Department of Anthropology and Jordan Tate in the School of Art.
American Anthropologist 120(1): 153–162.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Vi... more American Anthropologist 120(1): 153–162.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students “write and make from day one,” the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: “Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other.” The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging “dominant forms of seeing,” the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines. This essay describes the origins and development of the program and its biennial publication, CVSN, as told by the founders and directors of the program and two recent alumni. It is written in two parts. The first, traces the practical, pedagogical, and institutional concerns of establishing and running the program to demonstrate how faculty can navigate university structures to create spaces for these kinds of collaborations. The second, details the kinds of labor and practices that go into creating these publications and how this has shaped students’ thinking and future work. Throughout the essay, and in these multiple voices, we reflect on key choices we made in designing and developing the program and what it means to work in this unsteady in-between.
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Critical Visions by Sso-Rha Kang
The twelve main essays and creative projects—along with eight interstitial ones—emerged out of a semester of thinking through, with, and about color. We visited local galleries and print shops, talked to scientists who study the genetics of human pigmentation, created our own color deception studies, watched and re-watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” and took deep dives into the histories, connotations, and contemporary uses of significant colors in art and society. Students re-examined their daily routines, neighborhoods, and recent events they thought they knew.
As a collective, we were adamant that the book not address color in a broad or abstract way, but rather root it in local, embodied, and affective experiences. The projects reflect this, exploring how color is multisensory and moves, while at the same can be rigid, used to police boundaries, code language, and obfuscate reality.
Cincinnati has a complicated relationship to color, especially regarding race. Bordering Kentucky, it was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, yet remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Similarly, Ohio is neither a red state, nor a blue state. The city embodies the fractured tension between the two.
Drawing on this history and present reality, the first section, Locations, examines how color shapes the memory of a place. Working across geological and historical time, projects in this section explore local politics of greenwashing and the limits of human perception. They examine the city’s color line and how the built environment, and its colors, reinforces these boundaries. Moving from the once-toxic nature preserve on the city’s outskirts to the rapidly gentrifying downtown neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and finally, back up to UC’s campus, the projects here offer glimpses of how color structures local history and ways of moving through this place. The interstitial projects in particular examine how paranoia and fear are refracted through color and color names.
The projects in the second section, Expectations, explore the embodiment of color and color hierarchies, highlighting the connections between color and personhood. Navigating scales of families, nations, and global brands, the projects here examine the affective and relational dimensions of color. They offer alternative frameworks for critiquing color expectations and provide examples of how to do this: from social media activism and brandalism to historical deconstructions of race and kinship. The interstitial projects in this section likewise test the limits of color categories, reimagining Carole Jackson’s iconic Color Me Beautiful for dogs and exploring the non-fashion uses of optic yellow.
The third section, Integrations, examines how colors are mixed, both literally and figuratively, across sensoria, technologies, and modes of being. They draw on aural metaphors of noise and harmony, philosophical considerations of absence and presence, and non-visual ways of interacting with color. By showing how things fit together, the projects in this section provide methods for disassembling and reconfiguring color relations. In so doing, they question the social, ethical, and political implications of these new articulations, which are also examined in the minor projects on the transnational circuits of indigo and colors of urban renewal.
The final section, Disassociations, explores the limits of color as a symbolic system. These projects deconstruct spectrum thinking, the boundary between adulthood and adolescence, and the chromatic politics of avant- garde and Blaxploitation films. Offering new ways for thinking about sex, gender, race, and age, the work in this section explores themes of creativity, subjectivity, and inversion. They and the interstitial projects here offer new juxtapositions and propositions for the reader’s relationship to color.
This is the fifth year of the Critical Visions program. In that short time we have grown tremendously, piloting a graduate track, working with new co- and associate editors, and partnering with Special Collections Press to ensure the longevity of CVSN. As we continue to explore new genres with the publication, the core of the program remains the same: to challenge dominant forms of seeing through critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. We invite you to join us in this endeavor and to explore color in the field.
***
CVSN is published periodically by the University of Cincinnati with funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost and support from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. It is produced as part of the Critical Visions Certificate program. The Critical Visions Certificate program is a joint endeavor between faculty from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The goal of the cross-college undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice.
Seeking to increase students’ understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices, the program also fosters the development of new artistic, media, or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. It is directed by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in the Department of Anthropology and Jordan Tate in the School of Art.
Papers by Sso-Rha Kang
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students “write and make from day one,” the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: “Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other.” The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging “dominant forms of seeing,” the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines. This essay describes the origins and development of the program and its biennial publication, CVSN, as told by the founders and directors of the program and two recent alumni. It is written in two parts. The first, traces the practical, pedagogical, and institutional concerns of establishing and running the program to demonstrate how faculty can navigate university structures to create spaces for these kinds of collaborations. The second, details the kinds of labor and practices that go into creating these publications and how this has shaped students’ thinking and future work. Throughout the essay, and in these multiple voices, we reflect on key choices we made in designing and developing the program and what it means to work in this unsteady in-between.
The twelve main essays and creative projects—along with eight interstitial ones—emerged out of a semester of thinking through, with, and about color. We visited local galleries and print shops, talked to scientists who study the genetics of human pigmentation, created our own color deception studies, watched and re-watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” and took deep dives into the histories, connotations, and contemporary uses of significant colors in art and society. Students re-examined their daily routines, neighborhoods, and recent events they thought they knew.
As a collective, we were adamant that the book not address color in a broad or abstract way, but rather root it in local, embodied, and affective experiences. The projects reflect this, exploring how color is multisensory and moves, while at the same can be rigid, used to police boundaries, code language, and obfuscate reality.
Cincinnati has a complicated relationship to color, especially regarding race. Bordering Kentucky, it was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, yet remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Similarly, Ohio is neither a red state, nor a blue state. The city embodies the fractured tension between the two.
Drawing on this history and present reality, the first section, Locations, examines how color shapes the memory of a place. Working across geological and historical time, projects in this section explore local politics of greenwashing and the limits of human perception. They examine the city’s color line and how the built environment, and its colors, reinforces these boundaries. Moving from the once-toxic nature preserve on the city’s outskirts to the rapidly gentrifying downtown neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and finally, back up to UC’s campus, the projects here offer glimpses of how color structures local history and ways of moving through this place. The interstitial projects in particular examine how paranoia and fear are refracted through color and color names.
The projects in the second section, Expectations, explore the embodiment of color and color hierarchies, highlighting the connections between color and personhood. Navigating scales of families, nations, and global brands, the projects here examine the affective and relational dimensions of color. They offer alternative frameworks for critiquing color expectations and provide examples of how to do this: from social media activism and brandalism to historical deconstructions of race and kinship. The interstitial projects in this section likewise test the limits of color categories, reimagining Carole Jackson’s iconic Color Me Beautiful for dogs and exploring the non-fashion uses of optic yellow.
The third section, Integrations, examines how colors are mixed, both literally and figuratively, across sensoria, technologies, and modes of being. They draw on aural metaphors of noise and harmony, philosophical considerations of absence and presence, and non-visual ways of interacting with color. By showing how things fit together, the projects in this section provide methods for disassembling and reconfiguring color relations. In so doing, they question the social, ethical, and political implications of these new articulations, which are also examined in the minor projects on the transnational circuits of indigo and colors of urban renewal.
The final section, Disassociations, explores the limits of color as a symbolic system. These projects deconstruct spectrum thinking, the boundary between adulthood and adolescence, and the chromatic politics of avant- garde and Blaxploitation films. Offering new ways for thinking about sex, gender, race, and age, the work in this section explores themes of creativity, subjectivity, and inversion. They and the interstitial projects here offer new juxtapositions and propositions for the reader’s relationship to color.
This is the fifth year of the Critical Visions program. In that short time we have grown tremendously, piloting a graduate track, working with new co- and associate editors, and partnering with Special Collections Press to ensure the longevity of CVSN. As we continue to explore new genres with the publication, the core of the program remains the same: to challenge dominant forms of seeing through critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. We invite you to join us in this endeavor and to explore color in the field.
***
CVSN is published periodically by the University of Cincinnati with funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost and support from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. It is produced as part of the Critical Visions Certificate program. The Critical Visions Certificate program is a joint endeavor between faculty from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The goal of the cross-college undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice.
Seeking to increase students’ understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices, the program also fosters the development of new artistic, media, or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. It is directed by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in the Department of Anthropology and Jordan Tate in the School of Art.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students “write and make from day one,” the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: “Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other.” The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging “dominant forms of seeing,” the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines. This essay describes the origins and development of the program and its biennial publication, CVSN, as told by the founders and directors of the program and two recent alumni. It is written in two parts. The first, traces the practical, pedagogical, and institutional concerns of establishing and running the program to demonstrate how faculty can navigate university structures to create spaces for these kinds of collaborations. The second, details the kinds of labor and practices that go into creating these publications and how this has shaped students’ thinking and future work. Throughout the essay, and in these multiple voices, we reflect on key choices we made in designing and developing the program and what it means to work in this unsteady in-between.