What Is Visual Studies at Buffalo?

Vision is our only sense that pretends to comprehensiveness and completeness. We believe that all that is, ranging from the infinitely small to the infinitely large can at some level and with the right tools, be seen by everyone. Yet, our ordinary language makes lie of this ideal of universal visibility, for we regularly say things like, “Different people see things differently.” The Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo is dedicated to the social and cultural operations of seeing differently. Indeed, UB’s Visual Studies stakes its claim as the multidisciplinary exploration of the invisible in the context of the visible—all the structuring ideologies, habits of mind, projections and fantasies that always haunt our seeing. Some of us engage painting, sculpture, film, photography, performance and a host of new digital technologies to explore the boundary between what can be seen and what can be thought. Others of us pursue the same investigation in academic prose. But what unites us all is a belief that seeing is always a product of particular social and political structures whose power often depends on their not being seen. To surface those structures is to change them and so we understand our work as a kind of activist academics.