When we see, we do so many things; we experience what is happening in a direct way; we discover something we never noticed or possibly never even looked for before; we become aware through a series of visual experiences of something we eventually come to recognize and know; we watch for evolving changes through patient observation. A visual representation of this theory could be an optical illusion, which take time to discover and solve.
The first learning experience of a child is through tactile awareness. In addition to this "hands-on" knowledge, recognition includes smelling, hearing, and tasting in a rich contact with the environment. These senses are quickly augmented and superseded by the iconic- the ability to see, to recognize and understand environmental and emotional forces visually. From nearly our first experience of the world, we organize our needs and pleasures, preferences and fears, with great dependence on what we see. Or what we want to see. But this description is only the tip of the iceberg and in no way measures the power and importance the visual sense exerts on our lives. We accept it without realising that it can be improved just in the basic process of observation or extended into an incomparable tool of human communication. We accept seeing as we experience it- effortlessly.
As Caleb Gattegno comments on the nature of the visual sense in his book, Towards a Visual Culture:
"Sight, even though used by all of us naturally, has not yet produced its civilisation. Sight is swift, comprehensive, simultaneously, analytic and synthetic. It requires so little energy to function, as it does, at the speed of light, that it permits our minds to receive and hold an infinite number of items of information in a fraction of a second."
Infants observing the adults around them interpret other codes before the verbal code. They notice pitch differences very early. They can recognize their mother's pitch from that of another female by about 3 weeks old. By a month they can distinguish between different sounds such as 'p' and 'b'. That is, they develop the paradigmatic structures that are the basis of the full phonological system or the basic alphabet of sounds of their language. But they do not begin to crack the phonological code as a system till they are about 12 months old.
We express and receive visual messages on three levels: representationally- what we see and recognize from environment and experience; abstractly- the kinesthetic quality of a visual event reduced to the basic elemental visual components, emphasizing the more direct, emotional, even primitive message-making means; symbolically- the vast world of coded symbol systems which man has created arbitrarily, and to which he has attached meaning. All these levels of information retrieval are interconnected and overlapping, but can be sufficiently distinguished from each other so that they can be analysed both as to their value as potential tactics for message-making and their quality in the process of seeing.
Vision defines the act of seeing in its entire ramification. We see in sharp detail and learn and recognize all the elemental visual material in our lives in order to negotiate most competently in the world.
“Most learning processes are visual, sight is the only necessity for visual understanding. One does not need to be literate to speak to understand visual messages. These abilities are intrinsic in man and will emerge, to some extent, with or without teaching or models. As they develop in history, so they develop in the child.”
Part of the present and most of the suture will be made by a generation conditioned by photography, film, and television, and to whom camera and visual computer will be an intellectual adjunct: Guardian Article On Technology
Gattegno explains in 'Towards a Visual Culture':
"Man has functioned as a seer and embraced vastness for millennia. But only recently, through television (and film and photography, the modern media) has he been able to shift from the clumsiness of speech (however miraculous and far-reading) as a means of expression and therefore of communication, to the powers of infinite visual expression, thus enabling him to share with everybody immense dynamic wholes in no time."
Seeing a process is sometimes enough to be able to understand how it functions. Seeing an object sometimes provides enough knowledge to evaluate and understand it. This fact of observation serves not only as an enabling device for learning but also as our closest link to the reality of our surroundings. We trust our eyes and we depend on them.
On the other hand, the camera forms the final connecting link between the innate ability to see and the external capability to report, interpret, express what we see, without having to have special talent or extended training to effect the process. There is little doubt that contemporary lifestyle has been influenced, and crucially, by the changes enacted on it by the fact of the photograph.
“In print, language is the primary element, while visual factors, such as the physical setting or design format and illustration, are secondary or supportive. In the modern media, just the reverse is true. The visual dominates; the verbal augments. Print is not yet dead yet, nor will it ever be, but, nevertheless, our language-dominated culture has moved perceptibly toward the iconic.”
Most of what we know and learn, what we buy and believe, what we recognize and desire, is determined by the domination of the human psyche by the photograph. And it will be more so in the future.
"...it is the technique that will serve most effectively as connector between intention and results. Conversely, a familiarity with the nature of techniques will make a more discerning audience for any visual statement..."
The process of creating a visual message can be described as a series of steps from a number of rough sketches probing for solutions to increasingly refined versions toward a final choice and decision. The key to perception lies in the fact that the whole creative process seems to reverse for the receiver of visual messages. First, he sees the visual facts, either information drawn from the environment, which can be recognized, or symbols, which can be defined.
On the second level of perception, the subject sees the compositional content, the basic elements, and the techniques. It is an unconscious process, but through it is the cumulative experience of information input. If the original compositional intentions of the visual message-maker are successful that is, have been brought to a sound solution, the result is coherent and clear, a working whole. If the solutions are extremely successful, the relationship between content and form can be described as elegant.
With bad strategic decisions, the final visual effect is ambiguous. Aesthetic judgments involving words like "beauty" need not be involved at this level of interpretation, but rather left to a more subjective point of view.
“The interaction between purpose and composition, between syntactical structure and visual substance, must be mutually strengthening to be visually effective. Together, they represent the most important force in all visual communication, the anatomy of a visual message.”
We judge the work of children and primitives as crude, but before we accept this judgment, we should reevaluate the work on the basis of its purpose. Appropriateness has great effect on any visual work, and the intensity and purity of this style should be given its due.
Reality is the basic and dominating visual experience. For example the total general category of the bird is defined in elemental visual terms. A bird can be identified through a general shape, linear and detailed characteristics. All birds have some connecting, shared visual referents within the broader category.
All visual information of a particular object can easily be obtained through various levels of the direct experience of seeing. We all are the original camera; we all can store and recall for use this visual information with high visual effectiveness.
“The difference between the camera and the human brain lie in the question of faithfulness of observation and ability to reproduce the visual information. It is clear that the artist and the camera hold some special expertise in both areas.”
Beyond a realistic three-dimensional model, the closest thing to actually seeing a bird in direct experience would be a carefully exposed and focused photograph in full and natural colour. The photograph matches the facility of the eye and brain, replicating the real bird in the real environment. We call the effect realistic. It should be noted, however, that in direct experience, or on any level of the scale of visual expression from photograph to impressionistic sketch, all visual experience is intensely subject to individual interpretation.
The monochromatic representations we so readily accept in the visual media are tonal stand-ins for colour, for what is, in truth, a chromatic world, our richly coloured universe. While tone is related to questions of survival and is therefore essential to the human organism, colour has stronger affinity to the emotions. It is possible to think of colour as the aesthetic frosting on the cake, rich, and in many ways useful, but not absolutely necessary for creating visual messages.
“Colour is loaded with information and one of the most pervasive visual experiences we all have in common. It is, therefore, an invaluable source for visual communicators. In the environment we share the associate meaning of the colour of trees, grass, sky, earth and on endlessly to where we see colour as a common stimulus. And there, we associate meaning.”
We know colour also under a broad category of symbolic meaning. Red means something, for instance, even where it does not have any environmental connection. The red that is associated with anger has been carried over in the "red flag (or cape) wave in front of a bull." The colour red has little significance for the bull, who has no sensitivity to the colour, but only to the fact that the cape or flag moves. Red means anger, and love, and warmth, and life, and maybe a hundred other things. Each colour has as many meanings, associative and symbolic. Thus, colour offers an enormous vocabulary of great usefulness in visual literacy.
Since perception of colour is the single most strongly emotional part of the visual process, it has great force and can be utilised to express and reinforce visual information to great advantage. Colour not only has universally shared meaning through experience, but it also has separate worth informationally through symbolically attached meaning. In addition to the highly negotiable colour meaning, each of us has our own personal subjective colour preferences. We choose our own colour statements and settings. But there is little analytic though or concern about what methods or motivation we use to arrive at our own choices in terms of the meaning and effect of colour. Whether we think about it or not, realise it or not, we tell the world a great deal when we make a colour choice.
Texture is the visual element that frequently serves as a stand-in for the qualities of another sense, touching. But, in fact, we can appreciate and recognize texture either by touch or sight individually, or by a combination of both. It is possible for a texture to have no tactile quality, only optical, like the lines of type on a printed page, or polka dots on material, or crosshatched lines in a doodle. Where there is actual texture, the tactile and optical qualities coexist, not like tone and colour which are unified in their comparable and even value, but separately and uniquely, affording individual sensation to the eye and the hand, even though we project onto both strong associative meaning. What sandpaper looks like and what sandpaper feels like have the same intellectual meaning, but not the same value. They are singular experiences which may or may not suggest each other under certain circumstances. The judgment of the eye is usually checked on by the hand by actual touching. Is it really smooth or does it just look that way? Is that an indentation or a raised mark?
Texture has reference to the composition of a substance through minute variations on the surface of the material. Texture should serve as a sensitive and enriching experience.
“At the 1967 Montreal Expo, the 5+ Comingo Pavilion was designed for visitors to explore the quality of their five senses. It was a popular and enjoyable exhibit. People sniffed away at a series of funnels offering a variety of odours, even though they suspected, and justifiably, that some would be unpleasant. They listened, they looked, tasted, but they stood hesitant and inhibited in front of the yawning holes designed to be reached into blindly.”
What did they fear? It appears that the natural, free, "hands on" investigation approach of the baby or young child has been conditioned out of the adult. Whatever the reason, the result starves one of our richest senses.
But in this increasingly simulated and plastic world, the problem arises infrequently. Most of our textural experience is optical, not tactile. Not only is texture faked rather convincingly in plastics and printed material and faked fur, but, also, much of what we see that is painted, photographed, and filmed convincingly presents texture that is not there. If we touch a photograph of silky velvet, we do not have the convincing tactile experience the visual clues promise.
Abstraction toward symbolism requires ultimate simplicity, the reduction of visual detail to the irreducible minimum. A symbol, in order to be effective, must not only be seen and recognized but also remembered and even reproduced. It cannot by definition, have a great deal of detailed information. The more abstract the symbol, the more penetration of the public mind is necessary for the education to its meaning.
Not only in language does the symbol exist as an information-packed means of visual communication, universal in meaning. It is used broadly. The symbol must be simple and refer to a group, an idea, a business, an institution, or a political party. Sometimes it is abstracted from nature. It is even more effective for the transmission of information if it is a totally abstract figure. In this form it becomes a code that serves as an adjunct to written language.
“The symbol is anything from a simplified picture to a highly complex system of attached meaning like language or numbers.”
Abstraction, however, need have no relationship to actual symbol-making when symbols have meaning only because it is pinned on them. The reduction of all we see to the basic visual elements is also a process of abstraction which, in fact, has far more significance to the understanding and structuring of visual messages. The more representational the visual information, the more specific its reference; the more abstract, the more general and all-encompassing it is.
“Abstraction, visually, is simplification toward a more intense and distilled meaning. Human perception strips away surface detail in response to the need to establish balance and other visual rationalisations.”
Abstraction can exist in visual matters not only in the purity of a visual statement stripped down to minimal representational information but also as pure abstraction, which draws no connection with familiar visual date, environmental or experiential.
Abstraction is the primary tool in the development of a visual plan. It is most useful in the process of uncommitted exploration of a problem and development of visible options and solutions. The nature of abstraction releases the visualizer from the demands of representing the finished final solution, and so allows the underlying structural forces of the compositional questions to surface, the pure visual elements to appear, and the techniques to be applied with direct experimentation.
“Abstraction is a dynamic process filled with starts and false starts but free and easy by nature.”
Mainstream research on children and television has tended to define children as more or less 'incompetent' viewers. What children do with television is typically compared with adult norms, and thereby found wanting. Children, it is argued, are unselective, uncritical and unsophisticated viewer. They lack many of the ‘skills’, which are required to make sense of television and to use it in a responsible and sensible way. “children are incapable of distinguishing between television fantasy and reality; they are unable to identify the essential elements of a narrative or the motivations of characters; they do not understand the persuasive functions of advertising; and that they are ignorant about how television is produced.”
On analysing cartoons, it is usually the verbal code, which carried the necessary clues for children to 'understand' the plot as a whole. Children have been observed to pay greatest attention to television when other children are talking.
Cartoons are a long-standing target for the critics of children’s television, and at the same time a firmly entrenched favourite viewing category for younger viewers.
It will be too difficult to go through all the different cartoons, which are suitable for children so I will just concentrate on the series Fangface. Even in the 50 second long opening sequence there is a vast amount of meaning. In the sound track, the dialogue and sound effects during the first hundred shots are as follows:
___________________________________________________________
Introduction
‘Every 400 years a baby werewolf is born in the Fangsworth family, and so when the moon shined on little Sherman Fangsworth he changed into “Fangface”.’
[Howls, music in.]
‘A werewolf! Only the sun can change him back to normal. And so little Fangs grew up and teamed up with three daring teenagers, Kim, Biff and Pugsie, and together they find danger, excitement and adventure.’
[Music and sound effects continue.]
‘Who can save the day. Who can run the race and right the wrongs. None other than “Fangface”!’
Video: Fangface Opening Sequence
___________________________________________________________
The verbal language here accompanies a visual text, which is much richer in that there are many more images than words. But the verbal language affects the interpretation of the accompanying visual text. One important thing it does is to assign names. They label some images and ought to make them easier to recall and use in verbal language, giving them salience, and imposing specific interpretations on them. Barthes calls this function ‘anchorage’, by which he refers to the function of verbal language in limiting and tying down the ambiguity and multiple meanings of visual signs.
Verbal language also communicates abstract concepts such as ‘400 years’, ‘the Fangsworth family’, which are not present in the visual images. Words can convey concepts like time and causality more directly than pictures. Although most of the words are simple, the overall meaning of the text is actually very difficult to interpret. If its larger structures are perceived at all, they will be seen as contradictions. However, there are strong pressures against this contradictoriness being perceived. Even for adults the overall message will tend to decompose into chaos of apparently unrelated fragments, a series of rapid and discrete small-scale syntagms. Children, we can hypothesize, will hardly bother to ‘read’ the larger message at all, and its contradictory elements will float together in their memories arbitrarily and without recognition of their lack of coherence.
“Narratology has made it clear that, while narrative can have any number of functions (entertaining, informing, persuading, diverting attention, etc.), there are some functions that it excels at or is unique in fulfilling. As well as being a particular mode of knowledge, the narrative always reports one or more changes of state. It does not merely reflect what happens; it discovers and invents what can happen.”
It is the novel: an abridged, and simplified version, to be sure, but, in that respect, like the one-volume version of Clarissa constructed for busy or impatient readers or like the abridged and simplified Gulliver's Travels constructed for the amusement of children. Narratives are therefore quite manifest, material, and are just retellings. The importance comes from the different versions- of those same narratives, which are carefully constructed by someone in particular, on some occasion, for some purpose in order to suit a particular target audience.
For example there are many versions for Cinderella; some may not be suitable for the younger audience but may interest the older generation:
"...the one that appears in Julius E. Heuscher's volume, A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales: Their Origins, psycho-sexual development. The three visits to the prince's ball, he suggests, are occasions for erotic arousal from which the young girl flees, trying to evade sexual maturity..."
This reading is, of course, an 'interpretation' of Cinderella. It is also a retelling and thus a version of the tale; indeed, it also represents an attempt to identify the basic story of Cinderella, though it is certainly not the same basic story that might be identified by most people and it is far from the Disney version suited for the younger audience.
The modality (or perceived reality) of the visual message is thus the product of a series of judgments made by the reader. This process can be seen to have two dimensions. On the one hand, it depends upon our recognition of formal or stylistic properties that are internal to the text. For example, most cartoons employ graphic conventions- forms of simplification (Pocoyo) and exaggeration (tom and jerry)- that are clearly at a greater remove from 'reality' than the rather different photographic conventions of live action filming.
However natural they may appear, these conventions are of course subject to historical and cultural variations; and they are learnt rather than innate. 'Realism' is, in this sense, a relative term; texts are defined as 'realistic' in terms of their relationships with other texts that have been perceived as such in the past.
On the other hand, our judgments also depend upon criteria that are external to the text- that is, upon our own experience of, or beliefs about, the real world. Such experiences and beliefs are of course not without their inconsistencies and contradictions; although, broadly speaking, it should be harder to make reliable judgments where the reality that is depicted is remote from our own experience. Yet the potential for diversity here is clearly enormous, perhaps particularly for children, whose understanding of the conventions of the medium and of the world in general is still rapidly changing:
“Over the last twenty years or so, there have been some dramatic changes in the way that images are produced, in the ways we meet and access them, and in the kind of relationship we have to them. The fact that we are not immersed in virtual worlds while wearing old style head-sets and retro data-gloves does not mean that the virtual has not become an important characteristic of visual culture.”
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Buckingham, D (1993) Children Talking Television. London: Falmer Press
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