Visual Representation

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.