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.

Symbolism

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

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.”