Gestalt and storytelling

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When working on my Investigate project, I used the human mind’s tendency to find connections and patterns in pieces of information:

My intention was just to give context to overheard conversations of people walking through a pedestrian passage but in the end when looking at the composition it seemed like the image and the feeling of the place were build in the back of my head.

You can explain this putting separate pieces of information together and filling in the gaps with Gestalt theory, saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. In Elaborate project, I want to explore how it works, what do you need to achieve it, what are its rules.

To start, I searched for different tricks used in visual storytelling to play with our perception, and then tried to name, dissect and illustrate them on separate compositions (each would be considered one iteration). Those categories are not based on any text or research, only my observations on what I found, so there may be many more.

I decided to use the same images and put them together in different ways or contexts to brig out more the change in perception.

  1. Fragments of one view
Even though you see only fragments of images,
your mind builds them into one image of a person walking.

2. Context and elements

Loose composition of a place, objects, actions creates an image of some situation.

3. Looking through somebody’s eyes

When you see someone looking, your mind is happy to assume
that you see what this person is seeing,
her surroundings and actions.

4. Following someone’s line of thought

In this case when two groups of images are not easily related
the mind can still assume it’s someone’s thoughts,
dreams or memories.

5. Simultaneous actions

Another way of making sense of two groups of images
is seeing them as two things happening at the same time.

6. Following someone’s gaze

Following the idea of seeing through someone’s eyes,
what happens if there is more than one person looking?
We connect the dots and see someone looking at someone looking at something.

Not to mention seeing instantly two people going somewhere by car
without actually seeing a car.

When looking for references, I found out about Gestalt principles used in graphic design.

The basically explain the ways our mind tries to make sense of what it sees, how some things seem more related to each other than others, how we see continuity and fill in the gaps.

Later I found a series of articles about Gestalt principles and it seems that the principle of closure reaches further than simply closing a circle or a rectangle.

Here’s an article on that:

https://andyrutledge.com/closure.html

In this article the author, Andy Rutledge, says:

The principle of closure is literally about drawing conclusions. We humans are very adept at drawing conclusions from less-than-all the information.

It reaches into our experience and into our psyche to create a fiction and compels us to believe it. From these results we construct our opinions, assumption, understanding …our reality.

Here’s a fantastic example of how we collectively and unconsciously see patterns: