Elaborate writing response
Statement
What I wanted to comprehend by means of this project was the impression of having a full picture when given incomplete, discrete parts. Because it seemed so vague, I grew curious about its cause, mechanism, principles, as well as feasibility, level of predictability and manipulation.
The first iterations based strongly on observed and analysed examples in visual storytelling. Since the investigated phenomenon is closely related to workings of perception, my inspiration shifted from visuals to qualities found in writing and language, which I paraphrased in animation. From showing separate pieces combined together in numerous ways, I gradually moved towards indicating space, appearance, movement and presence that was supposed to reach for one’s connotations and serve as a prompt for his/her own narrative.
The process resembled learning to use a tool, developing the understanding of the areas under and beyond my control. With time, I realised that my products, as not animations in themselves but what one sees in them, were partly workable, as I could base on my grasp of the universal principles of perception and partly unforeseeable, dependent on the viewer’s unique understanding. They were the stimulus, the starting point, but did not constitute a finished product on their own.
Annotated bibliography
1. Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together
Latour, B. ‘Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together’, Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol. 6, pp. 1-40
When starting to work on the project, I had the impression of the subject being very deep, intriguing, hard to grasp, and at the same time simply obvious, as it touched on things we do unknowingly all the time. It was in a way uplifting to read Latour’s discussion on this duality. He, too, had that ‘sinking feeling’ of alternating between grasping the problem and falling into trivialities.
The approach he suggests to take is ‘to look at the way in which someone convinces someone else […] and to recognise the first author’s ownership and originality’ and then ‘the ‘things’ you gathered and displaced have to be presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there’, which can be achieved by creating new objects having the observed features.
In the first set of iterations it meant literally repeating collected and categorised techniques with my own set of images. Later, I reached for essays describing someone’s methods in detail, that I would translate to my medium. Either way, it was a process of finding solid, compelling examples of manipulating perception, and then recreating them in my own way.
2. Gestalt Principles of Perception – 5: Closure
Rutledge, A. (2009) Gestalt Principles of Perception – 5: Closure, available at https://andyrutledge.com
By and large, Gestalt principles of perception are considered as aid in graphic design work. Rutledge explores them in depth, and sheds more light on the principle of closure, its presence in everyday life, its profound repercussions on historic events, its vital role in building one’s world view.
He explains that ‘presented with less than the full picture, we attempt to […] fill in missing information and form a complete image or idea based on common or easily recognisable patterns from our past experience and understanding’. Needless to say, we never have the full picture, therefore all our opinions and decisions base on the drawn conclusions. We fully trust the illusion we create to comprehend the complex reality, we unintentionally deceive ourselves and let be mislead by others.
Thanks to Rutledge’s article, I thought of the principles of perception not as a fun fact but as a universal tendency of human mind to make assumptions and to come up with connections between given bits of information, which lays at the core of our understanding of the world. I was open to notice its working in various contexts and different forms.
3. A temporary Cessation of Habit: On experiencing Landscape
Sławek, T. (2015) ’A temporary Cessation of Habit: On experiencing Landscape’, Herito. Thinking the Landscape, vol. 19, pp. 12-21
Sławek calls the tendency mentioned above a habit of seeing the world as ‘imag-ed’, constructed from components mimicking reality. What he tries to explore however, are the occasional situations when one immerses so much in what he looks at, that it slips his constant urge to synthesise, to represent the world around him as a model, a system, and pushes him into a brief state of experience – ‘an interruption in the routine of existence’. The ‘I’ blurs into background, and ‘a different form of the world becomes illuminated’, the focus shifts to a detail which entirely fills one’s attention.
In my project, I saw it in the animation of the words spoke by people passed by on a sidewalk. There was no suggestion of what one sees, just the glimpses of someone else’s life. After an attempt to take it further by adding visual aspect, I moved on to other concepts. Nonetheless, the idea of focusing on something small, brief, on a moment, lead me to using haiku as another reference.
4. Yosa Buson: Haiku Master
McFadden, E. (2011) ’Yosa Buson: Haiku Master’, Kyoto Journal, available at https://kyotojournal.org/fiction-poetry/yosa-buson-haiku-master/
In the article, McFadden translates Buson’s haikus and explains their layers of complexity. The subtleties of ideographic language giving space to multiple meanings. The words being only prompts for eyes of imagination, painting a different picture in front of everyone. The vague boundary between the lines, and their meanings affecting each other in ambiguous way. Despite a very condensed form, and seemingly simple topics, haiku holds a lot of room for interpretation. The image it conveys is not blurred or confusing, but flexible – it stretches between a number of images.
It encouraged me to let go of holding on to one scenario I want to get across. Clarity is not a binary thing, and perception is impossible to control and predict. All those directions the mind could follow are not something to lead, limit, force or define. The images I create would me my interpretation of the artist’s words left for someone else to interpret once again. The more open and ‘spacious’ they would be, the more interesting results. I also wanted to translate that soft transition from line to line to visual scene to scene.
5. The Media is the Massage
McLuhan, M. (1967) ’The Media is the Massage’, Penguin Books
Marshall McLuhan argues that perception is shaped by the media. He blames the alphabet, as ’a construct of bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together […] in prescribed order’, for narrowing our perception and forcing on us the oversimplified, fragmented, linear, and sequential vision of space and time, which prevents us from grasping the complexity of reality.
At first sight, it contradicts the principle of closure. But perhaps its mechanism only helps us to cope with our unnatural, misshaped perception? Maybe if we could fully immerse in the multi-sensory experience in the first place, there would be no need for pattern recognition and explanations?
Domination of the sight as organic analogue of abstract thinking, was born in the ancient Greece, along with seeing oneself as detached from the world, which remained the core of western philosophy. Sadly, vision’s being so distanced from reality, is exactly the reason for its vulnerability to illusion and misunderstanding. On the East however, there’s no separation, no distinction, reflected in (or shaped by) the structure of iconographic language, which allows multiple meanings and storylines to coexist in one sentence.
This reasoning ties together language and perception as two sides of one coin, and gives meaning to drawing inspiration from language. It also explains even more clearly the mind seeing what is not there – it fills in the gap for the deluded eye.
6. The Death of the Author
Barthes, R. ‘The Death of the Author’, Fontana Press, pp. 143-148
Barthes explores in his essay who is hidden behind the words in the writing, what is that sense of presence we experience as readers. His reasoning leads to a fascinating concept that this is not a creation of writing but reading. ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’.
What he calls ‘the reader’ is a construct inside one’s mind when approaching a text, and what holds together all the words otherwise separate and meaningless. Personally, I see it as another example of human brain persistently looking for relations between everything it receives and reaching for the most convenient explanation, even if it would mean deluding itself.
For my project it meant, firstly, that it was possible to evoke a sense of presence that I tried to add to the last iteration, and secondly, that my project comes into being in a beholder’s mind just like a world depicted in a book.
7. Literature down to a pixel
Tenen, D. (…) Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation Stanford California: Stanford University Press, Extract pp. 165 – 195
Tenen discusses the nature of perception in relation to the nature of the world. Is the reality whole and continuous, and does perception simply cut it in artificial, discrete parts? He rather says that both of them combine continuous with discrete. Like nature evolves by breaking things apart and creating them again, so does human brain. ‘The mind receives images of the world that it compares with existing stored images to produce a new composite image that is once again stored into memory’.
For me, the word ‘composite’ is key. The material I work with is not graphics, words or animation but what perception makes of them, the illusion it creates. On the other hand, the illusion would not come into being without a suggestion on the screen. That leads to a conclusion that what my project comes down to is the consensus of my intentions put into work and the image in the back of viewer’s head.
8. Satoshi Kon – Editing Space & Time
Zhou, T. / Every Frame a Painting (2014) Satoshi Kon – Editing Space & Time. July 25th. Available at: https://youtu.be/oz49vQwSoTE
Tony Zhou dedicated this video essay to Kon’s unique approach to directing animated movies: ‘Not just elastic images, but elastic editing – a unique way of moving from image to image, from scene to scene’, used to blur time and space. The mind expecting a linear sequence is deceived by simultaneity of past and present, life and dreams. Not surprisingly, it remained a loose inspiration in the back of my mind as I kept exploring the medium of animation.
Only at the end of the project, however, did Zhou’s words come back to me when I realised I was trying to grasp the duality, which he put so accurately: ‘Kon felt that we each experience space, time, reality and fantasy at the same time as individuals and also collectively as a society.’ It confirmed my hunch about the twofold nature of perception, layering universal mechanism of human mind and collective memory with each person’s unique constellation of experience, context, character and so on. Kon’s work proved it in practice.