Session 1: Places, Persons and Processes

3rd Global Conference

Tuesday 14th July 2009 – Thursday 16th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Young Children’s Responses to Visual Images: Preferences, Functions and Origins
Andri Savva
Department of Education, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Through out history art educators/researchers have studied the responses of children to art in order to develop programmes that include the critical analysis of works of art.  While much of the above research is considered significant in developing artistic activities for young children, these days the study of art within visual culture engages the learning of a range of visual forms emphasizing  its  multiple functions and meanings. Thus an exploratory study was designed to gather information regarding 6-8 years old children’s responses to visual reproductions of images. An open ended interview procedure was used. Four reproductions of visual images were selected: a realistic painting, an abstract painting, a photograph with social- political meaning and a popular culture image.  The sample included 17 participants (8 boys and 9 girls) between the ages of 6-8, drawn randomly from 9 primary schools, in urban areas of Nicosia, Cyprus.  Findings indicated that children identified the human source and the medium used for each visual image. In many cases children’s responses demonstrated a strong influence by media. The study identified some relevant factors underling children’s responses to a range of visual forms and highlights their potential for critical reflective thinking through the use of appropriate methods and approaches.

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Regarding Preservation of Nuance: Visual Literacy in the Perception of the Human Body
Jeanine Breaker
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

Visual literacy in human movement-analysis is critical in fields such as dance, theatre, industrial and medical design, fashion, and animation which is now broadly applied in both art and science. Exciting advances in visual communication for understanding and simulating movement (motioncapture, eye-tracking, body-scanning, digital image-capture) are rapidly replacing the traditional methods of art practice and pedagogy, such as life drawing. However, is reliance on this new technology affecting our visual literacy? Can an understanding of past methodology help us to monitor the quality of the tools we have come to rely on today?

For instance, training in computer animation technology has the tendency to develop expertise in the technology and not the underlying movement perception. This tendency has its affect on even the most current and sophisticated movement-analysis such as motion-capture. Although motioncapture itself is a precise tool with the potential to become a valuable cross-disciplinary movement-analysis resource, much of the accompanying animation software is substandard. For example, the standard virtual software provided within most motion-capture systems is extremely disproportionate and incomplete (below left). This anomalous juxtaposition of such an inaccurate skeleton provided within the most current and sophisticated motion-capture systems, is presented, and often accepted as accurate even within advanced scientific research and application. Acceptance of such substandard models can contribute to a visual culture of deficient movement and synthetic form, and presents potentially serious error when applied in movement training and medical and industrial design.

As practitioners and programmers increasingly rely on computer models with decreasing figural and movement-analysis training to scrutinize them, we face potential loss of the highly
specialized visual literacy required for identifying problems and creating solutions for the body and its movements. This paper introduces five years of AHRC movement-analysis research that merges new tools with traditional skills to enhance visual literacy.

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Reading the Visual: Language, Body, & Space
Mark Thorsby
Department of Philosophy & Religion, New Jersey City University, USA

To speak of visual literacies is to invoke an analogy between the signs of a language and the domain of the visual. And while a close parallel between these two fields of perceptive activity is certainly comprehensible, there are peculiar logical differences between linguistic and visual literacies that must be conceptually delineated prior to the task of ‘reading’ the visual.

This paper examines and articulates the limits of the analog between these two modes of perception and interpretation by drawing from the work of both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By activating an investigation into the phenomenological differences between seeing and speaking, I argue that the body itself plays a crucial role in the former that is not readily transmitted in a comparison with the later. Namely, the interpretation of the visual is not simply a matter of ‘reading’ signs, but also fundamentally evokes, involves, and references the activity of the bodily. As such, sound interpretation requires more than just the recognition, negotiation, or juxtaposition of cultural symbols; an acute awareness of the bodily relation between the perceiver and ‘text’ is critical.

Once this conceptual differentiation is made, I then turn to and conclude with a discussion on spatiality and its relation to visuacy in architecture. Every architectural space contextualizes the body; thus adding, reorganizing, or possibly transforming the texture, perception, and meaning of any visual media. The museum, as an architectural motif, perfectly embodies the bodily relation to the visual, although we might as easily speak of the hospital, the cinema house, the highway, or the garden. In essence, to be visually literate is to be spatially aware.

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Abstract Perception:Graphic Literacy and the Limits of Pictures
Thomas Forget
School of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

This paper examines a distinction between two types of visual literacy: pictorial and graphic. Even straightforward representational pictures involve cognitive processes that both rely on and transcend vision, but graphic modes of communication are more explicitly analytical and abstract. Graphic signs occupy an epistemological territory somewhere between pictorial images and linguistic alphabets.

Architecture is the vehicle through which this paper examines the distinction between pictorial and graphic communication. The inherent abstraction of the built environment necessitates a special form of visual communication. Architecture and urbanism defy objecthood and escape the limits of images. From the earliest known examples of orthographic projections in the 13th century, to the adoption and subsequent subversion of linear perspective in the 15th century, architectural graphics straddle the boundary between art and science. Through their interrogation of visual truth, they epitomize Modernity.

In the medieval era, appearance and reality were indistinguishable; the natural world was a divine composition of visual (and specifically pictorial) meaning. The medieval viewer is the antithesis of the prisoner in Plato’s cave. The invention of linear perspective changed everything. Perspective drawings resemble neither the ideal forms nor the misleading shadows in Plato’s cave. They are pictures constructed from graphics. Linear perspective is thus a dialectic between pictorial and graphic communication.

Linear perspective reflects the interaction between religion and reason and the separation of mind and body that defines Modernity. Its culture of visual investigation reappeared with the emergence of photography and cinema, and it is relevant again in the digital era. Linear perspective is a central theme of this paper because it embodies the pictorial/graphic duality of visual literacy.

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