The Polemics of Visual Thinking
Introduction
"Visual thinking calls. . .for the ability to see visual shapes as images of
the patterns of forces that underlie our existence - the functioning of minds,
of bodies or machines, the structure of societies or ideas."(Arnheim, 1969:
p.315)
Vision is fundamental to our abilty to comprehend
and communicate with the world around us and world within
us. Interior cognitive dialogues rely on many mediums, the most prevalent
being language and image. There is a disturbing cultural tendency to
rely solely on language for the communication of complex ideas, and use
images frequently, but with little thought for their powerful potential
if used with thought and insight. Education, in particular, abandons
imagery after the first few years, and even classifies the study of visual
imagery as not only secondary to the aquisition of language, but
as optional. In a culture whose reproduction of images is increasing not
only in volume, but format: from television, to cinema, advertising,and the
web - we are being buried in optic imput that we have learned to decode
by enculturation. We can experience it, but we have not learned how to
reflect on it - to analyze it, or to create our own vision.
It is my firm belief that an education in decoding and creating imagery -
to move from simply receptive to active - will not only be beneficial,
but necessary.
As the artist Diana Michener states: "I have always taken
pictures the way other people keep journals and diaries. It is a way of
ordering my reactions to the world, of placing my ideas and feelings in a
concrete form outside myself, of breaking my isolation."
(Michener: p.152)
In her book Notebooks of the Mind, Vera John-Steiner points out that
while characterizing their approches to thinking, the artists she interviewed,
"highlighted an oft-ignored aspect of reflection, the visualization of
ideas."
(John-Steiner: p.83, emphasis added)
A need to re-order the flow of human experience, by reshaping it, or even
simply remembering it, requires multiple mediums - particularly those of
langauge and image. Language is a highly conventionalized form of expression,
" . . .but images - the constituent forms of visual thought . . ." are more
difficult to either standardize or even to define.
(ibid.)
As many have
pointed out, there is no dictionary of images - visual
expressions are unique to each individual's personal symbolic system based
on memory and imagination. But images are key to comprehending and
communicating with the world around us. And the dismissal or imprecise
use of the visual, partcularly in the realm of education, is at the very
least disturbing, and for those children who have an innate preference for
the visual, it can be tragic.
Vision itself, on the logistical level, is more complex than we have ever
imagined. As we have expanded our thinking about thinking over the
centuries,
the peculiarities of vision have intrigued not only phiolosophers and
artists, but physicists and behaviorial scientists. As infants, we scan
the immediate environment, attempting to detach the background, and form
a context for the details which will be of specific adaptive value for
us.
This process is refined over time, but remains basically the same into
adulthood. The incredible achievement of this lies in the fact that we
rely not only on "wired-in perceptual mechanisms" to categorize what we
see, but that our process of seeing, and understanding what we see
"
. . .consists of a lengthy process of constructive
activity."(John-Steiner,
p.22) As the psychologist Ralph Haber stated: " . .[T]he perceiver may
see the world before he knows it."
(Ibid.).
The perceiver constructs
flexible frameworks from vision as a whole, plus the contents of single
glances, interpreting what is seen based on what we have seen in the
past,
contextualizing. As Richard Gregory states in The Intelligent
Eye
"Perception must, it seems, be a matter of seeing the present with
stored
objects from the past."
(Gregory, p.10) The effort of linking past and
present experience can easily apply to our neural pathways devoted to
vision, as they can to the creation of images as art. It is the
importance of images firstly for themselves, as well as for inner
vision as a mode of interior cognitve dialogue, and for visual
literacy
in education both in school and on the web that I advocate repeatedly
in
this space.
This site itself is divided into two sections. The first section
sketches
out a brief history of visual thinking, including: a description of the
major
schools of thought organized around the importance of mental imagery,
some
of the uses mental imagery has been put to, both scientific and
artistic,
and finally offering a tentative solution towards the incorporation of
visual imagery into the educational lexicon, as a fundamental aspect of
any and every individual's literacy.
"While language is a socially constructed and conventialized mode of
expression," states Vera John-Steiner ", no corresponding single visual
language exists."
(John-Steiner,
p.34) However, attempts have been made not only to
incorporate
visual imagery, but to highlight the inherently visual nature of both
thought
and language. In A Primer for Visual Literacy,Donis A. Dondis
emphasizes the need for, and burgeoning possibility of, mass visual literacy
through technological innovations:
"If the invention of movable type created a mandate for universal verbal
literacy, surely the invention of the camera and all its collateral and
continually developing forms makes the achievement of universal visual
literacy an educational necessity long overdue."
(Dondis: p.x)
The second section deals with the "disorientation problem"
(Rouet
and Levanon, p.19) described by hypertext users, specifically in an
educational setting. I equate the fiend described in The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge with this "disorientation problem",
and argue that the discomfort experienced by hypertext users can be
traced
both to the widespread use of unimaginative, visually monotonous HTML,
and
at the other extreme the ornamental and random use of imagery out of
a
context in which it could be meaningful.
This site attempts to follow a set of logical rules based on research
done in the fields of memory, of visual thinking, and on hypertext
usage.
The images in the key at left correspond in content and color to the node
of text they represent, to aid in orientation. The key also marks a path
of usage, changing the color around the nodes visited, to further enable
a
user to naviagate with the smallest amount of confusion. It is also
hoped
that this site will not fall into the category of "inert knowledge", as
proposed by Whitehead - "inert knowledge" - information without
understanding
- and that the user will decide to learn how to program hypertext, and
create their own site - to leap from the "experiential mode" to
the"reflective" one, as Norman describes them.
(Bereiter, Scardamalia:
p.77
, referring to Whitehead), In the webilography at the bottom of the
key,
I have included links to instructional sites which explain how to
create,
and more importantly, integrate, both text and image in hypertext.
The Polemics of Visual Thinking
The Fiend of Hypertext - or - The Visualization of Inert
Knowledge