A question of visual predominance

I think that it is arguable that there is greater predominance of the visual in media texts and what I would like to do at this stage of the argument is to bring into question the the idea that we live in a more visual moment in culture and at least to question the transparency of this assumption. I argue that the essentially, Kress and van Leeuwen cannot have their cake and eat it. That debate about the predominance of the visual misses an important point because, firstly, as Kress and others have argued, all forms of communication are of necessity multimodal and therefore cannot be described straightforwardly as either visual or non-visual, and secondly because, context, as framework of expectation, are fundamental to all communication and that those frameworks, by their very nature, cannot be described as being either visual or non-visual.

I will pick up on this point about framing later.

Such trends can be observed in the visual component of the presentation of news discourse, especially in the contemporary press where the visual nature of the medium has progressively been transformed, with technology being one of the drivers of these changes.One immediate consequence of this greater reliance on the visual in the press is the progressive breaking-up of the complete text into smaller constituent units and the increasing colonisation of the page by images and graphics. This begs the question as to whether this breaking-up of the text is a symptom of more visually oriented "modes of communication" or perhaps of a more visually oriented culture, and indeed forces us to ask the extent to which technology is an "agent of change" in this process.

Towards a new visual literacy?: a challenge to Kress and van Leeuwen

"Visuality" is a distinctive topic within visual studies and, like semiotics, it yields a potential set of research techniques which can be used to describe and analyse media texts, newspapers, for example. The concept of visuality sets up a useful generative opposition or dialectic between, on the one hand, the singularity of vision (sight as a sensory modality) and on the other; the multiplicity of of vision, or points of view, that is, the multimodal nature of forms of visual communication (vision as a semiotic reality).

Visual Literacy bridges both of these oppositions - the singular and the multimodal - and in doing so combines forms of language competence - literacy, with vision.

Associated with the phenomenon of visuality is the generally accepted view that, chiefly as a consequence of the rapid development of technologies for the production of media texts and other technologies that generate and distribute mass images, that most modern cultures have shifted in recent years towards more visually oriented ways of communicating. That, according to Kress and vanLeeuwen (1996), "[t]he last two decades have seen a far-reaching change in media and modes of communication" (p. 21). The point here being that general cultural process such as visual communication and the mass consumption of visually oriented media texts has increased inn the last few decades. Moreover, it is argued that a major part of this shift constitutes a move away from an "old visual literacy" towards a "new visual literacy" (ibid.).

Whilst it is arguable that technology may be entirely responsible for these shifts, much of the literature on visual communication tends to support this view, it is so often seen to be a central driver, an "agent of change", similar in its impact to, say, the printing press in fifteenth century Euroup (cf Eisenstein) in these shifts in modes of communication. Here it is definitely worth speaking inn terms of modality from a more technical perspective, since technology has shifted modes of representation to a point where, in both the research literature and in more general debate about the changing nature of public communication. It is assumed that we do now live in a culture where the image is dominant and in many circumstances in the mass communications context maintains primacy.

An example of how this polemic assiciated with visuality and visual literacy can be exemplified in resent research. In addition, the case of newspaper design is used as an exemlar:

"In newspapers, the pages of the 1960s are black and white, and covered in print: in the 1960s, by contrast, there is colour, there are images; and in many contemporary Western newspapers print has very nearly been pushed off the page" (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996).

There are many other examples of this kind of transparent thinking in the literature. In subsequent writing I wish to challenge this a priori, transparent assumption of the progressive visuality towards a "new visual literacy" that is evident in the work of Kress and van Leeuwen.

The Bradford Grid: big screen commission

Creativity and Leadership: a matter of identity and a question of design

This image was taken in my office - early morning Monday 15th March, 2010. A the top it shows two of my sketchbooks opened at strategic places the one on the left is a page that shows a photo taken a couple of years ago of a footpath, gravel, lettering, cigarette ends etc. This image surrounded by some of my own writing that is circling in a spiral around the picture. On the right of the table at the top is another page from a diary - the text that you can't quite read is from the previous post and looks at alternative ways of representing space - Miro and Modrian are good examples of the extremes in the representation of space and relations between objects in space in painting.

On the bottom half of the table on the left is a worksheet from a course that I attended - a six month long course in Leadership - I was a coach on the course and on top of the worksheet is my badge from the course. on the right at the bottom, an assignment from a course that I am currently doing at Uni - PGCert in Leadership and Management. In between these two documents are some name badges that I have used for work as well as my business card. All aspect of identity. All a question of Design in some way.

[Click on the image - it should expand for grater detail.]

Space - the final front...

Navigation is the planned action that is taken between spaces, between zones.

When the eye comes to rest - in dwell-time - it engages with a communicative artefact (say, a painting or a page) it then oscillates between a fixed point of interest and the search for another object.

The visual sense - grasps, speculates and questions: finds the necessary cues and clues to create meaning or value. It simultaneously gathers certainty, makes distinctions whilst it finds answers to the very questions that it seeks.

In truth, the eye is very rarely at rest. If it were, we would take in nothing.