Visual Rhetoric

"Visual Rhetoric" is an inter-college, inter-disciplinary collaboration between the London College of Communication and the London College of Economics. It captures some of the areas I am researching in terms of contemporary design curriculum. On the one hand I am investigating complex relationships between the designer and the viewer and then also the complexity that exists as we are exposed to more and more information to visually express. This project, which focuses on the visual mapping of complex data, captured my attention on may levels. It has also stimulated my thinking in relation to the possibility of collaborating with other faculties in my own work environment as part of expanding on my participatory research and further development development on into BUZZ.

COP Introduction Video

Oh the horror of watching myself on video but hope this provides a quick introductory overview of my COP intentions.

REV ENDED

What follows below are the 3 strands of work I have created during the revival of my personal creative practice during REV.

SynaeScape  – a sense of synaesthesia, my book of personal reflections and visual responses to both the subject of synaesthesia and also to the process of researching and designing around it within REV

SynaeScope – a series of photographic explorations expressing heightened sensory awareness and visually alluding to the brain mapping technologies that capture that state.

SynaeSence – a wall installation that attempts to map the synaesthetic mind in an abstract way.

SynaeScape - REV project 2

My book is entitled SynaeScape - a sense of synaesthesia, and is a personal account of the ideas and responses I have had to the subject of synaesthesia, through my research and through my visual explorations and expectations. Given the abstract nature of synaesthesia I felt that it was more appropriate not to attempt to pin down or explain the condition in the work I produce but rather flow with that abstraction and subjectivity of experience. So to some degree I have removed the subject matter in a literal sense and tethered it to an autobiographical account of its discovery  - in doing so I have moved the attention away from the subject and focused attention on my response to the topic. The book is as much a documentary as it is a document, an intuitive response to the information gathered and I have endeavored to capture my journey of discovery in its pages.

The cover uses thermochromic paper which reacts to the heat of the readers hands by changing colour – from a gloss black to shades of red, green and blue. It reacts immediately and hopefully sets the tone for the rest of the book in its engagement with the viewer and the way in which it underlines the personal nature of the creative work and the condition it describes.

Following is a small selection of sample pages from the book (it can be viewed in full in the movie clip above and I will also bring it with me to the next face to face day on October 15th)

The design of the book utilizes both paper and acetate in its make up and so the notions I have had since the start of the creative process in REV are being carried through – specifically those of layering views, altered perceptions, subjective individual views on the world, and of course engaging the viewer through the design – this I have addressed in the use of the materials, in the paper mechanics of the book  and hopefully too in the writing itself. I have used acetate to produce layering and staged delievery of the message. And also to emphasise subjective views – where printed elements across layers of acetate interact with eachother in an expression of how different people can perceive the same information in very different ways or to underline the idea of layers of perception working in unison.

The lift up flaps on this page, for example, read " f sharp; pear; seven" and these refer again to the sensory mingling where the colour yellow that is being revealed underneath can also cross over to these other things - be they the sound of a note, a colour perception of a number or the taste of a particular fruit. These occur in the 'synaesthesia & memory' section of the book where I talk about the way that synaesthetes have extra hooks upon which to hang a memory trigger. 

I  have used folding and binding to provide alternative views. These are used in different ways throughout the book, but one device for example creates an envelope type effect where the page is folded back on itself and bound into the spine.  My intention here is to communicate hidden aspects – whether they relate to memory or concealment of what lies beneath.

Also I have used die cuts which provide peep holes through to other pages in the book, and which also change how we read the visuals as they alter the context by revealing only part of the story, This could be interpreted as alluding to the non synaesthetes reality where we are not getting the richer more intense version of the world, my hope is these communicate too notions of altered views and perceptions.

I have used a couple of my SynaesScope images in the book also and below the image is used to enhance the communication on synaesthesia and its link to metaphorical thinking. The image is used to highlight the change in view from the literal where all can be seen clearly with the acetate set against the white background and then when you turn the acetate page there is a more metaphorical lateral view of it against the black background.

I also played with reflective paper to explore the communicative qualities in mirroring to express the impact of synaesthesia on emotions. I have used acetates extensively in this section too.

Elsewhere in the book, as you can see in the video, I have made use of the ampersand to allude to the richer more intense reality of the synaesthete – there is always more to their perception, everything is more intensified. In the spreads with the gradually increasing point size in the text I intended to communicate the idea of  becoming more and more consumed by the volume of the research I was getting into and also it represents the overwhelming nature of the condition for some synaesthetes  - like sensory overload. All these  devices will combine to, hopefully, engage the viewer both physically in the use of the book and intellectually and visually in decoding the communication as they work through the book.

SynaesScape -text in the book

Click on the images below to enlarge them and read the text written for my book. The text in the introduction itself gives details on the narrative style I used in the book, and why.

SynaeScope – REV project 3

My intention with these photographic explorations is to suggest the notion of heightened sensory feedback – the world as perceived by the synaesthete is richer and more intense. All the original images feature reflection, illumination, connectivity – this is their underlying theme. My intention is to convey something of the idea that the familiar scenes we perceive that play out in an ordinary way, have actually the potential for another way of seeing and perceiving – an altered perspective. In synaesthesia there is a crossing over from one sensation to another and also a literal crossing over that occurs from one brain area to another. MRI is one way to show the sensory and higher, or associative,  brain areas that cross over and underlie in synaesthesia. The element of the MRI comes into play subtly in the how the images are created and finished.  This is primarily done through the colours and abstraction of the shapes which also serve to communicate something of the heightened more intense sensory awareness of the synaesthete. The idea is to allude to the visualising that these brain mapping technologies provide. The intent is to express how what is before us is not always reflected back in the same and expected way to every individual – again looking at altered perceptions in the synaesthestes reality.  

SynaeSence - REV project 1

The idea for the visual approach to this work stems from the abstract nature of synaesthesia. In it I am not trying to create an image of synaesthesia in this piece, but attempting to express it in more abstract terms. The piece is a map of the mind of sorts - the senses each have an area in the white matter and are populated with colours allocated for each sense. I have assigned red to sight, blue to hearing, green to touch, yellow to smell and orange to taste.  The main colour for the sense dominates each pin stack but the other sense colours have also mingled in and crossed over. I have also included 2 areas that are not senses themselves - memory and emotion - but which nonetheless are tied in with our perceptions of the sensory world - in the way a smell can immediaely trigger memory and also the way in which synaesthetes have another ‘hook’ to hang memory from. Both memory and emotion are expressed with a dominance of silver, reflective of that which surrounds them. The final communication layer on this piece is the threading together of the pinstacks across the sensory zones to show the sensory and functional cross wiring of the synaesthetes brain.

See the blog posting on August 24 2011 for more on SynaeSence.