7 Responses to “Using Visuals”

1. Natalie Shell Says:
   November 16th, 2006 at 3:01 am

   With thanks to Ken - a link to another great visual explanation - of Indiginous art: “Storytelling Aboriginal Style”

   http://www.pbs.org/howartmadetheworld/episodes/once/aboriginal/
   “The images that most Aboriginal artists paint today are the same images that were painted on rock walls thousands of years ago. The Barramundi fish, Yingarna, the Earth Mother, the Rainbow Serpent - these are paintings that each tell a unique story. However, the Aboriginal artist doesn’t paint a sequence of images as if outlining the plot of a story. Instead, they use single stylized images to trigger in the mind of the onlooker stories they already know.

   The use of a single image is only one part of their storytelling secret. These artist also use music, song and dance…
   But the use of a single image is only one part of their storytelling secret. These artists also use music, song and dance to enveloped their audience in a full multimedia experience designed to stimulate not only the eyes, but the ears as well. This soundtrack, then, is what has given Aboriginal stories the power to survive for thousands of years”

   ___

   Again am getting a sense of the Alchemist - travelling a long way away to find that everything was and always is inside us, and at home. That said I am not clear my journey is near complete…

2. Ken Says:
   November 17th, 2006 at 9:05 pm

   Your recent post on visuals, though, tweaks my interest again, especially the first picture, perhaps it’s modern but it reminded me of a cave painting, which reminded me (or my brain?) of a series called how-art-made-the-world, so I though I’d send you a link in case you might find it interesting…

   http://www.pbs.org/howartmadetheworld/episodes/once/aboriginal/

   It went out originally on the BBC, clearly PBS have picked up on it, and they have quite a nice little web site to explore (without needing a tv :). There is a book, but unusually the tv was better (must have been the visuals). When I saw the episode on cave painting I was hooked, and the series got better and better, touching on history, story telling and neuroscience (sometimes the ‘words’ of story seem to act like a trojan horse, speaking to a deeper part of the mind, a cover story if you like, or perhaps painting a picture to distract the chattering mind and reinforce the deeper story?).

   I saw a painting this week and it evoked the idea of a visual conversation, the painting engaging the brain of the viewer, more than just left brain (words) and right brain (picture) but the empathic front brain, feeling into the image (though maybe that’s just rubbish :) The bit that really got me in the series was where he talked of aboriginal art: what looked ‘odd’ to western ideas only part of the bigger story, and to truly speak to the audience was accompanied by a ’sound-track’ (like the campfire ghost stories, mood and scene is more than words - and there the visuals, we make them ourselves, prompted by the snap of a twig). Like a movie wouldn’t feel right without a soundtrack: the stories emerged from words, pictures and music - evocative characterisations, people that people can identify with, echoing timeless questions we ask to make sense of our fun, scary, complex and mythical world.

   Anyhoo, I will look forward to the unfolding of your continuing thoughts on visuals.

3. natalie shell Says:
   November 17th, 2006 at 9:08 pm

   Hi Ken, thank you so much for this!

   You have my interest piqued - what piece of Art did you see today?

   I really would like to know (and potentially post) the image that had you so enthralled/engaged

   And I also find your thoughts intriguing on Indigonous art! And it provides a key for me - makes me see that story has ALWAYS been a multimedia contextual experience… which fits perfectly into today’s new and emerging world!

4. ken Says:
   November 17th, 2006 at 9:09 pm

   Hello again :)

   First things first - you asked if you could share what I wrote last night: feel free , the great things about ideas is we can give them away and still have them - even better is the cross fertilisation and stimulation of new ones we my get in return :)

   So, last night I wrote about the soundtrack to the aboriginal story. Well, I went back to the book that accompanied the series and found that I missed something else, our westernised eyes only see a part, judging what we see, but it’s more than just music and words - he writes in the book..

   - “it was a symbolic form intricated into a cryptic network of law, land, ancestry and myth, and it could not be understood in isolation from the complementary media of story, song and dance”

   Ooh, dance - performance, “and” I’ve just had my interest tweaked again, never before noticing the word form in per-formance, what grows out of a story, in the space between audience and story teller? Dance, as two beings move around a space, connected in some way, patterns and symmetries emerging and form organising around it all. Symmetries breaking as form transforms, from caterpillar to butterfly, and stories passing on the wisdom of the tribal elders to explain why these odd transformations happen, when we’re ready to hear them. Could what we label as crisis be but a point in-between two stages of transformation? There’s so many ways this can go :)

   Buckminster Fuller talked of Pattern Integrity, how the hand he holds up is not a-hand, or the same hand as he had month or two ago, like the flowing river it’s constant change, just on a scale we tend not to notice - or pay attention to - and we label stages of transformation with permanent judgements. Ray Kurzweil seems to echo this…

   - “I am a completely different set of stuff than I was a month ago. All that persists is the pattern of organization of that stuff. The pattern changes also, but slow

   And you ask what was the painting that evoked the ideas of visual conversation. As I reflect on it, I now realise it wasn’t a painting but a series on a blog (http://amberlounder.blogspot.com/) and I have no idea where the feelings came from, the idea of going beyond left and right brain to the empathic part. I was reading a little poetry (which is not something I’d every done, always hating “English” as “taught” at school) and it was so evocative, transcending both page and grave. The painting on it’s own is just a thing (the thing-itself, if that’s not too metaphysical, or a lump of stuff to echo Kurzweil), it’s what happens when we stand in front of it, it was as if the painting was an instrument created by one brain to engage another brain, to reach out beyond the canvas (or the page of a poem) and hold the attention, not just evoking ideas but requiring more than the an internal reflection or representation of what the image said, a two-way communication: once the camera was invented there was no need for photo-realistic art. And now we see that in the dark of the cave, millenia ago, and throughout time, social beings have known how to engage the brain for millenia. Combine it with moving pictures, a soundtrack, some whole body sensuality (of the dance) and that’s an experience suitable for the rite of passage - the limbo, of in-betweenness, lacking which we get the crisis of modern ‘existence’? Patterns uninterrupted, we live on, under, behind but never really in the flow of being? Or does that just make it more special when we experience deeper connections?

   Oooh, do you drive? Ever experienced highway hypnosis? I look at my mp3 player and see three songs have played and i never ‘heard’ any of them, guess that’s a state of flow, though whether my words can make any sense of that stream of consciousness is another matter, so I’ll stop now :)

   Have a good day!

   …kenn

   PS. Your note about the Alchemist, travelling a long way to find everything was already inside us reminded me of the Zen ox-herding-pictures - are you familiar with them? I Googled them, just now for a refresher and came across a key principle of Zen “it does not rely on words or letters” - suddenly words just seem “part” of a larger whole :)

5. Natalie Says:
   November 17th, 2006 at 9:11 pm

   Ken - there is SO much here I need to ponder and let it work in my head but no doubt this has seeded a LOT for me - and it rminds me to get a book called “Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander, an architect who wrote a lot about living spaces and healthy context and I believe helped catalyse the field of environmental psychology.

   Thank you also for being a part of the conversation and taking the time to connect - and also for your support in my unfolding

6. Natalie Shell Says:
   November 27th, 2006 at 4:27 am

   http://www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/
   Storytelling: Passport to Success in the 21st Century
   Why is there a resurgence of interest among today’s business and organizational leaders in the ancient art of storytelling at a time when electronic communications might seem to make it obsolete? Human beings have been communicating with each other through storytelling since we lived in caves and sat around campfires exchanging tales. What is new today about the art of telling stories is the purposeful use of narrative to achieve a practical outcome with an individual, a community, or an organization. Four of the world’s leading thinkers on knowledge management explore how storytelling will become the key ingredient to managing communications, education, training, and innovation in the 21st century.

7. natalie Says:
   December 3rd, 2006 at 7:21 am

   http://elgg.net/csessums/weblog/137026.html
   Teaching, Learning, and Storytelling: Lessons from Pixar’s Creative Team

   “Storytelling and narrative are essential parts of any teaching and learning endeavor. Stories and jokes, if told well, elicit our interests; they serve as a means for capturing our attention and offer the potential for improving our understanding and retention of material (Egan 1989). Stories, like language itself, serve as a “symbolic mediator” in our ability to think and learn (Hicks 1995)….”

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