Crop of The Spinner by Billy Houdek, painting of a woman who talks too much while in the act of retelling a story. Source

The Hectare Lesson I recall years ago reading a scene in a book that has stayed with me since. I was about 11 and I think it was in one of Roald Dahl’s bio-works e.g. Boy. In any case, the narrator describes a teacher who early one morning takes his group of male students out into a freezing cold yard and asks them to stand on the markers he has placed out for them. There they stand, in one gigantic rectangle. The teacher then stands in the middle with a megaphone and booms  "Look around you. For the rest of your life you will hear about hectares. 1,000’s of hectares of rainforest destroyed. Hectares of desert to cross’. Look around you now and see a hectare." "This is what a hectare looks like". You can bet his students never forgot that lesson. And even I, never having stood on a hectare that cold morning, remember the lesson too.

Paper Bags 2007 (c) Chris Jordan Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour. (thanks Kenn)

* 

Visuals, and visual narratives, can sink incredibly deep.

Needless to say, I am thinking about visuals today and how I have been enamoured by their power for a while now. Some of you may even have noticed more visuals linked to my words over the last year. Indeed, I have been consciously playing and thinking around visual representations. I suspect my friend, Joel, was trying to point all this out in 2005, but it took me a while to play with them myself. Everything in its own time.

Perhaps because I came to them again because visuals are so good at showing a ‘whole’ with tangible clarity beyond words, in a way that we can meaningfully hold in our minds. It also links to a quote I am sitting with by Edgar Schein ‘We do not think and talk about what we see. We see what we are able to think and talk about‘. Sometimes visuals can bypass or catalyse that process.

In any case, I thought I would add some of my exploration’s bounty and more words below, and some others, sent to me by friends, for you. I will also add an insight that has appeared to me just now and may be fleeting so hopefully this captures a trace: letters, the alphabet, are themselves visual pictures that individually and together harness an infinite power with which to allow us to visualise/see the world around us.

 

New York Times photograph from the Year in Ideas by Zachary Scott December 12 2004 (source)

Visual Mapping People  (some)

• Martin Wattenberg
• Josh On
• Jason Salavon
• Chris Jordan
  
• Demetrie - looking forward to collaborating!

Visual Mapping Projects/Groups (some)

• Accuracy & Aesthetics established to improve the exchange of ideas and digital information across cultures and disciplines
• Gothamberg …is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings. Ëveryone who has lived in an apartment has a story to tell
• They Rule - created by Josh On, the web site visualizes the members of directory boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors….to create [visual] narratives of unsuspected influence in society. The best one I saw was in this article p8 Artistic Data Visualisation by Fernanda B Viegas and Martin Watternberg (recommend reading)
• Visual Complexity: a resource space for anyone interested in the visualisation of complex networks
• Interactive Universal Scale movie via Information Aesthetics and similar to Power of 10
  
• Though not necesarily complex, I also like tag clouds
  

Tate Modern, artist unknown (there is no authorship written anywhere and the woman who worked there informed me I could not buy any prints of it. Image Thanks Flickr and deeymon)

* 

I am also at the beginning of mapping dialogue. I have been wanting to do this for ages so figure the best way is simply to start. I am interested in highlighting that thoughts don’t happen in isolation and how different people from different areas communicate together to create something new. ie I want to visually show how dialogue is profoundly generative and healthy, and how we can all be part of new and remarkable things - discoveries, connections and more. For instance, did you know that Einstein spoke with Jung? I am not clear what it will look like but started with something akin to the Tate Modern Maps of Artists along a timeline (image above), only I want something more spherical. So far the closest I can think to do is blow up balloons…

You might find it interesting to know, given we are talking about mapping complex networks, that a lot of the images and people I am referencing here are all interrelated through dialogue and interconnected with my own life through fabulous serendipity. For instance, I discovered I could get to almost everyone listed in this post via one degree from one person, Eileen, who I met by chance through dialogue,  when facilitating a conversation lab workshop. However, Demetrie, who I met later in conversation about his own maps, via a great friend, Alice, could have pointed me in much the same direction.

Of course visual stories also has me thinking of my interest in visual journalism and graphic recording (thanks again Eileen) and of course, one of my focii, Digital Storytelling. Seems to be an increasingly growing area. Read an interesting comment here.

Which leads me to thinking about the sound of the human voice, and the visuals it creates itself, even if we can not see them. I have wondered often how we might communicate differently, or better, if we could actually see our letters visually fly in the air and impacted the world around them.

Which brings me full circle,  I hope with some added insight-depth into my thinking around visuals along with my brain dump (?)

 

Image same as first image, uncropped (source) 

 
PS I also want to say hello to some people who have emailed me lately both friends and ’strangers’ who have found me via google or other places and who have so kindly connected and shared their thoughts, words and more. I am SO appreciative of your support words and links - thank you!

And thank you for making it through this very long post! Please share comments, would love to hear your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 3:20 am and is filed under art, beauty, creativity, dialogue, digital storytelling, imagination, musings, stories, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.