Visual language
Encyclopedia
Overview
An image which tramatizes and communicates an idea presupposes the use of a visual languageLanguage
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
. Just as people can 'verbalize' their thinking, they can 'visualize' it. A diagram
Diagram
A diagram is a two-dimensional geometric symbolic representation of information according to some visualization technique. Sometimes, the technique uses a three-dimensional visualization which is then projected onto the two-dimensional surface...
, a map
Map
A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes....
, and a painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
are all examples of uses of visual language. Its structural units include line, shape, color, form, motion, texture, pattern, direction, orientation, scale, angle, space and proportion.
The elements in an image represent concepts in a spatial context, rather than the linear form used for words. Speech and visual communication are parallel and often interdependent means by which humans exchange information.
Visual Language
Visual units in the form of lines and marks are constructed into meaningful shapes and structures or signs. Different areas of the cortex respond to different elements such as colour and form. Semir ZekiSemir Zeki
Semir Zeki is a professor of neuroesthetics at University College London. His main interest is the organization of the primate visual brain. He published his first scientific paper in 1967...
had shown the responses in the brain to the paintings of Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer was a Dutch painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime...
, Magritte
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
, Malevich
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician, born of ethnic Polish parents. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.-Early life:...
and Picasso.
Imaging in the mind
What we have in our minds in a waking state and what we imagine in dreams is very much of the same nature. Dream images might be with or without spoken words, other sounds or colours. In the waking state there is usually, in the foreground, the buzz of immediate perception, feeling, mood and as well as fleeting memory images. In a mental state between dreaming and being fully awake is a state known as 'day dreaming' or a meditative state, during which "the things we see in the sky when the clouds are drifting, the centaurs and stags, antelopes and wolves" are projected from the imagination. Rudolf Arnheim has attempted to answer the question: what does a mental image look like? In Greek philosophy, the School of Leucippus and Democritus believed that a replica of an object enters the eye and remains in the soul as a memory as a complete image. Berkeley explained that parts, for example a leg rather than the complete body, appear in the mind. Arnheim considers the psychologist, Edward B. TitchenerEdward B. Titchener
Edward Bradford Titchener, D.Sc., Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D. was a British psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt for several years. Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the mind; structuralism...
's account to be the breakthrough in understanding something of how the vague incomplete quality of the image is 'impressionistic' and carries meaning as well as form.
Meaning and expression
Abstract artAbstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
has shown that the qualities of line and shape, proportion and colour convey meaning directly without the use of words or pictorial representation. Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
in Point and Line to Plane showed how drawn lines and marks can be expressive without any association with a representational image. Throughout history and especially in ancient cultures visual language has been used to encode meaning " The Bronze Age Badger Stone on Ilkly Moor is covered in circles, lines, hollow cups, winged figures, a spread hand, an ancient swastika, an embryo, a shooting star? … It's a story-telling rock, a message from a world before (written) words."
Richard Gregory
Richard Gregory
Richard Langton Gregory, CBE, MA, D.Sc., FRSE, FRS was a British psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol.-Life and career:...
suggests that, "Perhaps the ability to respond to absent imaginary situations," as our early ancestors did with paintings on rock, "represents an essential step towards the development of abstract thought."
Perception
The sense of sight operates selectively. PerceptionPerception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
is not a passive recording of all that is in front of the eyes, but is a continuous judgement of scale and colour relationships, and includes making categories of forms to classify images and shapes in the world.
Children of six to twelve months are to be able through experience and learning to discriminate between circles, squares and triangles.The child from this age onwards learns to classify objects, abstracting essential qualities and comparing them to other similar objects. Before objects can be perceived and identified the child must be able to classify the different shapes and sizes which a single object may appear to have when it is seen in varying surroundings and from different aspects.
Innate structures in the brain
The perception of a shape requires the grasping of the essential structural features, to produce a "whole" or gestaltGestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a theory of mind and brain of the Berlin School; the operational principle of gestalt psychology is that the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies...
. The theory of the gestalt was proposed by Christian von Ehrenfels
Christian von Ehrenfels
Christian von Ehrenfels was an Austrian philosopher, and is known as one of the founders and precursors of Gestalt psychology.- Life :...
in 1890. He pointed out that a melody is still recognisable when played in different keys and argued that the whole is not simply the sum of its parts but a total structure.
Max Wertheimer
Max Wertheimer
- External links :* * * * *...
researched von Ehrenfels' idea, and in his "Theory of Form" (1923) – nicknamed "the dot essay" because it was illustrated with abstract patterns of dots and lines – he concluded that the perceiving eye tends to bring together elements that look alike (similarity groupings) and will complete an incomplete form (object hypothesis). An array of random dots tends to form configurations (constellations). All these innate abilities demonstrate how the eye and the mind are seeking pattern and simple whole shapes. When we look at more complex visual images such as paintings we can see that art has been a continuous attempt to "notate" visual information.
Visual thinking
Thought processes are diffused and interconnected and are cognitive at a sensory level. The mind thinks at its deepest level in sense material, and the two hemispheres of the brain deal with different kinds of thought.The brain is divided into two hemispheres and a thick bundle of nerve fibres enable these two halves to communicate with each other. In most people the ability to organize and produce speech is predominantly located in the left side. Appreciating spatial perceptions depends more on the right hemisphere, although there is a left hemisphere contribution.
In an attempt to understand how designers solve problems, L. Bruce Archer
L. Bruce Archer
Leonard Bruce Archer CBE , British mechanical engineer and later Professor of Design Research at the Royal College of Art who championed research in design, and helped to establish design as an academic discipline.-Early life:...
proposed "that the way designers (and everybody else, for that matter) form images in their mind's eye, manipulating and evaluating ideas before, during and after externalising them, constitutes a cognitive system comparable with but different from, the verbal language system. Indeed we believe that human beings have an innate capacity for cognitive modelling, and its expression through sketching, drawing, construction, acting out and so on, that is fundamental to human thought."
Graphicacy
The development of the visual aspect of language communication has been referred to as graphicacyGraphicacy
Graphicacy is concerned with the capacities people require in order to interpret and generate information in the form of graphics.Our society is becoming increasingly reliant on graphics to communicate information. Until recently, words and numbers were the main vehicles for communication –...
, as a parallel discipline to literacy and numeracy. Michael Twyman
Michael Twyman
Michael Twyman is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. He joined the university staff in 1959. He established a BA course in Typography & Graphic Communication which eventually grew into its own department in 1974...
has pointed out that the ability to handle ideas visually, which includes both the understanding and conception of them, should not be confused with the specific talents of an artist. The artist is one very special kind of visual manipulator whose motives are varied and often complex. The ability to think and communicate in visual terms is part of, and of equal importance in the learning process, with that of literacy and numeracy.
See also
- Data visualizationData visualizationData visualization is the study of the visual representation of data, meaning "information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information"....
- Information graphicsInformation graphicsInformation graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education...
- Musivisual LanguageMusivisual LanguageIn art, the musivisual language is a semiotic system that is the synchronous union between the language of music and the language of image. The term was first coined by the Spanish composer Alejandro Román, and indicates the existence of an own unique language of film music.For over a century, film...
- Nocturne (painting)Nocturne (painting)In visual arts, nocturne painting is a visual language that is often used within realistic treatments to depict scenes evocative of night or subjects as they appear in a veil of light, in twilight, or in the absence of direct light. Many artists develop their own methods to create nocturnes unique...
- PictogramPictogramA pictograph, also called pictogram or pictogramme is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance.Pictography is a...
- Writing systemWriting systemA writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...