Book 3 - Visual Communication: More than meets the eye

Notes
Introduction

• 'The world presents itself in manifold ways to the sense of vision.' (pg. 11)
• Innocence - '..pre-verbal state of the infant whose world had an immediacy between cause and effect, a world where form and content are fused, where no distinction is perceived between message and meaning.' (pg. 11)

The Perceptual Connection

• 'The issue of illusion is central to much of visual representation, it plays a part in, for example, perspective, photography, film, and computer-generated imagery.' (pg. 13)
• 'Through illusion a world of make-believe or of pseudo-reality is open to manipulation when the media is one that centres upon vision.' (pg. 13)

Framing and Context

• 'The eye is naturally given to framing, to seeing things in relationships within frames which we call contexts; because it is uni-directional it provides, at any single moment, only one frame from a wider field.' (pg. 23)
• 'such definitions stem from the nature of vision itself, from its focusing and framing.. meditated images become proxy for reality.' (pg. 23)
• 'the viewer is put more closely to into relation with the natural order of things; as we might say, closer to things; and, of course, cinema-verite is founded upon inclusion of the apparently irrelevant, of peripheral information, of fulsomeness in the attempt to portray real-life.' (pg. 23) - this is a great point. Look more into this!

The Inclusiveness of Vision

• 'Vision is grounded in frames, the forward-looking eye guarantees this. Everything seen is perceived in relationship to something else within the frame of vision.' (pg. 39)
• 'This inclusiveness of vision, in which even the least significant items and their relationships within the field of vision contribute to the image received on the retina, is the natural order of things, the ultimate reality. And it is within this province of excessive detail, of extraneous information serving no apparent utility to the observer, that artists and image makers in general can generate a feeling of reality in their work.' (pg. 40)