What is research - a concentration on

VISUAL RESEARCH AND VISUALISATION

RESEARCH

• Robert Frost, "Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more valuable in the free wild ways of wit and art. " source unknown. The great American poet characteristically throws his considerable weight behind the artistÕs claim to research in the service of creativity. The metaphor is characteristically based in the out of doors.

• The advancement of research over tutorial techniques alarmed the Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, "Research ! Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved and will never achieve any results of the slightest value." from Modern Poets on Modern Poetry.

THE APPEAL OF PICTURES

• Otto Neurath, "Long before I started to read I started to look at books that contained pictures and maps in my father's library. I looked especially at the atlas intended to accompany Alexander von Humboldt's famous Cosmos. Here were deserts, mountains, clouds, seas, strange plants and unfamiliar animals, marvels of many sorts. This world, presented in delightful drawing and colouring, satisfied my longing for a cosmic view. The arrangement of our library helped my liking for books with pictures. As often happens, the large books, many of which contained pictures and maps, were kept in the tall bottom shelves. I would take them out and lie down on the floor to look at them. I liked that position. Most children do. I soon realised the difference between pictures `made for children', and pictures with a more general appeal. I found that books describing inventions and crafts for children did so by using large pictures and `big' figures, but pictures intended for adults were smaller and not so colourful. The colourful pictures when the colours were clear attracted me much more than when they were vague and indeterminate. I have always remembered this." quoted from the Neurath manuscript, in Future Books, Vol III (undated) Otto Neurath was a pioneer not just of European Socialism but of the visual presentation of statistical information (the Isotype Institute whose archives are in the University of Reading). The Future essay is rare and no further extension was published as far as I know. His reputation was based on the ability of the designer with IsotypeÕs pictograms to impart sophisticated bodies of stastistical information with pictograms. There is a sort of telephone book of available pictograms published and in the University of Brighton Library.

THE DESIRABILITY OF THE IMAGE OVER LANGUAGE

• Ernst Lubitsch, German director, "In my silent period in Germany as well as in America I tried to use less and less subtitles. It was my aim to tell the story through pictorial nuances and the facial expressions on my actors. There were often very long scenes in which people were talking without being interrupted by subtitles. The lip movement was used as a kind of pantomime. Not that I wanted the audience to become lip readers, but I tried to time the speech in such a way that the audience could listen to their eyes. " That Lubitsch Touch [1968] quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak. Hitchcock too designed his own titles and developed as a film director in finding visual equivalents. As early as the films of Griffiths there was a developed (if stylised) body of acknowledged gestures to extend the audienceÕs understanding of the narrative.

CONCEPTS BECOME IMAGES AND GET OUT OF CONTROL

ÒThere are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to confound, and I, S/.T.Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of those who use five hundred words, more than needs to express an idea - that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than I or chose them more deliberately and discriminately. The second sort is those who use five hundred more ideas, images, resons, etc , than there is any need of to arrive at their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mindÕs eye of the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave one vague impression that there has been a greta blaze of colours all about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the omnipresence of each in all, platonically speaking... Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Anima Poetae.

IMAGES AS CONVERGENCE OF OTHER ARTS

• "Grammar contributes to painting its concordances; dialectics its logical conclusions; rhetoric its persuasion; poesie its inventive power; oratory its figures of speech; arithmetic its numbers; music its harmonies; symmetry its measures; architecture its level planes; sculpture its roundness; perspective and optics their magnification and diminution; and finally astromony and astrology their talents for the knowledge of the heavenly images. Who can doubt that [painting] , the transcendent sum total of all arts, is the chief art which comprises all the others ?" Antonio Palomino, "Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale," 1795-7, in E.Holt A Documentary History of Art Vol 2. An unusually grandiloquent claim when the creation of imagery was seen often as a lowly and undemanding servant of the other Arts.

VISUALISATION AND INTERPRETATION

"I would go so far as to say that if an illustrator or a potential illustrator does not see an image as soon as the phrase is given him, he should not illustrate a book: if he does not feel the excitement of a typographic page, he should not illustrate a book; if he has no dreams or aspirations, he should not illustrate a book; if there are no books he feels he would wish to illustrate, then he should not illustrate. These are some of the essential qualities of the illustrator; they must be already there." from John Farleigh, It Never Dies 1945. p.80 . The British illustrator, highly prolific - putting the capacity to visualise from text at the head of his list.

• Pablo Neruda Memoirs, of his childhood, "I grew older. Books began to interest me. Buffalo Bill's adventures and Salgari's voyages carried me far away into the world of dreams..."

• Graham Greene staying with his uncle, at Harston in Cambridge. Aged c 8, "It was at Harston I found quite suddenly I could read - the book was Dixon Brett, Detective. I didn't want anyone to know of my discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Balantyne's Coral Island for the train journey home - always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley. I still wouldn't admit my new talent, and I stared at the only illustration all the way to the junction. No wonder it so impressed itself on my memory that I can see with my mind's eye today the group of children posed on the rocks. I think I feared that reading represented the entrance to the Preparatory School.... I detested that absurd book Reading Without Tears. How could I be interested in a cat that sat on a mat ? I couldn't identify with a cat. Dixon Brett was another matter, and he had a boy assistant, who might easily, I thought, be myself....[of terrors] Another recurring terror was of the house catching fire at night and I associate it with the sticky colour plates in the Boy's Own Paper recording the exploits of heroic firemen. " Lists of favourite books of the period, Beatrix Potter and the influence on the writing of Brighton Rock. "The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on our shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching. I feel certain I would not have made a false start, when I was twenty-one, in the British American Tobacco Company, which had promised me a post in China, if I had never read Captain Gilson's Lost Column, and without a knowledge of Rider Haggard would I have been drawn later to Liberia ?" G.Greene, A Sort of Life.

DRAWING AND MEMORY

"[Harry] Furniss cultivated a trick of making rough notes blind in his pocket - a difficult job at first, but one at which improvement comes with practice. In my experience a better dodge in emergencies is to 'draw' notes with the forefinger upon the palm of the hand. After all, half the value of putting down lines on paper is that by action, the lines are also put down in memory... 'Spy' believed that his best work in pure caricature was a done from memory, but from memory ordered and educated by copious note-taking beforehand. " David Low, Ye Madde Designer, 1936. p.77

IMAGE WITH TEXT

William Saroyan, "To tell a story implies plainly a narrative ability. How to intersperse description with action, and in what quantities ? How much to dwell on the minor activities of a character, which will reveal that character, before continuing the major action of the drama itself ? How much dialogue? How much straight statement, how much silent implication of the underlying theme ? And so on. All these quantities will depend on nothing but the quality of the author's taste, and on his response to certain undeniable influences in life outside literature. I mean technical influences like, say, the cinema. Add now television and the increased of the photographed image in newspapers, magazines. In short, the great new currency of the Image. Whether this enormous pictorial increase makes us see more clearly is debatable: it is possible that too quick a succession of images becomes blurred, cancels itself out, as with the pictures in an art gallery when one tries to see too much in too short a visit; it is possible that a Victorian faced with a few oleographs absorbed much more (compare the lasting impression of the illustrations in a book read and prized in childhood). But what is certain is that the frequency of the image projected at us has resulted in an increase of movement or action. Even a motionless photographed figure, static in itself, implies action before and afterwards. And certainly in films and television you cannot have a figure on the screen sitting about and doing nothing for long. This has had its effect on writing. The pace has increased. " from William Sansom, The Birth of a Story, Chatto & Windus 1972.

• Jerome Singer on Daydreaming to Drawing as a Child, Singer 1981ÒAs schoolwork, sports and organised games took more of my time, ands as I naturally became embarassed by continued overt make-believe, I indulged in these fantasy characters more and more by drawing pictures of them in notebooks. Eventually the sequences were almost totally internalised in private visual imagery. My drawings were much like comic strips elaborating particular sequences of adventures, except that no captions were necessary because the fantasy was played out internally....

THE EXERCISE OF MENTAL IMAGING

• Saul Steinberg, "Drawing is a way of reasoning on paper." from Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg. • Alfed Hitchcock, film director, article in Stage, July 1936 ÒThere is not enough visualizing done in [film] studios, and instead far too much writing. People take a sheet of paper and scrawl down a load of dialogue and instructions, and call that a dayÕs work. It leads them nowhere. There is also a growing habit of reading a film script by the dialogue alone. I deplore this method, this lazy neglect of the action, this lack of reading action in a film story or, if you like it, this ability to visualize.Ó quoted in Sidney Gottlieb, Hitchcock on Hitchcock, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, the original title of HitchcockÕs article was ÒClose Your Eyes and Visualize !Ó

• Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself Penguin 1988 (first published 1936) ÒMy office work had taught me to think out a notion in detail, pack it away in my head, and work on it by snatches in any surroundings. The lurch and surge of the old horse-drawn buses made a luxurious cradle for such ruminations. Bit by bit, my original notion grew into a vast, vague conspectus - Army and Navy Stores list if you like - of the whole sweep and meaning of things and effort and origins throughout the Empire. I visualised it as I do most ideas, in the shape of a semi-circle of buildings and temples projecting out into a sea - of dreams .Ó

• Bishop George Berkeley, 1710 Ò28. I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure , and vary and shift the scene as oft as I think fit. It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy; and by the same power it is obliterated and makes way for another. This making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active. This much is certain and grounded on experience : but when we talk of unthinking agents, or exciting ideas exclusive of Volition, we only amuse ourselves with words. 29. But, whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad sunlight I open my eyes it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view: and so likewise to the hearing and other senses, the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them. 30. The ideas of Sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the Imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series - the admirable connection whereof sufficiently testifies the Wisdom and benevolence of its Author. Now the set rules or established methods wherein the Mind we depend on excites in us the ideas of Sense, are called the laws of nature; and these we learn by experience, which teaches us that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas, in the ordinary course of things.Ó

SEEING WITH EYES SHUT

Ò I have only to shut my eyes to feel how ignorant I am whence these forms and coloured forms, and colours distinguishable beyond what I can distinguish, derive their birth. These varying and infinite co-present colours, what are they ? I ask to what do they belong in my waking remembrance ? and almost always never receive an answer. Only I perceive and know thatwhatever I change, in any part of me, produces some change in these eye-spectra; as, for,instance, if I press my legs or change sides.Ó Samuel Taylor Coleridge December 19th, 1803, from Anime Poeta.

VISUAL PROBLEM SOLVING

ÒKekule made his fundamental discovery in organic chemistry having had a dream image in which a snake was coiled in such a way as to represent the molecular structure of benzine. Faraday claimed to have visualised lines of force that emanated from electric and magnetic sources, resulting in the modern conception of electromagnetic fields. Tesla reported that he could determine how well a machine would work by mentally ÔrunningÕ it in his mind. Feynman claimed to have used visual images in thinking about interactions among elementary particles, which led to the development of Feynman Diagrams...Ó from Finke Ward Smith 1992 p.45 Òone of the reasons that imagery can be so effective in problem solving is that in constructing visual representations of a problem, key features often emerge that reveal a simple or obvious solution...Ófrom Finke Ward Smith 1992 p. 175 end CM

This session encourages you to take seriously the generation of mental imagery to an external stimulus (memory, text, invention etc.)