Facebook speaks: excerpts from the comments to the previous post (why can’t people post comments here?)

Ben Golder:

People often do not consider the value of picture books in developing visual and graphic literacy. As a culture, we rely extensively on graphic communication, in addition to textual, but we rarely consider it to be an essential skill. The a bstraction of those cows teaches not only a specific representation of cow (white/black) therefore defining the characteristics of the idea of “cow”, but also established a standard for the abstraction of animals and their 2d representation. Eventually when Dante makes the connection between a real cow and the drawing, he’ll intuitively begin to develop a standard for how to graphically communicate an animal, or any other thing. Some aspects of that standard may be innate, and may describe how we actually perceive and communicate about form and shapes, while others may be cultural (for example cows might be marked their back profiles rather than their spots in places where cows with spots are less famous). Super interesting stuff. You should JSTOR the subject (or google scholar it) instead of just plain google!

me:

Thanks, I will… I wonder if I still have JSTOR access? Never heard of google scholar… ooh, new resources! I’m especially curious about which of those standards of graphic communication (…term…) are innate and which are learned. I of ten find myself thinking about how perspective drawing was a learned skill (and still is…) that utterly reordered the way people not only depicted but - I believe - saw the world. When I was young I could never figure out why, if people have always drawn from life, the art of depicting life has changed so much since say, egyptian wall paintings or medieval manuscripts… what has changed was the lexicon, as it were, the belief in or dedication to ideas such as an observable reality or a symbolic reality. Interesting stuff. Mind if I copy your comment to the blog?

Melinda F: 
And you can always incorporate knowledge through everyday random things like, “Should we eat this red apple that is round like a circle?” Those little sponges soak that stuff up like crazy!!!!

Ian S: 
Interesting thing I learned at some point recently: In Europe, and this probably varies by culture, they spell the noises animals make differently. So by teaching him that a cow goes MOO you’re making him American. I’m not saying buy Euro books b/c then he’d probably get teased at school, but I thought that was relevant to your post…

Ben Golder: 
also, comics. Reading them as a kid taught me a ton.

me: 
oh yeah, comics, definitely. I was just thinking I should go look at my BFA dissertation - comics, word/image, fragmented narrative - again for some sources.

Adria L:
Super interesting!
so i haven’t learnt much about word/symbolic developmental cognition but I’ve seen a few talks by this woman liz spelke at harvard who studies cognitive development about numbers. It’s really interesting. basically concep…ts of one two and three change at a certain point in devp’t from ‘one and one and one’ to the concept that is three. here’s her website: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu /~lds/index.html?spelke.ht ml and she has a lot of papers up there for free…. :)

Ben Golder: 
And what’s funny is that while perspective drawing is great for creating the illusion of depth or depicting the view from a particular location, it sucks at conveying information about size and well, lots of stuff. There’s a reason that maps are never in perspective, and that egyptian hieroglyphs can move seamlessly between declarations and narrative about events within one awesome graphic layout (and that reason would be that everything is flattened out in an ordered manner).
The intuitive thing to do when drawing is to draw everything flat, as if laying out objects on a flat surface.
I think about this kind of stuff all the time for architectural drawings. In architecture we constantly have to develop standards of graphic communication about both events and spatial characteristics. We have to go through a whole stage in… our education where we learn all these different drawing projections and symbolic languages. We NEED flattened drawings, like this: http://www.archdaily.com/8 1726/germoplasm-pavillion- vlad-sebastian-rusu/sectio n-01-203/
because they convey actual dimensions, which perspectives suck at. Okay, I’ll stop rambling and get back to work now. Super interesting topic though, Zephyr.

Drury Brennan:
jeesus h. christ this is brilliant

me:
yes.. yes… yes!
(i think this here platform should be developed so one can comment on a particular word or phrase of someone else’s comment, not just this linear string. at least have stacked comments.)

it’s interesting to think about …visual languages - graphic communications - as responding to different, concurrent issues or pressures. to think of how tools are developed to address different needs simultaneously, and then how their use reorders social/cultural consciousness. again with perspective: as i understand it, the popularity of early perspective drawing/painting was in large part due to the church, thanks to its ability to evoke a sense of sublime (yet inaccessible!) space. it also reinforces the subjecthood of the viewer and relies on calculated observation by the creator (the artist or draftsman, that is, not capital C ‘Creator’), all of which were particularly important ideas to the time of its development. once developed and put into widespread practice, it then helped reinforce those concepts, though subtly and largely unconsciously. so - to make a theoretical and hugely unscientific leap, does the primacy of perspective drawing - which at least when i was young was taught as The Right Way to draw (nevermind that no one is even taught drawing at all anymore…….) - encourage a sense of the primacy of one’s own individual perspective, with the world receding from our sight? do other cultures that privilege other forms of graphic ordering have an entirely different conceptualization of the individual? could you instigate a subtle but foundational shift in the social narrative of self/world by teaching architectural styles of drawing instead? once again assuming there was ever any money for drawing for children ever again…. :P