EDUCE

Working with Light

a few thoughts on collaboration

'composite productions carried the mark of that which could not be engendered by a single brain'
Andre Breton (on surrealism)

Visual Language in Society

THE ELECTRIC BUSINESS CLUB

Images as a form of everday communication evolved into words due to the efficiency and speed with which ideas could be conveyed using text.  In this workshop with the Electric Business Club we explored how we communicate ourselves through a process of 'speed portraiting'.  The process of drawing as someone is speaking is a very difficult one without a rehearsed vocabulary of images readily to hand and therefore text tends to dominate.  Because so much information is conveyed in only a few minutes of speech (both spoken and physical) we have to be selective with the information we choose to capture.  Our own limitations are quickly revealed as we struggle to find a way of capturing an essence of things.  This workshop encouraged a repetition of information. To find yourself continually trying to repeat yourself, to try and remember what you have said, is harder than you might at first think.  It is suprising to 'see what you have said'.

The final sheets of text and image reveal that if you are looking to open up to the possibilities of new ideas emerging the image based pages readily provide ambiguity, contrast and juxtaposition, the text based pages leave you flat unless someone has taken the time to create a 'visual text or been particularly poetic. The odd phrase may stand out but on the whole the pages are not 'exciting' enough to want to engage in them again.  The pages with images give you the opportunity to 'trigger a memory' as well as allow for their ambiguity to make other suggestions and associations that help you clarify your thoughts or think of them in a fresh way.

Through a process of extraction from individual drawings into individual self portraits we are left with a new starting point for conversations with a much wider audience.  That audience making their own interpretations of what has been conveyed, but a visually exciting starting place for interesting conversations to emerge.  The result is a curious mix of ideas that allows the mind to wander, to wonder and to think without any formal constraints, putting them altogether would add another dimension entirely but sadly we ran out of time.

I leave it to the other participants of the Electric Business Club to make their own conclusions or contributions to the dialogue by adding comments to this weblog below.

Thanks to all the attendees who made this a very rewarding and insightful event.

Linda

In the Mind's Eye

"it is useful to recall that for some 400 or 500 years our schools and universities have been developing essentially the skills of a Medieval Clerk - reading, writing, counting, memorising texts and developing verbal arguments.  Today, we are on the verge of a really new era when we will be required to develop, whether we want to or not, a very different set of visually-based talents and skills - like those of a Renaissance visual thinker such as Leonardo da Vinci rather than those of the clerk or scholar or schoolman of the middle ages.  In the not too distant future, machines will be the best clerks.  Accordingly we must learn to develop distinctly human talents, and these are likely to involve the insightful and broadly integrative capacities associated with visual-spatial modes of thought"

Thomas G West, In the Mind's Eye, Prometheus Books, 1997

Why draw?

because bullet points are dull (and a picture speaks a thousand words)