Exploring the visual forest

Visual literacy, in its most general sense, refers to the skills needed to interpret and use graphical information resources. It means knowing how to read a map. Or having enough sensitivity to social and cultural stereotypes to know when an image in a magazine is exploitative or sexist.

Visual literacy is often discussed in the context of education (for example). How can we incorporate visual skills into information literacy lessons? How can we teach our students to assign appropriate attributes and citations to the images they download off the web? We also talk about visual literacy in terms of the massive amounts of multimedia resources to which we are exposed through the web and the entertainment industry: How do we become more responsible consumers? How can we tell when an image, or film or music video is harmful or discriminatory?

These are important questions and I will write more about them later.  But this morning, I’m thinking about another kind of visual literacy.  I’m thinking about not just having the ability to know how to look at an image, but also having the perspective to understand  where to look.

A few years ago, I heard graffiti artist and painter Tim Clorius (aka Subone) speak at a conference. His presentation documented the historical evolution of tagging and graffiti. The narrative that Clorius brought to this history was guided by his own evolution as an artist and the work he has done building a public art practice in collaboration with at-risk youth in the Portland, Maine area.

Clorius described the ways in which, throughout industrialized times, marginalized, itinerant social groups have communicated with each by leaving messages in highly visible, public locations. He talked about markings made on the sides of box cars that were used by hobos to communicate with each other as they moved back and forth across the country in the early part of the 20th century; and he followed all the way through to current debates and practices associated with what we now know as graffiti art. (Most of us have probably heard about the special police task forces in charge of deciphering tags as a means for keeping tabs on gang activity.)

Subway car, 1973. Downloaded on June 27, 2011 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/

Clorius is not the only one to have compiled such a history, but perhaps because of the way he told the story, what he was saying really struck a chord in me at the time and has stayed with me since. He made a strong connection between a sense of identity and the act of leaving a physical mark on one’s environment. He talked about tagging in a way that evoked the idea of voice, stance and territory. As he decoded various examples of more recent graffiti art, he revealed the mechanisms of empowerment that he saw at play.

Hiding messages in the open is a true feat of visual literacy, requiring a nuanced understanding of the craft of visual communication. The goal is to make the sign undeniable to those “in the know,” while having it remain invisible to everyone else. It’s an interesting information design problem. And it’s an interesting visual design problem.

Hobo or tramp markings at Algiers entrance to Canal Street Ferry across Mississippi River, New Orleans.Downloaded on June 27 2011 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HoboMarkingsCanalStFerry.jpg

Hiding messages in plain sight, especially when done by an underground movement or marginalized group, is bold. It puts a lot of faith that the “other” (whomever that may be) has a  collective obliviousness to their visual environments. In fact, these subversive communication systems actually depend on the selective attention and tunnel vision that we so often profess to be fighting against. I know that I am constantly trying to get my students to open their eyes, to look around, to report what they see.

These cryptic visual systems rely on an ability to slip through the cracks, to remain left of center, to be on the margins of our field of vision. In these terms, accessibility and universal literacy are not helpful. These signs and symbols get their power in part from our blind spots, having communicative value to those who use them by the very fact that they seem like nothing to the rest of us.

For a while I was reading a lot about Roma (Gypsy) culture and I found a number of examples of this kind of visual literacy throughout their stories of nomadic movement, secrecy and marginalized living. There’s an interesting tale of complicity between the World War II Resistance Movement and the Roma community of Western Europe in the book Crossing: A Journal of Survival and Resistance in World War II by Jan Yoors. The loose-knit partnership, as described by Yoors, centered on the off-the-grid system of communication used by the Roma in order to stay in touch inspite of being in constant motion.

A sign from the French hobo or gypsy sign system, meaning here live kind-hearted women. Downloaded on 27 June 2011 from http://www.symbols.com/encyclopedia/22/2222.html

The system made use of symbols carved into fence posts or hung at crossroads, virtually invisible to those outside the group, but unmistakable to those within. According to Yoors, the Roma shared this system with the partisans and it proved to be vitally important to the Nazi resistance.

True or not, this story illustrates the kind of visual skills that I’ve been thinking about. It reflects a kind of visual literacy that embodies issues of identity, expertise, and creativity, and that is divorced from record-keeping, documentation, and institutionalization. These are living systems, that expand and contract, that respond to the environment, circumstances and situations in which they are deployed. Once they are understood by a larger audience, they cease to function and must change in order to remain useful.

I think this is one of the reasons I’m also intrigued with the idea of the Underground Railroad.  I mean, in addition to the role it played in African-American history, the abolition of slavery, and the development of race relations in this country. I’m really curious about how it actually worked.  How would you know who to trust? How would you know where to go?  You’re scared, tired, hungry. Chances are high you can’t read.

From what I have come across, the evidence for how it really worked is scarce: there are stories about using patterns in quilts to show the way (but these ideas have been refuted); there are accounts describing signals in the form of lanterns, statues, laundry on the clothes line. But there’s just not a whole lot of corroborating documentation, as the whole process was secretive and dynamic by necessity, and visual and largely non-verbal by nature. (Although it is interesting to read about the clues left in song lyrics…)

Downloaded on 27 June 2011 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Undergroundrailroadsmall2.jpg

The problem that motivates all of these situations is clear: off-the-grid communication is needed; other forms of literacy can not be relied upon, and the  signals being sent need to be undeniably visible to some, while remaining utterly invisible to others. In all of these cases a form of visual literacy evolved that was built on the principle of hiding the message in plain sight. Visual secrets unlocked according to who’s doing the looking and if they know where to focus their attention.

Sure does make me wonder about all the things I’m missing when I walk down the street….

I just finished my first semester teaching a brand new graduate-level course that I created called Information Design. The School of Information Studies at Syracuse University generously allowed me try out this new offering and I was delighted to get a full class the first time out of the gate.  Based on a show of hands on the first day of class, most of the students expected the course to focus on graphic design and visualizing information. But information design means something more than that to me and I tried to make this class reflect that. Fortunately I didn’t scare away too many students on that first day.

In fact, I’ve found that most people assume that when you start talking about design, you mean visual design. I run into this a lot, especially since my area of academic research is visual information and the majority of my formal education is in visual art. It is easy to see why I often get mistaken for a graphic designer. When it happens, I usually say something like, “Oh, no, I’m not a designer, I’m actually trained as a painter…” People outside of the art & design community generally respond with something like “Oh, whatever, it’s all the same, your one of those visual/art-y/bohemian people, right?” For people inside the art & design community, my statement is met with a knowing smile accompanied by a decided drop in my credibility. Painters are not designers (and generally can’t design their way out of a paper bag).  Everyone knows that.

So whenever I talk about designing with information, I try to be very upfront about the fact that I do not consider myself a graphic designer.

In reality, my formal training in this area is limited to the obligatory design courses that were taught as part of my undergraduate foundations program at art school.  At the time, I wasn’t particularly interested in these graphic design classes, strongly preferring the visceral experience of working in the painting studio.  Fortunately, I got a chance to  supplemented this neglected part of my education during the several years I worked for various design firms an interactive producer and information architect.  My web development teams always included at least one visual designer and this exposed me to some  highly skilled and articulate typographers, graphic designers and creative directors. While one of my primary jobs was to organize the information to be presented through a website (designing the information architecture), the visual designers focused on crafting the graphical user interface (GUI) through which the information would be accessed.

It was while collaborating with these folks  that I really came to understand how little I knew about graphic design. It actually came as a little bit of a surprise to me. I mean, really! I’ve been a practicing visual artist for years! I spent many years studying painting! I know color.  I know shape. I know balance, composition, rhythm. I can draw! But what I learned by watching gifted graphic designers work is that while we shared a similar visual language, my accent was all wrong. My eyes were not trained to the same calibration as theirs.

During the time I worked in industry, on occasion, when  the schedule was very tight, I would be the one tasked with making an initial mock-up of an interface design, or with making edits to an existing file, just to keep the ball rolling.  Then I’d take the file to the real designer who would thankfully fix it: adjusting the colors by barely imperceptible degrees; shifting a block of text 10 pixels to the left; moving a photo up by a 8 pixels; taking away a border here; increasing the space between two letters in the header by a couple of pixels. The impact of several relatively small  changes was huge and undeniable (and actually kind of magical sometimes). The transformation was evidence of their craftsmanship.

Slowly, I got a little bit better at seeing like a designer, but I was never able to achieve the fluency that comes from many years of training and practice.  This is why I do not call myself a graphic designer. (…And given a choice, I’d still take stinky, old school oil paints over Adobe Illustrator any day of the week.)

However, I have and do design with information. It’s just not always visual information.

Probably because I have been so focused on the kind of designer that I am not, this is actually a relatively recent revelation for me, and I am still a bit tentative about saying it out loud.  After spending years fighting the label of designer (for precisely the reasons described above), not long ago I realized it might be possible to be an experienced information designer without being a gifted graphic designer… And that there is a lot to be gained from separating the two practices: graphic design and information design.

Getting back to my Information Design course, when I began to plan the class, I wanted to explore this idea. For that reason, we actually only spent about a third of the semester talking about specifically visual concepts and principles.  What did we do the rest of the time? Well, here’s the syllabus, you can see for yourself. The students learned how to think about information separate from computers and technology, to recognize real, living information and information systems in their environment (we referred to it as “in the wild”) , to identify all the components of those systems, and then to take an action that would somehow influence or change that the flow of information through that system.

It was a great semester and I think I learned as much or more than the students did.  I’m looking forward to teaching it again next spring.

Last weekend we took a trip to Ithaca’s Museum of the Earth.  Just past the exhibit about corn (oddly fascinating), was a seismograph machine.  This complex device is used to recognize and measure global seismic activity, documenting and recording movement within the earth’s tectonic plates using an essentially simple graphic interface.

Although today data is captured in digital form, seismographs have also traditionally generated ink drawings that can be analyzed after a seismic event to determine the direction, duration and intensity of tectonic activity.  To create this visual record, a piece of paper is wrapped around a drum. A very small and delicate pen rests very lightly on the surface of the paper. The cylinder rotates at a very slow rate of speed (see video below). When a tremor occurs, the pen tip records the duration and severity of the movement by leaving a jagged trail on the paper.

The seismograph machine at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, NY.

As it trails around the drum, the pen also slowly moves down the length of the cylinder, preventing the tip from writing over previous data. By the time the barrel has made one complete rotation (1 hour for the machine in this video), the pen tip has moved down the barrel by about an inch from its original position. The result is a long line of ink that spirals around the cylinder and down the page, recording any seismic activity that is registered by the equipment.

When I was a little kid, I used a similar technique to record the movement of the family car as we drove around town running errands or on longer road trips. I would  let a pen or pencil rest just on the surface of the page, exerting as little pressure as possible, while maintaining contact between the tip and the paper.  As we drove over bumps and around corners, the tip moved across the surface of the page, creating a cryptic record of our journey.

Two members of the museum staff were performing some routine maintenance on the equipment when we arrived, including changing the paper wrapped around the barrels and making sure that the ink reservoirs were filled.  Displayed on the wall beside the machine were three graphs showing different dimensions of the movement of the earth during the tragic 9.0 earthquake that had occurred just off the coast of Japan.

Seismograms from March 11, 2011. The massive change in amplitude reflects the major earthquake that was centered off the north eastern coast of Japan.

The earthquake and resulting tsunamis had occurred just a day before our visit so the impact of the catastrophe was still  unfolding as we stood listening to one of the museum staff explaining the images that we were examining.  As we learned more about how to read the visual records, how to connect specific points on the continuous line with events from the news over the last day or so, the reality of what we were looking at sunk in.

Detail of a seismogram created during the Honshu earthquake on March 11, 2011.

The museum display discussed the jagged line of the seismogram as a seemingly simple and straightforward record of change over time. However, as I registered exactly what I was looking at, my interpretation of that single continuous line became inextricably entwined with the memory of violent and terrifying images circulating on line since the quake.  The coupling of radically different graphic representations of the same event created an image of undeniably brutal change.  During the period of time when the earth’s crust was most highly agitated, the lines are dark, abrupt, thrusting up and down, aggressively pushing the limits of the recording device.

Museum staff explained that during this period of intense seismic activity, the island of Honshu had actually shifted eight feet to the east. At that moment standing there in the Museum of the Earth, following that single continuous line as it jumped, jutted and lunged across the page, I thought I was looking at what happens on earth when a change of that magnitude happens.

Over the next several days, the crisis in Japan continued to deepen. Nuclear power plants failed, the number of casualties soared, and a shortage of water, food and shelter reached critical points. Even more photos and videos poured on to the internet.  I thought a lot about the violent change reflected in that single continuous line. And my perception of what it means to see change of such devastating magnitude changed.

Ice-fields. Lantern slide from Oregon State University Archives. Downloaded from Flickr Commons on 10 March 2011. Image Description from historic lecture booklet: "... where snow accumulates to great depth and lies long upon the surface, it is changed to ice. the beginning of this change may be seen in the snow a few days after it falls, for it soon loses its light, flaky character and becomes granular, so that it feels harsh to the hand. The change is very distinct in the last banks of snow in the spring. They are made up of coarse grains (granules) of ice, sometimes as larges as peas...."

Syracuse in March.  I guess it will make us stronger… if it doesn’t kill us.