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posted by Jack Butler on December 29, 1997 at 11:45:02:
in reply to: pictures/metaphors/content posted by Moira Howes on December 04, 1997 at 12:23:53:
Some resposes to Moira's questions. Let our exchange be a conversation - partial answers, incomplete thoughts, suggestions - even though your questions could easily inspire a doctoral thesis. 1.and 2. Do pictures add content or informatiuon ... ? and do pictures simplify content ... ? "The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced or combined ... The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laborously only in a secondary stage." Einstein in Baigrie (1996), p.41 We seem to believe in a hierarchy which places material pictures and " certain signs and more or less clear images ..." at the bottom, progressing upwards through degrees of increasing abstraction until the order of mathematical logic symbolically expressed in words is reached. It is at the level of words that we believe thought occurs. If Einstein (above) is to be taken at face value, then the Western prejudice which collapses thought into language would seem to exclude Einstein's psychical images from the class of "thoughts". My own premise is that thought (whether in science or in art) is constituted of all forms of symbolic discourse, private/introspective as well as public/communicative, material mediums such as "psychical" entities and physical abjects as well as abstract systems. And thought, ie., pictures and words and the spaces in between these, I believe, is mediated by convention. In direct response to tour question Moira, I think some concepts can best be expressed in pictures and, therefore, require translation (with a loss of content) into words. And the opposite is true for word centered concepts. 3. Does "illustration" equal "metaphor"? This web site started as an attempt to analyze my own uses of art to enact a scientific theory of embryogenesis. In response to your question Moira I find I must attempt a meta or second order analysis of the site itself. Here we go. The term 'illustration' to my mind implies a specific relation between the processes of theorizing about science and the processes of picturing the science/theory - a relation (I contend) where, in the case of this web site, my concept or theory of fetal lung development is communicated in a dialogue between digital pictures of models and textual description. Both pictures and words in this case are about something else: they jointly represent a theory of fetal lung development. 'Illustration' is how I think of the pictures and texts in the section of the site titled "Beware of Models". Metaphor: in the earlier branches of the site, such as "Is Like", I am using what I think of as art processes - visual pattern recognition (construction?) which, as "Is Like" suggests, is a process of identifying visual metaphors, as a method for enacting embryological science - using picturing to do science. 4. In the long run I am much more interested in investigating the relation between picturing, metaphor and knowledge than I am in producing a theory in science. If a model becomes a fetish, that is, identified with the process it represents, the relation between content, convention and context becomes opaque - closed. In order for the relation between a model and its object to be an act of artmaking, representation must be transparent - remain open to continuous interpretation or re-framing. Follow Ups:
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