Multi-literacies in Visual Culture.

Paul Duncum's hypothesis in: Visual culture isn’t just visual: Multi-literacy, multimodality and meaning. Duncum, P. (2004); is that even new changes, by art educations, to shift the emphasis of the term visual in visual culture, is not enough to encompass the new diversity of contemporary social culture. He feels that culture cannot be divided into the visual, the auditory, the text-based etc. Within the new digital age, art forms are so integrated that they cannot exist without each other. Duncum talks of the need for art education to be interested in more than just visual culture. In order to be relevant for the student’s art education needs to embrace multimodality. All around us the world mixes mediums linking visual art with music film and digital cultures. Duncum talks of sites being not just visual, therefore as art educators we must look at more than just the visual.

Duncum cites Fairclough (2000) with his description of the "multi-semiotic nature", building up the linking of semiotic symbols in this Web 2.0 age, to suggest that contemporary culture cannot be described by the visual alone. There are many other sign systems that are incorporated into contemporary visual culture. There is a strand in this article that suggests that art educators focused on Visual culture in order to define, legitimise and draw barriers around the 'visual' in art, so as to make it the 'important' or 'pertinent' part of art. Somehow to acknowledge the use of language, music or other in art might reduce the importance of art taught as a visual culture.

Duncum uses the term Multi-literacy that he sees as both reading from many sides and also the way sites include many "modes" the sound, visual, text and language. Art itself had also added to the move to the visual, as artists explored the abstract and the minimalist. It is in this way that Duncum seeks to define the position of visual culture before the onset of multi-modality. For Duncum it seems that the rise of the study of film and media brings forth an interruption of visual culture. Because film and media integrate sound and image but is taught in a similar way to art, the definition of visual culture is being diminished. Duncum emphasises the links between art and text in children's picture books and thus defining this as an area where multi-literacy is experienced. The child reading needs to be able to read the images as well as the words in order to understand the story. Durcum does not link this further to the use of visual culture on computers or computer games, or the multi-modality of web 2.0. As a conclusion he says:​

The cultural forms of global capital combine images, words, and sound to produce highly seductive experiences that are not in everyone's best interests. The need for a citizenry equipped to deal with multimodal culture sites remains pressing.​

So although he has identified the problem he puts forward no answer and I am not sure that he has any solution. So he has said a new world exists but not how to deal with this. Although I think it is important to move into this area
as art educators I am not sure this reliance on "modes" is as new as he sees it. As Duncum falls into an argument that seems to pit visual culture against literacy I think that he misses out on the many modality or multi modality of contemporary culture. Although I agree that the present visual arts students need to be aware of more visual culture, it is more their ability to use their visuality within this culture.

Eisner is an art educationalist that seeks to bring theories of what make learning and teaching art important, to a wider audience. With his book; 'The Art of Educational Evaluation -a personal view' (1985) Eisner was seeking to set Art Education within the wider educational curriculum. It was all about how to use the skills developed by the teacher of art in a wider curriculum. Using words such as 'curriculum and education' linked with curriculum theory and education theory; Eisner seeks to put 'art' into the classroom in every subject and through every teaching style. He talks about a 'science of education', as in a theory of how education should be delivered and the methods of that delivery. This ' science' reflects the ability to measure, test and replicate the education that is being delivered. Eisner does not dismiss this idea, he says it could be useful, but he does feel that it is not possible to create one system, one theory one style that works for all everyday everywhere. As he says (p2);

What truly is useful are conceptual frameworks that enable one to raise fresh questions and to interpret what one sees with the kind of qualification that the situation warrants.

I do like Eisner's concept that the most successful technology developed in education over the last century has been the technology of testing. Tests to evaluate, test to define ability, the most able from the less able. Thus tests and testing have driven the curriculum. Eisner is seeking to divide evaluating from testing saying that with a film we watch but do not test, we evaluate but do not test. I found it very interesting that Eisner is discussing how we evaluate education and whether just looking at the 'score' the 'result' is the best way to look at it.

As Arnheim (1964)discusses we all use our vision to determine in image is in the centre of a page. What we are doing is using our visual judgement. In visual arts this visual judgement becomes very important. When something, such as a picture, is not in the right place it sets up an inner tension with it’s surrounding. As Arnheim says:

Since the tension has a magnitude and a direction, it may be described as a psychological 'force'. (P2)

A Multi-Modal Response from New forms of writing, new visual competencies, by Theo Van Leeuwen (2008), is an article where Leeuwen seeks to address what he see's as a difficulty with a semiotic analysis of computer devised information presentation. Unlike the presentation of basic information before widely used presentation programs, he feels that we now work with the visual style of grids. This therefore changes how we must analyse documents and web-based information that we use every day. For this we must develop what he calls 'visual grammar' rather than the 'grammar of sentences'. We have to be visual literate in order to read the visual literature. He also talks of 'pictorial writing' which he see's as a link between writing and image.​

Leeuwen goes on to talk about the semiotics of colour. This semiotics of colour is different from the semiotics of image. He links colour with identity and historical context, as in red for royalty. However, he goes on to say red is never just red it is dark or light at which point I became rather confused. Leeuwen is describing colour used in what I would describe as a graphics context. Colour is used widely in magazines linking colour with subjects creating their own symbolism. He is seeking to describe this through the use of semiotics but he is describing the process as social semiotics. In semiotic there were rules and codes but in social semiotics these are changed. What I found most interesting was the suggestion that the wide use of power point, which had non-traditional, uses of colour that was now used all across the web. He quotes Ellen Lupton talking about this (Hunter, 2006, 135), ' So we have a language of vision now, but it was created by software developers'. Leeuwen asked students of visual communication to compare this corporate visual communication, with the visual language outside in the field, or outside the software.

At the end of this article I was not sure what he was saying. Were the traditional rules of colour now superseded by a new semiotics of colour created by new technology? What is the semiotics of colour? Leeuwen talked about red being the colour of royalty, however in art we sometimes see a different hierarchy. Blue was the most expensive colour, being ground from semi precious lapis lazuli. This became the colour of the Virgin Mary. Why is this important to me? What I am creating is based in the visual and I use colour regularly mixing my images with pre prescribed backgrounds and formats that I work with. Whether consciously or not I choose colour with every click, changing font, text, image and background to suit my own visual grammar consciously or sub-consciously.

Muller (2008) uses the term visual competence as a term, which could be used to describe art, design and digital formats. For Muller the changes in the social and political reality of the twenty-first century with the changes in communication human interaction must be recognised. The producer has changed from the professional to anyone with the equipment to be a producer.  Muller suggests the control is no longer in the hands of the government or the mass media.

She feels that it is the non-literate context of visuals that then leads to mis-understanding and mis-interpretation. This is a reflection of the saying, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. For Muller what is absent in present day analysis of visuals is an overarching visual approach that unites all social sciences. Visual literacy has been defined as:

The viewer’s awareness of the conventions through which the meanings of visuals are created. (Messaria & Moriarty, 2005, p481) Muller (2008)

What Muller is seeking is not to understand the ‘interpretation’ of the visual but somehow to see the visual as an end in itself and therefore she uses the term ‘Visual Competence’.

Kress and Leeuwin (2006) talks of a ‘grammar of visual design’. This seeks to explain not just ‘the thing’ but the setting within which ‘the thing’ is placed. They seek to address the production of meaning as it relates to the grammar of visual design. It is the whole production that is important. They link the grammar of language, meaning being changed by situation, to visual grammar and identify that this grammar is also changed by situation. Social semiotics is trying to make sense of and communicate meaning in social settings. Kress and Leeuwin see the semiotic world as a large area difficult to capture so they have developed multimodality to deal with all the means we have for making meanings.

Leander and Frank (2006), when discussing online images pose a critique to multimodality. For them the multimodality analysis abstracts the work talking less about the image and more about the situation the image exists within. Multimodality is seeking to explain the visual in today’s society. The fact that we exist within a world of image, visual, colour and logos means that we need a method to make sense of these. Leander and Frank suggest this need to link so much information together creates a new problem, as they say:

We question and critique the abstraction of the multimodal perspective in two ways. First, in striving to post an expansion of media resources in new media practices, the multimodal perspective elides important differences between types of medium(Leander & Frank 2006).

As Kress and Leeuwin see it as important to see the item within it’s setting, for others this becomes a distraction and removes the importance of what they are trying to look at. For Leander and Frank, who are primarily looking at visual images, they are looking in a different way. They also see a difficulty in how those who use multimodality actually look:

Secondly, multimodal perspectives often place much more emphasis upon meaning-making than on affective or aesthetic attachments (2006).

For those involved in multimodality their assessments are trying to make sense of a multi sensory world where sound and images are shot at us 24 hours of the day. The receiver, the person, receives and makes personal sense of this in order to function. It is almost as if they ‘touch base’ with the ‘resources’ those endless multimodal resources, then interpret and continue. They are asking a specific question and receiving a specific answer. Leander and Frank are looking at the visual world in a different way and the questions that ask see the world in a different way, as they say:

We argue that online imaging practices should be understood as occurring at the intersection of the personal, cultural, and social, and that this intersection should be understood as affecting aesthetic attachment (Frank 2006) .

Like Muller, and Leander and Frank, I see what I am doing as being set within an aesthetic framework. It is about the creation or an artwork and the Visual Competence of the maker and viewer. In creating a piece of digital fiction it has to succeed. In, Arts and the Creation of the Mind, Eisner puts forward his concept of ‘somatic knowledge’ within visual art. Kerka (2002) cites Sellers-Young(Sellers-Young 1998) in her description of somatic knowledge:

“A somatic approach to education integrates, as an existential whole, the experiential history of individuals with their current experience. It implies an education that trusts individuals to learn from their ability to attend and to listen to the information they are receiving from the interaction of self with the environment” (Sellers-Young 1998, p. 176)

Eisner uses this concept to identify the qualities that a creative person uses in order to compose. Many people could be asked to create an image from a view. The artist brings the somatic knowledge, sometimes called embodied knowledge, to bare in the creation of the image. As you view a collection of images this artist’s image stands out. Eisner suggests that the artist brings this somatic knowledge to the creation of the image. This could also be described as Muller’s ‘visual competence’. Muller also needs the viewer to have the visual competence in understanding of what they are seeing. It is these ideas I will be using in my development of my own work and when looking at and evaluating the work of others.

Lev Manovich tries to bring together the media and the visual when he talks of ‘Visualization Methods for Media Studies’. As he says:

In doing this, I want to articulate the connections between some of the key concepts involved in visualizing media for humanities research – “artefact”, “data”, “metadata”, “feature”, “mapping”, and “remapping”.(Manovich 2001)​

In doing this ‘visualization’ for media he has created the term Info- aesthetics. Info-aesthetics is a term used by Lev Manovich to identify the new aesthetics emerging from computer-based cultural forms. As he says on his website;

INFO-AESTHETICS suggests that new media culture picks up the constructive energies of the modernist project (while discarding its demand to forget the past) – but these energies now work in a different way.

If the 1920s avant-garde came up with new forms for new media of their time (photography, film, new printing and architectural technologies), the new media avant-garde introduces radically new ways of using already accumulated media.

Sometimes we seek the new to understand the new but we forget that others have seen ‘the new’ and challenging technology before. In referring to the Avant-Garde movement of the 1920’s Manovich is seeking a structure from where his new info-aesthetics can move to the analysing of new media. It might also been seen as an answer to the question: where do we go after post-modernism?