Reading/Pictures/Viewing/Words/Lines/Mirage?

By now you've noticed the lines above.  How do we read this?

Do you read it as a whole image noticing the bike or do you notice the letters then words?

Where do you first look?

Does it make anyone think of sounds?


It's kind of an interesting relationship, turning the words of an object into an image of the object.  I mean this is how kids are taught through association and experiential association with words and worldly objects, at first sound to sight--speaking and revealing (or pointing to) a visible object of reality--but then from representational image of an image (a word) to iconic memory like the physical word on a page such as "cardinal" to the imagined "cardinal".  Then from representational image to echoic memory like the sentence "A played middle c on the piano", but this second association can only happen for us only if we know what middle c is and what a sounds a piano makes, just like we need to know what a cardinal looks like to imagine it, but because we first translated sounds to image.  Mostly, i bet you imagined the iconic piano when you thought of the piano's timbre even if you don't know how to hum middle c.  Image can help display sound as sound can help display image.

What I notice is that you only need one word to describe what all these words are together--bike, but when I see the word bike my imagination takes me somewhere other than the image I am presented here, or rather multiple images that can be interpreted as one.  The bike I imagine is red when the bike I own is yellow and purple.  What kind of association is this?  have i just seen more red bikes or is there a  metaphysical bike that is surely red?  What color of bike do you see when you read the word bike?

I dunno if this is at all helpful with what weve got going on with comics but i find it somewhat fun to explore... peace.

Invisible Art

I've read some graphic novels, or comics, before (Sin City, The Watchmen).  During high school, I had some friends that really enjoyed filming movies and writing scripts and they highly respected some comics because, to them, a comic was the ultimate storyboard.  It could show every camera angle, scene, piece of clothing, all dialogue, colors, and actions between characters.  I think I can understand why my friends held them in revere for the benefit of film... the entire movie is imagined and worked out on a physical page where moments in space and time are easily navigated among.  But comics can work with readers more than a movie (vice versa), or perhaps be more intimately involved with one another, or just maybe, comics offer more freedom to the reader. 

An important first fact is that comics are purely visual in form and require more imagination than film.  In a movie the sound of a tea kettle whistling is projected for the audience where rather in a comic you have to imagine the timbre of the hum.  Interestingly in cartooning or animation, all sound must be recorded to fit the images or actions.  McCloud writes on the difference between movies and comics, "Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space--the screen--while each frame of comics must occupy a different space.  Space does for comics what time does for film" (McCloud 7).  

I guess one thing I find interesting about all this is that the creator has to guide our eyes on the page to the line that is the story, and a page in a comic can really start anywhere.  Even though reading right to left and top to bottom is standardized for western readers the comic can throw it out the window... see page 106.  The flow of every page can be different and twisting but it also relies on a lucid creator and an able reader, because too much abstraction in this particular tool could cause it to be undecipherable.  Space is also effected in the comic by the different frames, speech bubbles, and the gutters in between. That then leads to how time is manipulated by space in comics.  It somewhat reminds me of how music uses space.  Music has its own gutters which are called rests.  With out space in between notes, melodies, or phrases, there would only be constant tones and no rhythm to move time along, just like the breaks in frames.  Without it both art form would be stuck in one moment or space.  

The "Invisible Art" is like a good B.B. King quote, "Sometimes it's not what you play, it's what you don't play."  The space in between has to be there.  (I'll try to expand more on space in comics tomorrow).

What do we call what we do?

I think possibly a way to start to define what we are calling our writing when produced through multiple mediums and presented in multiple mediums is an acknowledgement of how many forces are at work in the fundamental blocks that support the entirety of the work.  These fundamental blocks, as I will call them here, are the multiple ways in which a worker works for the collectiveness of one piece.  There has to be a cameraman for every camera and a musician, or speaker, for every microphone, an editor for every piece of audio, an editor for every piece of film, and a storyteller for every idea.  A way to begin to determine the type of writing and the way people are writing is to step back and just look at who and what are happening in the piece to make it a complete piece.  So if we can step back and notice how many forms of different writing make up the piece, I would guess that maybe the next part of what was going on in production, is how many people are involved with the piece and how many people are intellectually involved with the idea or underlying meaning of what is produced?  If there is a conglomerate of writers, should the piece fall under a different category of final product?  Maybe? I don't know.  Should it be considered something more, or different if one person is behind a production?

But lets say that someone just records a video of themselves and sends it to their mom instead of writing a letter to say hello.  They are the creators of all of the aspects of that product, but a product such as this lacks intellectual potency or a degree of "literariness".  There is no value for humanity behind it.  So when it is possible for most any person to create product that encompasses many forms of recording so easily, another step in defining what we are doing is the question, "what can this product shed light on?"  What does it tell us that we need to know.  It's sort of like making the difference between the cannon of literature and dime novels.  While there is nothing wrong with the dime novel, it holds nothing essential for humanity.  James Baldwin wrote something along the lines that only a good artist is telling its society what's wrong with its functions.  So to judge the value of a work by what it can do for the good of us all is not a new idea and should be considered when trying to interpret what it is that we engage in when we produce an idea into modern modes of presentation.

I guess that then to sum it all up is to say that when looking into the works of presentation and production we have to acknowledge how many genres of production are used in the product and how many people are involved in the production and what is the purpose or usefulness of the product to those that interpret it.  But what do we call it, this newer form of presenting ideas? I just want to put a string of words together like "multi-scriptural production" or "modarts" for multiple modes of art together at once.  Some brand new word I think is in need here, unfortunately it is not one that falls place so easily like "googling".

Stories

Every thing's a story because if nothing happens there is no story or you.  Power through story is manipulative-ability.  You can tell the truth or lie outright to get what you want.  We seem to find truth easier to handle in mathematics.  With calculus anyone can find the story of a line--the truth of the line.  But when you order a 100% beef hamburger from a restaurant how do you know it's 100% beef?  The power in a story is that it has believability.  If everything has an origin, then every move that thing made is a chapter, page, phrase, or word in the whole of its own story.  And of course it's always happening and changing and since we're human and don't have instantaneous truth checking machines for every situation we have to have some margin of just believing.  The only reason the dollar is worth a dollar is because everyone believes it is, and surely the dollar has its story. 

It's all about ME