pt.2

Regardless of the context in which it is used, drawing comes down to the application of small sets of visual structures - marks made - as external aids for thinking, proposing and understanding. They can be built into pictures, explanations, or instructions, and although a drawing might have a particular objective (portraiture, typography, pedagogy), the same set of visual elements are used in each one: point, line, shape, and to some extent colour, value, texture. These are deployed in structural terms of rhythmic distribution, proportion, symmetry and contrast – principles that may have natural sources in the interactions of mind and world, but which are complicated by our compulsion to communicate, so vitally exemplified by spoken language. We must learn to read a drawing’s content: interpreting, taking advantage of metaphor, or the inherent ambiguity of the working sketch to explore unforeseen
ideas.
Drawing’s most basic function is to encode extractable information into visual images, and within this common framework, vocabularies and compounds develop which convey the information for decoding. Visual textures, for example, are excluded from engineer’s drawings; expressive flourishes are not found on the blueprint. In the work of designers, on the other hand, drawings have instrumental cognitive and communication functions that streamline the generation of design-solutions, but which also function catalytically -- propelling the conversation, bringing intuition up against experiential and technically specific knowledge. Of course drawing in a contemporary fine art context explores precisely this sheer utility and ubiquity, drifting across disciplines, picking on technical and scientific visualisations, amending maps and network charts, blurring digital and analog. Within each graphic application, there are techniques and schemata that develop through communal usage, as well as individual and group innovation. John Willats suggests that the uses of oblique projection systems in Byzantine paintings are meant to symbolise transcendence for a culture that abhorred idolatry (1997, p.27), more than merely reflecting any lack of knowledge of how to represent space. As another example, the diagrammatic structure of the Common music notation replaced the uncertainty of medieval Neumes (syllabic markings-up, with little pitch specification) with the visually simpler topology of the 5-line staff, thus reforming music practice and pedagogy. And finally, writing on the emergence of Renaissance perspective systems, Bruno Latour notes the geometrisation of the page-space, and consequent technical and naturalistic inclinations in the West (citing Ivins 1991) “due in largest part to the development.. of visual awareness and a grammar of perspective which made it possible to establish logical relations not only within the system of symbols but between that system and the forms and locations of the objects that it symbolizes.”

why draw pt1

In my creative practice I have investigated drawing as a productive operation between conception and execution of works of art and music. Through personal and professional experience as a visual artist and studio instructor, I have come to understand it as a mechanism through which ‘disparate zones of experience are mediated and forced into unexpected dialogue with one another’ (Naginski, 2000). Although drawings, without doubt, are things that must be made, over the past 25 years there has been considerable research concerned with cognitive, linguistic and practical aspects of this resilient expressive action: the ideation and knowledge-generation of the sketch (Goldschmidt; Tverski), drawing in the design-process (Lawson), the values of notation in computational (Green; Healey), new approaches to picture analysis (Willats; Riley), drawing as a “boundary-object” (a locus through which different professional voices may dialogue [Henderson]). Speaking as one who draws, and who recognises its critical utility at every stage of the work, the taxonomical component of my PhD is being undertaken to develop a richer understanding of the terms of discourse and the networked systems at play within, as well to further investigate the dialogic nature of drawing. A clear articulation of the complexities of creative practice related to drawing – a fundamental part of so many fields, as Deanna Petherbridge points out -- should lead to a correspondingly clear understanding of the nature and importance of the work of art for both artist and viewer.

classify

‘Talking does not make the world, or even pictures, but talking and pictures participate in making each other and the world as we know them.’
(Goodman 1976, p.89).

In the aesthetics of the philosopher Nelson Goodman, classification is a key utility that bears upon the ‘world-constructing’ operations of all symbolic activity, including those of scientific, artistic and philosophic fields. To classify, he writes, is merely a natural, reflexive, and interactive engagement with culture and conditions: it is an approach to our experience of the symbolic, which is not too dissimilar from the practice of the visual artist, as a form of practical syllogism (Pakes 2003), and discovery. Classification and interpretation are cooperative in this search for understanding, and are at work in acts of inversion, gap-filling, transcoding, the toppling of small-scale paradigms, or at least the turning over of a wet stone to see what, if anything, may be crawling underneath. To apprehend is a consequence of consciousness, in Goodman’s view, and is fed by knowledge-generating activities such as art and science, through our acculturated uses of reading, classifying and interpreting. And although they may reflect entrenchment as well (habitual, unimaginative and detached, as in a very badly performed 4’22”), it is through classifications and interpretations of the matters before, and between, us that we may derive and share insight and novel perceptions; they are dialectics of just the sort which Goodman describes in the epigram. Of the eye (as a summary for a broader idea of vision) he writes: ‘(it) selects, rejects, organizes, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs… It does not so much mirror as take and make.' (1976, pp.7-8).

More directly, to classify is at the core of scientific methodologies, as through the systematic parsing of collections of observed and lab-generated data, the development and expression of a theory becomes legible to the communities which seek their explanatory power. Scientists use classifications to structure the systematic inquiry which underlies their work. For just one example, that dinosaurs are related to birds is not an obvious inference, either to lay people, or to palaeontologists before, so to speak, the fact. As it is in so many other fields, it is difficult to image how such a relationship might be uncovered. A closer examination of the morphological characteristics of particular animals in these ancient groups, taking advantage of increasingly sophisticated technologies and the renovated perspectives fed by insights emerging from their use, disclosed hidden relationships between them, such as the structure of certain bones. Without retelling the story in full, a deeper examination of the material available to palaeontologists, including those relatively recent studies at a genetic level of resolution, has in fact allowed such interpretations to be made, and has led to a rather more detailed, and thus plausible, account of the evolutionary pathway between the two families of animals. Among the tools used by specialists studying matters of speciation and the relationships between extant and extinct organisms, the phylogenetic tree and its precursors have been key methodological systems in this project of classification and analysis.

sketchy

In spite of the many contexts in which it is used, the word ‘sketch’ seems always to refer to something comparable. We sketch ideas, we perform a sketch, things look sketchy, and we sketch on paper, in visual and verbal languages. No matter the domain, sketching seems to possess, in some proportion, both the functional and structural features that Barbara Tverski describes in ‘What do Sketches say about Thinking?,’ beginning with its act of communion as a public performance of private, rather unformed thoughts. Stenning and Oberlander note that the effectiveness of diagrammatic representations is partly due to the determined articulation of its structure and semantic content. This limits possible interpretations by restricting abstraction of the content, aiding thereby ‘processibility.’ In contrast, the sketch’s common directive (whether in verbal, pictorial, or theatrical contexts) is the conveyance of structure, in a form that is indeterminate, or underspecified. Used in the visual arts and design as an early-stage conceptual and practical engine, they are ‘effective in conveying abstractions that may be inferred from the structure presented in the sketch, but are not directly conveyed by the sketch.’ She continues: ‘(Sketches) do not portray -- they convey conceptions of reality,’ and thus ‘reveal people’s conceptions of domains.’ Like a notation, a sketch is a kind of analog-digital hybrid, coming from the other direction; although notations are, strictly speaking, highly articulated and purpose-driven systems for making visual information explicit, a sketch is relatively low-resolution, embracing tacit knowledge and ambiguity -- what Nelson Goodman referred to as density: that quality of a graphic mark to stand for anything, even itself.

Using a restricted set of formal elements, a drawn sketch amounts to an exploration of spatial relations on paper, and through its fuzzy, recursive visual logic, it encourages inference -- more so than a relatively abstract form of expression. From the point of view of cognitive science, researchers suggest that sketching acts as a kind of scaffold onto which we offload cumbersome memory and information retrieval functions, enabling a kind of creative ‘backtalk’-- an interactivity through which our ideas may be developed in unexpected directions, without premature commitment, reviewing and exploring alternate routes, and encouraging innovative solutions. In sketching, we present ourselves with a practical syllogism – a moment of interaction between ‘material and metaphysics,’ which begins with the need to visualise some aspect of thought, but during which we might see new objects, relations and configurations.

drawing

To be oblivious -- as in dreams, and those better moments in the studio -- would be nice, but for the world in which I am currently at work (creative practice research), we are looking for the truth of the matter, so to speak, as a supplement to the fabrications that take place in those rather more immaterial spaces. Despite the (analogous?) resemblance of this search to a call to political action, it is actually to the discourse around the uses of such words as ‘image’ that we turn, in order to begin. Through a more analytical (not to say more precise) scrutinising of the languages we use, we hope to better grasp our own work and processes, as well those of others. The word ‘image,’ among many others, is one we have used willy-nilly (l.g.) in practice, but that we should shape within the context of this research project, and the social system into which I will place it; the meaning of that particular word is increasingly fluid, pulled as it has been between cognitive sciences, psychology and linguistics, while spilling as always back onto the studio floor (where we use it to clean our tools). Understanding ‘the image’ is as essential to understanding the state of contemporary cognitive sciences (a seeming unification of biology, philosophy and psychology, concerned with values and variables, mapping the networks of perceptual systems, internal vs. external, descriptive vs. depictive) as it always has been for the artist, who traffics, after all, in the processed image: hybrid analog and digital activities.

Ultimately we will attempt to demonstrate that Drawing amounts to a kind of transduction operation (we might use the word transcoding -- a programming term employed by Bourriaud as a key word in contemporary art discourse) which efficiently facilitates exchanges between depictive and descriptive representational practices. We intend to anchor the research on a mapping or modelling strategy applied to studies of those fields related by a necessary use of graphic praxes (design, visualisation, etc), in order to understand them as a network. For this we will take a low-res approach -- somewhere between analog and digital -- keeping the language as stable as possible, under the circumstances, while trying to be as explicit as possible without ossification. What we hope to end up with is a visual model: something like a phylogenetic tree, such as those used by biologists to ‘see’ the map of speciation events in the fossil record.

information and gaudi

The role of visualisations are well understood as systems for ‘off-loading’ of memory processes (design schemata), as boundary-objects that permit interacting fields to use heterogeneous information cooperatively (field-worker and theorist), and as amendable, portable documentation for learning and performance (music notation, engineering diagram, and so on). The field of Information Visualisation, properly speaking, has recently become a focus of attention across contemporary cultures, as software tools and innovative, interactive approaches have allowed it to emerge from the ‘academic vault,’ and find applications more stimulating than the pie chart, and forums beyond the laboratory, or technical journal. This is a point of collision for many social and professional worlds, as the web becomes more deeply rooted and densely populated as repository and interchange, critically useful to corporate, political and academic entities. Take a look at any of the programmed visual structures which are being created to organise and visually re-present data and information (http://infosthetics.com for a few examples). Many of these structured information indexes possess an uncanny formal beauty, and their interactivity and animated quality takes advantage of our innate-seeming narrative impulses, as well as psychophysical and experiential knowledge, allowing (it is hoped) for novel insights to be gleaned by those groups and individuals who use them. However, Manuel Lima writes, ‘The recent outburst of interest for Information Visualization caused a huge number of people to join in, particularly from the design and art community, which in turn lead to many new projects and a sprout of fresh innovation. But with more agents in a system you also have a stronger propensity for things to go wrong.’ Putting aside this last, rather problematic statement for a moment, Lima seems to be saying that an expanded field of visualisations can miss the (data) point, so to speak – generating indulgences, in some cases mere ‘eye-candy,’ that exploit the algorithmic tools of web-based graphics programming, and the individual creativity of their users, for their own sakes.

Art historian James Elkins writes of the ‘non art image’ (any image whose construction has a purpose related to the dissemination of technical, informational or scientific knowledge), that: ‘they are normally taken as propositions that may include nonessential pictorial elements… When they begin to work as art does - that is, by giving up any secure meaning in favour of a halo of possibilities, then their place in science becomes problematic and their pedagogic utility is unpredictable.’ Certainly, in the interactive web-based and computational visualisations that Lima works toward, aesthetic properties do become part of the story-telling that takes place around the representation (as long as they are not superfluous). They do indeed relinquish the ‘secure meaning’ (of a tabular approach to data, for instance) and embrace ‘the halo of possibilities’ inherent in more pictorial forms of imaging. And yet, citing Shneiderman on his blog, Lima notes: “The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures;” and in contrast to what he deems Information Art, Lima proposes a manifesto for Information Visualisation, writing: ‘the purpose should always be centered on explanation and unveiling, which in turn leads to discovery and insight… (Its purpose is) to translate information into knowledge. Every project should aim at making the system more intelligible and transparent… (S)imply conveying data in a visual form, without shedding light on the portrayed subject, or even worst, making it more complex, can only be considered a failure.’ For philosopher Nelson Goodman, insight is the product of experience and knowledge within the systems we use to communicate with one another, and are not essentially different, in kind: ‘A scientific treatise signifies abundantly but is not thereby a work of literary art,’ he writes, just as ‘a painted sign giving directions is not thereby a work of pictorial art.’

In her visualisation project, “Atta, Palindrome,” which used ground-penetrating radar to map an ant colony, Carol LaFayette describes a basic quandary she perceived as inhering in algorithmic art generally ‘which had to do with the metaphorical quality of mathematically derived images.’ She writes: ‘Like painting and drawing, a work of art created algorithmically can sometimes seem to be more about the medium than the subject. Like painting and drawing, algorithms are symbolic signs. They rely on generalisation to address physical phenomena.’ This generalisation (a necessary condition: a symbol is not what it symbolises, after all) naturally seeds connections to referents outside the system. The technically sophisticated, but ultimately imprecise visualisation of the vector-spaces of the ant hill quite easily slips down ‘routes of reference,’ and out of the realm of the purpose-driven project. The mediated creative act – an algorithmic circumscription of actual, but invisible, spaces -- is given material form, gaining communicability and some value as an artefact of knowledge, yet disconnects from its ‘subject.’ LaFayette continues: ‘Simulations of gravity, water, or terrain are freed from substance and geographic locale. At the same time, algorithms possess a fluid quality and can be repurposed from one form to another.’ The generalisations necessary in the processes of abstraction in computational visualisations – an essentially linguistic, virtual mediator – unmoors the bits of data from their context, even if chaotic systems are carefully configured into the program. To press a chiming ‘button’ embedded within a GUI is not, of course, in any way the same as pressing a doorbell, and so it is with an algorithmic water-flow. The ‘metaphorical quality of mathematically derived images’ is inviolable, so she asks herself as kind of metaphysical query, ‘What connection could be maintained between a virtual representation and its referent?’

In “How buildings mean,” Nelson Goodman writes that ‘as in few other arts, a work (of architecture) usually has a practical function such as protecting and facilitating certain activities, that is no less important than… its aesthetic function.’ An opera house, as much as a factory (or an information visualisation, structured to behave or respond), can embody its purpose in formal tensions through its design, producing what Goodman calls chains of referential links: while stoic efficiency can be built into the factory, ‘the weird towers of Antoni Gaudi's church of the Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, are revealed as startling representations when we come upon the tapering conical mountains a few miles away at Montserrat.’ As with the architectural work of stone and steel, so it is with the coding of information. Using information as both index and reference in a re-presentation, are we looking at constructions that have the kind of chains of reference that we see in Gaudi’s spires -- embodying and exemplifying the data with which the structure is built, and some aspect of reading the data?

a thing not a thing

At the large-ish scale of our human experience – a scale best measured in kilograms and metres -- it is impossible to see an atomic structure, as such. Of course, we can see representations such as Niels Bohr’s model of the atom and intuit a physicality that is otherwise invisible, for what must always be a theoretical entity. Indeed, that particular modelling effort, with its little globes, florets, and concentric circles, has lost its pedagogical relevance since the establishment of quantum mechanical concepts as central representations of the behaviour of the fundamentals of matter. After ‘uncertainty’ was incorporated within the expectations of the physical sciences, those tasked with visualising the concepts have had to set aside such comforting and intuitively derived images. Arthur I. Miller suggests, in “Representation and creativity in art and science,” that we ‘try imagining or visualizing something that is… both wave and particle. Clearly, any visual imagery of atoms could not be of the sort produced by a combination of our perceptual systems and cognitive apparatus.’ Our very scale, this is to say, prohibits a direct mapping of physical behaviours from our experience onto subatomic structures. And yet, the Bohr model remains lodged in my mind’s eye as a kind of ‘truth’ about things I will never be able to see.

As written, Miller’s suggestion is a tantalising one for a practising artist – a challenge, almost (if we put aside the question-settling matter of Richard Feynman’s diagrams). As Feynman clearly showed us painters, some sort of notational approach is necessary if we are to avoid simply generating ‘evocative transcriptions’ (Leigh Landy’s term for the expressive notations of stochastic music composers such as Cornelius Cardew, inadmissible as notations from the start, says Nelson Goodman). Unmoored from mathematics, these easily degenerate into arabesques (for example) and ribbon-like forms of visual/decorative memory (not that these are invalid hypothetical images for modelling quantum processes, it’s just that their cliché qualities must be mitigated by some kind of data-specific rigour [for lovely examples of this kind of abstraction in the computational realm, see the early interactive visual-musical work of Golan Levin]). At the core of a notation system, in Goodman’s terms, is differentiation and articulation: that a character in the system needs to be unambiguous, and that the system itself must be articulate and reproducible. A notational system must also tend, as practice, to emphasize certain features at the expense of certain others, sacrificing communicability to consistency; both the common music notation and mathematics are good examples of these: hard to learn, but once understood in its conventions, providing consistency and tremendous power in what can be represented. In the case of a visualised physical modelling of scientific knowledge, like Feynman’s for example, or Levin’s strangely titled ‘floo’ program (which raises other sets of questions), attention to intrinsic properties of motion, rather than some attempt at a ‘depiction of a thing’ is the thing. Miller writes: ‘Bohr's central point was to accept the wave and particle aspects of light and matter as complementary… particle properties and wave properties complement each other, like yin and yang. But in any experimental setup, the electron can reveal only one of its sides. So its wave and particle aspects are complementary but mutually exclusive.’ This is a notational stance, and although his atomic model was partial, and in some senses, quite wrong, it was a valuable bridge, as Miller demonstrates in his article, between images of the old and the new physics.

The word ‘image’ has many contemporary contexts, having lately permeated the discourse across cognitive sciences, psychology, and related disciplines, spilling back into the visual artist’s studio. For the sake of narrowing the discussion, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, in “Images and Mental Maps,” insists on the word ‘artificial,’ yet, he writes, an image is also ‘a percept… a mental picture in the memory, and furthermore it could also mean a people's schematic and indirect knowledge of place, as in the expression "the European's image of the New World."’ But unlike the artifice of image, he continues, ‘schemata (broader coding systems), and cognitive structures cannot be directly experienced: they can only be inferred.’ An image, in other words, is not a ‘thing,’ but it is something: in “L'isola del giorno prima,” Umberto Eco wrote that the word is a ‘thing that is not a thing,’ and this arch remark can stand for drawing, as well as it does for the (drawn) word.

Representations are differentiated from visualisations by intent, writes Colin Ware: the visualisations of scientific and engineering disciplines are ‘external objects’ emerging out of the same ineluctable need to communicate that motivates the painter and the poet, but for the purpose of ‘decision-making:’ the visualisation itself is not the end, as it might be for the studio artist, but is simply a useful and efficient (appealing to common haptic and experiential knowledge of users) conduit of exchange, possessing particular persuasive qualities, which the rigorous, non-pictorial tabular form does not. The purpose of the image, in a visualisation for the technician and designer is to spur dialogue, revision, consideration of alternatives, and ultimately facilitate the making of a choice; for the user, meanwhile, the purpose of the image is to disappear into the background of the interface experience – to become part of the virtual field. To draw is to make an image, and an experience of the made-image (qualities of line, the dynamic, scalar relationships between mark-maker and viewer, and symbolic sparks thrown off in the act of looking) is a kind of metadata not unlike the idea that an atom is an emergent property of observable data about the physical behaviour of matter: the meaning of drawing is emergent. It is a model of a truth-value that is available as a function of the interpretation of the data. The drawing provides a context for inference and interpretation. The graphic act contains what it needs to contain so that the mark-maker sees what is to be seen, and come to think of it, what is not.

index

The critic ‘assembles’ (or should) says Bruno Latour, and as formal sites for this emergent critique, Drawings are objects with elastic and cross-disciplinary utility, and so resist definition (if definition is necessary). The act of drawing has itself been characterised by those who do ‘it’ (assemblers, and dissemblers, all) through reams of metaphor and analogy: excavation, cookery, inventory, and more; this density supports the suspicion that visual and verbal languages are expressions of the same urges recast from within different symbol systems, as Nelson Goodman forcefully demonstrates in ‘Languages of Art.’  As a kind of bridge between picture and text, we need to read drawings, in a way that we don’t need to read films, notwithstanding general conditions of criticism, put by Richard Wollheim, that it seek to ‘understand, or grasp the meaning of, the work of art,’ in which pursuit we might read the background conditions of the filmmaker, and his film. The reading of the drawing (as opposed to the conditional research of the critic) is an indexical interactivity.

Rosalind Krauss: “As distinct from symbols, indexes…are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify.’ What may be said to be common to all drawings is a more or less immediate sense of thinking-being-made: there, in the tracks and traces on the page, are evidences of a correspondence, George Whale writes, ‘between marks and actions (which) are sufficiently constrained that sometimes we feel that we can 'read' psychological states from a drawing almost as easily as we can read them from, say, the shrug of a shoulder, or the turn of a head.’ This is the index, as Krauss describes it. Also, in his review of the work and thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, (“Peirce, Visuality, and Art” 2000), Michael Leja asks us to consider Jackson Pollock’s action painting as index: ‘To read them in this way is to understand them as resisting the function of painted marks to depict or resemble or to generate any sort of illusion. Rather, they stand essentially as registrations of the physical conditions that produced them… situated securely in the world of literal presence and physical existence… Imagine Pollock lying on the beach and leaving traces in the sand by virtue of moving his arms and hands as he reclines. Now compare these traces of arm movements on the beach with the painted records of his arm movements in his paintings. The identical physical movement will produce two different forms of index with two different significances. Whereas the mark in the sand may stand simply as evidence of a movement, the painted line made within a frame by the identical movement will be simultaneously and necessarily a symbolic gesture.’

Nelson Goodman writes: ‘A scientific treatise signifies abundantly but is not thereby a work of literary art; a painted sign giving directions is not thereby a work of pictorial art.’  After Borges, Turing and Warhol, I am unsure (I think), but Goodman is ‘a relativist who nevertheless maintains that there is a distinction between right and wrong theories, interpretation, and works of art… He refuses to reduce this distinction to a matter of power or rhetoric, treating it instead as a product of systematic and structural logic’ (Mitchell 1986), and an evolving reading of his particular application of analysis to the experience of art continues to permeate my research. Mitchell describes Goodman’s philosophy: ‘(His) "mind" is that of Jerry Fodor and the MIT behaviourists, not the mystic writing tablet of Freud or Lacan…. His interest in "writing" and textuality is that of a logician…not that of a metaphysician pursuing the limits of a metaphor. All his refusal to trouble himself with ideological issues, his suspension of the "why" in order to trace the "how," allows him a clarity about fundamental questions in the arts that cuts across many of our sterile debates about meaning, intention, reference, and representation.’

For my part, reading Goodman, there is much to admire in the tacit awareness (read “Languages of art’ 1976) of the problems carried within, even as it ‘carries on’ with the project – a kind of general life lesson, as well as an analogue to the work of art.

boundaries

‘Knowledge is a social product… a matter of dialogue between different versions of the world, including different languages, ideologies, and modes of representation,’ wrote critic WJT Mitchell, while from a study of drawing activities in engineering industries, sociologist Kathryn Henderson sets out the organic nature of knowledge production, affirming that it is best grasped in the making: ‘Coordination and conflict take place over, on, and through the drawings,’ she writes, ‘…(they) are agents that socially organize distributed cognition.’ The use of drawings in her industrial case study (“Flexible Sketches…” 1991), amounts to a kind of extension along which ‘the structure of the work, who may participate…and the final products’ which emerge at the end are marked up by a messy, socially sensitive, and non-linear sufficiency that the adoption of CAD systems avoids (and not for the better, in spite of their streamlining, articulate nature). As interactive sites -- what she calls boundary objects -- ‘the sketches themselves structure the work process as well as its product.’ It is a process that includes, in other words, not simply the conventions of their utility, but ‘the social organization of collective cognition and the locus for practice-situated and practice-generated knowledge.’ Moreover, the sociologist (in the field) concludes that the true source of innovation is not derived from technology, but emerges from within ‘the mundane interactions of actors, machines, and paper.’

A boundary object (Star 1989) can be described briefly as a more or less plastic process which acts as a kind of material(ising) interface – a point of exchange between members of communities, or those differently tasked within. Boundary objects (in Henderson’s study, engineering drawing sequences) allow a critical, communal approach to the complexities of building from within: what she describes as a cascade of representations and re-representations. It supplies these opportunities both through differential verbal and non-verbal interactions between co-workers and paper, as well as access to domain-specific detail, established through common reference points which yet leave room for redirection and interpretation (a polyphonic echo of sketching operations in art and design methodologies). In her study, for example, sequences of engineering drawings allow representation across the shop, from lead-designer to machinist: the drawings provide an opportunity to various players in the practice to ‘read different meanings particular to their needs from the same material.’ She writes that, although they ‘do not capture the full array of tacit knowledge used in practice… they point to more complex stocks of tacit knowledge and provide a loose, broad frame for them, so that individuals and groups may index different information or knowledge from the same representation or portion of it.’ 

Citing Jean Lave in “Cognition in practice” (1993):  “‘Knowledge-in-practice, constituted in the settings of practice, is the locus of the most powerful knowledgeability of people in the lived-in world.’ She argues that the whole person in action…is a more appropriate unit of analysis than the one used in reductive theories, in which ‘the individual is reduced to a self-contained disembodied technology of cognition, knowledge is reduced to scientific 'discoveries,' and society to a set of actors whose lives are structured only by self-interested motives.’"

practice led research

John Steinbeck, with biologist Ed Ricketts, in the Log from the Sea of Cortez wrote the following: 

“We could, if we wished, describe the Sierra (species of fish) thus: ‘D. XVII-15-IX; A. II-15-IX;’ but we could see the fish alive and swimming, feel it plunge against the lines, drag it threshing over the rail, and even finally eat it. And there is no reason why either approach should be inaccurate. Spine-count description need not suffer because another approach is also used. Perhaps, out of the two approaches we thought there might emerge a picture more complete and even more accurate that either alone could produce.”

Its as good a description of practice led research as I have come across. It reflects the categorical requirements of the scientist, the tinkering of the technician (and the novelist), and finally, the desire to catch and eat. A consummation devoutly to be wished.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

conclusions

In his “Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien,” Alfred Jarry proposes a ‘science of imaginary solutions’ – a mode of enquiry that is neither physics, nor metaphysics, but ‘pataphysics (Dworkin, 2003). Jarry’s theoretical science, later described by Jean Baudrillard as ‘the nail in the tire’ (2007),  gave rise over the following decades to a conviction that, as catalyst for artistic investigation, just about any question will do, notwithstanding one’s impulse to be precise in the response. It is unanswerable, in this sense, to ask: ‘What does an oblique plane sound like?’ but is useful nonetheless as an entry point to practice. Extracted from the marginalia of research journals and notebooks, that very question has served the purpose of initiating the programme of research and production which has resulted in a set of case studies for my PhD. As experiments in drawing music, the three projects developed to explore ways in which dialogues can be facilitated and driven by the various practical and cognitive properties of drawing, underpinned by an expanded theoretical/critical understanding of its practice. Conclusions are in the work

reciprocal lattice also

reciprocal lattice

The painter Stephen Farthing has recently formulated an admirably stoic working definition of drawing. He writes: ‘I understand drawing as the translation of multidimensional information into readable two-dimensional matter’ (2009). This point-blank description demands (quietly) a couple of readings, as it underwhelms just a bit in its recapitulation of a central, yet famously fragmentary and vexing activity in the work of art. Among its qualities, the definition speaks quite explicitly to that critical functionality of graphic thinking which will be under investigation in my research project: To draw is a fundamentally translative act -- a way to reach across.

More stirring in its language is art-historian Erika Naginski’s remark (2000) that ‘what makes drawing a compelling object of study… is the dynamic collision of hand and mind to which it continually bears witness’ – a literary take, contrasted with Farthing’s rather pragmatic one, but saying something essentially similar: that what is in (a) drawing is a reciprocal lattice of transcriptional gestures, a making-evident. Deanna Petherbridge has noted that: ‘drawing is a basic practice within so many disciplines, that it makes definition a problem’ (2002), and if true, the challenge is to approach graphic praxis as a field operation – an interpretive, relational interaction with data and analysis, rather than a toolbox of adaptations and constraints. This, Farthing has done both in his short definition, and in his lovely, metaphorically rich ‘Plan de dessin.’

It is said that the human being quite naturally ‘draws through’ the visual field as a cognitive exercise, tracing, tracking, and grouping -- seeing animals in the stars, for example, and faces simply everywhere. Of course, to engage with any seriousness in the practice of drawing is precisely to turn over these tracing and tracking proclivities for a better look, so to speak. But despite the temptation to say that we ‘see’ drawings everywhere, I assert that ‘to draw’ must include making – the evidence of Naginski’s ‘dynamic collision.’ At the heart of the research project I am undertaking will be an investigation of the peculiar utility of graphical thinking, implied in Farthing: a making evident, by drawing, as an act of interpretation and translation.

more metaphor

Architect and Researcher Brian Lawson, in his ongoing study of how designers do their work (2004), notes the experiential nature of ‘designerly’ thinking, characterising it as a “recognising” of problems and solutions, rather than a more piecemeal or orderly analysis of the problem. Experienced designers see in ‘broad strokes’ possessing a high degree of detail, and they tend to draw less (than inexperienced designers), but the drawings are more sophisticated in scope.  The use of drawing becomes central in an indexical and discursive system -- it becomes a mode of thinking, mediated by memory and mark-making. Similarly, scientific visualisations encourage what sociologist Roger Krohn (1991) calls an ‘interaction of theory and data’ that has become critical to its methodologies, as it always has been the studio of the working artist. Philosopher Michael Ruse (in Elkins, 1995) argues that scientists use pictures as both conjecture and vehicle -- sometimes illustrating theories, but in other cases merely taking one place in the laboratory discourse, summarising complex maths thru metaphor, thereby stimulating dialogue by being worth 10^3 words. And in “Sketching musical thought,” Dr Pat Healey examined real methods of composition from the point of view of composers, looking at a range of idiosyncratic but nonetheless efficient sketch and graphic-based strategies used by composers to get from “brief” to finished music. In each case-study, we see a process similar to Lawson’s ‘problem-recognition’ approach, moving from ambiguity to clarity thru dialogic practices, aided and abetted by drawing, which suggests that the pen-and-paper interface furnishes a practical way of grasping the parameters of a problem, and projecting possibilities -- in Healey’s study, generating a more or less direct, workable path between visual ideas and auditory structures.

There are two particular ideas which underlie the meanings of 1000s of words, says Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker: ‘location (in space), and force/causation/agency;’ Pinker suggests that this redundancy might be a key to ‘Mentalese,’ or the language of thought… This has all kinds of interesting implications beyond the scope of my research, but in music theory, for example, Fred Lehrdal has done fascinating research into this conceptual dynamic as central to the emotional content of musical experience…

And although there may be syntactic differences in the expression of the ‘force/agency’ dialectic in different domains, that they are fundamental also to the various systematic graphic practices we use to work in those domains has not escaped notice. Music, painting, and poetry are built differently, after all, yet their visual implementations – systems developed to communicate – are also underpinned by those ‘force/agency’ metaphors.

The literary translator Richard Pevear has described his discipline as “a dialogue between two languages, taking place in a space between them” (not just an ‘exchange of meanings,’ but a bridging of contextual differences as well as grammar); and although he is referring to The Word, and more specifically, the written word, investigating how other symbol systems can follow the same general principle will be a primary goal across the arc of the project.

Just as Pevear the translator seeks to bridge the complicated space between Russian and English texts, if we can interrogate systems of representation for visual and auditory arts, in context, so to speak, then the ‘spaces between’ their expressions could be similarly and practicably bridged, Then the work becomes not a matter simply of objects or sounds, but of representation and translation.