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Summary
In last week’s 100screen grabs, I used an image of a man “eating“ a hot dog to do the iteration. The wealth of this character lets this picture spread widely that people discover whether a person is rich or poor, they seem to eat in the same way. I tried to decompose the image from the color, composition, and line. Or using different people to play the same posture. Then, analyze the action in the process of reproducing the movement frame by frame.
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Reflection
First of all, the topic of this project is “eating”, which is going to be an anthropological study of human beings from the perspective of biology and culture, using graphic design as a method. In general, academic research is conducted by essay, academic forum, or other traditional methods using verbal and written language. However, we shouldn’t ignore the significance of images, such as mind maps, charts, diagrams, and networking are related to graphic disciplines. As stated in Graphic Design Interpretation (Drucker, 2014), when simple numbers and words couldn’t explain and integrate more complex information, the new models which are arguments based on images are gradually accepted by people. The visual language is more flexible and concrete (Drucker, 2014). As in my visual production, the connection between human eating and brutal animality emerged unconsciously when the body movements are listed horizontally. The configuration relationship based on visual scale breaks the boundary of data and intuitively looks for the answer in a more familiar way. The “eating” images are like a slow-motion of the animal gobbling up prey from a nature documentary. At the same time, as the research by Neil Cohn (2020) confirmed, the reason that a single image can be understood without difference is that the universal visual language it uses. Almost all people have the same perception ability. This makes it possible to transfer knowledge to more minutiae because visual thinking is the universal potential of human beings to construct logic through a series of images, analyze and integrate information (Cohn, 2020).
This made the audience understand the series of “eating“ body actions in my iteration. How the images circumstantially transformed into a dematerialized symbol of taking? Why it has the value to metaphor the animal nature of humanity？ Because we are animals and have the most basic needs, to eat, to defecate, to rest, to reproduce. The eating rituals evolved from primitive hunting animals, tribal celebrations, to elaborate cutlery, having religious prayers like Thanksgiving. But the act of eating doesn’t seem to be ennobled by it. No matter how elegant the way of eating, there is no way to hide eating is animalistic, primitive, and involves killing. Because this is the process of converting the body of another living thing into its energy.
Later, I was inspired by the phenakistoscope, the horizontally listed images of body movement formed into an infinite circle, which turned to symbolize the energy circulation. Implying the cyclical nature and the role in the food chain. The eating image is only a representation, which can be a metaphor for various phenomena in society. As mentioned in this article about global warming written by Wendy Chun (2018), the linear graph of temperature prediction has been endowed with political significance, arousing the audience’s attention and vigilance to environmental change. The images are easy to understand，so the influence of the idea itself will magnify. This demonstrates the role of graphic designers in addressing social issues.
Overall, I pieced together the images of “eating” as a body language through montage, and turned them into visual symbols of animalism and depredation. Through the investigation of “eating”, because “eating“ is a universal image, it will be transmitted in a broader sense.
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Brief
This project will take biology and culture in anthropology as the starting point, and study the meaning of a series of actions related to “eating“.
Explore the symbolic value of this body movement through iteration for challenging the possibilities using graphic design research in the anthropology discipline.
The digital moving images is the method, and the circulation using montage will stitch into a repeated infinite model system.
Finally, hoping to find the political value of this visual symbol to society.
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Reference:
Drucker, J. (2014) ‘Designing graphic interpretation’, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 180–192.
Cohn, N. (2020) ‘Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not?’, Psychon Bull Rev 27, April, pp. 266–285. doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01670-1.
Chun, W. (2018) ‘On Patterns and Proxies, or the Perils of Reconstructing the Unknown’, Accumulation, Available at: URL: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/212275/on-patterns-and-proxies/ (Accessed: 24 April 2021).
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Visual practices
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Montage is not only an important technique in movies, it can also be used to describe the artistic usage of images such as collages to create continuity, discontinuity, dialectics or antagonism. (Sheikh, 2015)
It has the nature of assemblage, whether images are placed next to each other on a single visual plane or in order. These kinds of images that follow each other in a particular sequence, form the meaning and discourse and produce the subject of politics (Sheikh, 2010).
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The sign should be connecting the symbol carrier and the meaning of the symbol. And the sign is a perception that is thought to carry meaning. Meaning must be expressed by the sign, and the purpose of symbols is to express meaning (Zhao, 2013).
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A symbol is a special sign which points to a complex meaning or spiritual quality. Symbols can acquire this ability mainly through repeated use in a culture (Zhao, 2013).
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Next Week？
The “Cannibalism” Society
The book “A Madman’s Diary” (1918) by Lu Hsun, it has compared the oppression of classification to “cannibalism” (Heller, 2015).
This metaphor can be understood as injury between individuals.
People, no matter what they do, whether they hold good or bad intentions, will drive others to act in order to accomplish their own goals. Between driven or being driven, a bleeding-eating relationship is formed.