In2In
Posted on May 20, 2008
Filed Under What's New |
I wrote this piece for In2In Thinking, a US corporate network. Occasionally I’ve written pieces that explain how the way I think is changing.
FRAGMENTS of thinking
As someone who writes for a living I began to feel uneasy in my chosen profession about a year ago.
Fewer and fewer people read much of any length. Written communication is becoming increasingly allied to imagery which should be no great surprise. We’ve had TV now for over 50 years, cinema for over 100 years and personal computing for over thirty years. More and more everyday, person-to-person communications depend on screens and, increasingly, on moving images. But if that was the only change then so be it.
The other direction change has come from is the new importance of the network and the requirement of networks to patch together something coherent about ourselves, interests and needs as well as our visual world. Fast.
Why does that matter in the context of “better thinking about thinking”?
The first thing to say is this article is not a complaint – images are great and so are networks.
The significant change though is that explanation and articulation are reduced. Let’s think through the consequences of that for how we think.
One of the features of writing for a living, and something I noticed all down the years, is that my job has always in fact entailed thinking for people. A client might hire me, or people like me, to give a document the gloss of better wording – “can you add the words?” – but almost without fail the fault of a document lay in the muddy thinking.
A lack of structure reflected a client’s lack of understanding; the absence of shining language reflected confusion. I always saw my first task as to help a client think better.
Today my job remains the same but the big difference, brought about changing forms of communications, is I can’t rely on language any longer as my primary tool.
There will be designers and artists out there who say - nothing new in that, we’ve always turned to images. Images have always evoked emotions, images stimulate, provoke, seduce. Language tends to be abstract, leading to analytical thinking and a somewhat elitist outlook.
My counter-argument - the changes we’re looking at have taken place during a period when visual arts such as photo-journalism have gone into decline so I reject the idea that all we’re doing is jettisoning language for images.
Nonetheless I think it is true that those of us who have relied primarily on language are outdated. We probably took ourselves too seriously and ultimately declined in relevance because we made the trade elitist, we drove written communications into too structured and abstract a form.
What’s to do about it? I think any style of thinking is only as good as the form of communications that exists to share it. Put another way communications dictate what and how we think. If we can’t communicate a set of thoughts, the thought process is of minimal value and so we, generally, iterate between thought and expression each shaping the other.
The forms of communications people are now favouring are fragmented, highly personal, ultra-topical, and interactive and they mix visual and fragmented textual images. I am of course thinking Facebook and MySpace type digital documents.
There is a fairly free association between the textual, biographical visual, topical elements of these sites. Most social network home pages/profiles are random segments of bio, photo, diary, and loose loyalties and widgets that the viewer/reader creates association from.
It seemed to me about a year ago that the relationship I have with the visual needed strengthening and I guess there are many people out there like me. I also need to loosen up to the randomness of networks.
Because I occasionally make TV programmes and use my mobile phone camera incessantly I’m not exactly a stranger to the visual. Still I needed less of a hobbyist’s approach so now about half my time is spent working with visual artists. I’m also involved in launching new visual arts projects and one of these offers an easy way into visual thinking – Fragments.
Fragments began when I asked a group of artists to go back to their favourite work and select a segment or fragment to evolve into a new work. I figured that would give me access to what the artist defines as essential in a work and in turn that might yield visual insights. But that’s not all we were looking for.
I wanted to make work by established artists accessible to a larger audience – to put real quality visual thinking before a wide public.
The result is a series of art works with conceptual strength geared for accessibility. We priced them at only $60. T they are my attempt to engage more with visual culture – in fact to be lead by visual art. They also mean every household can both, for about $600, collect and exhibit high quality art by great artists. The home becomes something else, something visual but also semi-public, and engaged in abstraction.
We have six works on the site right now – http://fragments.galleryica.com - and we’ll be adding one or two a week as we go forward.
These are original art at a price anyone can afford. Why that’s important though also brings me back to networks. It’s not just that my job is being rendered superfluous by all these fragmented forms of communications.
The role of art is changing, in part because what social networks reflect is a move against the free market and a desire for re-attachment to social values. But over and above that art is about the only place we can turn to to debate values (other than religion). Visual arts can be a confused environment too but at least artists continued to work in pursuit of some kind of elevated moral outlook while the rest of us deferred to a system that gave us bank failures so soon after Enron-type failures.
Something is converging in the world of the network, the visual and moral renewal, giving visual arts a self-evidently important role in defining social values. I have written about this in the Irish Times particularly with reference to corporations taking artists in on long assignments in the innovation process (recently I wrote about Disonancias which ogansied ten 9 month art in industry residences each year).
I think we’ll see more of these kinds of things – people vying for attention in the sphere of visual communications and I think it will be incumbent on businesses to persuade, cajole and teach people to think in more visual ways as well as to integrate visual concepts into the innovation process. We’re already seeing it. Behind the scenes this is a quiet revolution
Time though to make a song and dance about it.
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