When a person or group 'works' out their thoughts by making marks intermixed with writing or math or symbols, what relation does this have to classical views or sketching and drawing? Do these visual representations of ideas have a value as objects/ creations? Should we be teaching visual thinking in schools? Should we be collecting these creations from many disciplines and displaying them in public?
Neil,
In ''Visual Thinking'', Rudolf Arnheim made a good case why art and particularly visual arts should be part of the curriculum.
About 150 years ago, Felix Ravaisson tried to do that in France.
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/docs/canales-cinematography.pdf
In the book `''On Painting'', Leonardo Da Vinci provided many good reasons why it should be so.
If its purpose was to help people think about a problem together, the markings and notes are conceptual aids rather than having an image-making purpose. The classic blackboard full of formulas has a visual appeal at least partly due to the repetition of patterns within a complex image (horizontal lines, repeating symbols). Such images have been exploited many times in commercial art such as stock photography, so much so as to become a cliche, but the image is usually an adjunct to another concept.
The true value of such a sketch is the thinking it made possible. If such thinking became manifest in a social or physical way that made it publicly known, the sketch might be valuable as a reminder or souvenir, like Abraham Lincoln's top hat in the Smithsonian. But pure visual value is subjective; if one saw that the sketches accidentally had visual value as an image, one might posit it as found art.
However, I would warn that the collection and exhibition of such "art" as a policy could have a stultifying effect on thinkers, if they become conscious of their sketching as potential art. Then they're thinking about the marks themselves, rather than the marks helping them think about something else. The energy of their thinking process, the instinctual relationships between them, the shared excitation of brains involved in a common purpose would be lost to self-awareness and thought of potential reward.
This form of multi-mode practice (see Gunther Kress) is precisely what we should be teaching if we want to enhance creativity. (The computer is not the answer). My book Teaching Creativity: Multi-mode Transitional Practices 2009 Bloomsbury is devoted to the kind of multi-mode artefacts that you mention. The way to teach this is to sit beside the student and in dialogue and mulit sign use work with them on the development of an idea. This multi-sign use sign use is the very essence, in relation to the arts, of what Marx and later Lefebrve saw as the aim of a philosophy divorced from abstraction and concerned with praxis. I personally see these artefacts as part of what I term Das Gegenwerk or the work towards the work that avoids definitive closure. Thus, I do not differentiate such artefacts from completed works. ( see also my publications on Researchgate all of which deal with such notational artefacts.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Education