Life & Research Notes

In reading Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s forward in master designer Mitsuo Katsui’s book Visionary Scape, I found myself happily struck by his analysis of imagery in communication.

The modern era has been an age in which visual images have been in overflowing abundance but viewed to be inferior as a form of language. Today, however, the time has come for us to cast doubt on the special status accorded to communication whose purpose is rational agreement. We do not communicate only for the purpose of agreement. Rather than agree, we accept each other’s words. There is no need to set uniformity of awareness as our objective. It should be ample simply to understand what we are communicating. Communication gives rise to further communication in chain reaction. It should be enough merely to have the perception that one is participating. Though visual images may be thoroughly arbitrary as language, they are not inferior in terms of communicative function.

For most visual artists and designers this point is indisputable, yet in reading this I found myself confronted with my own biases . I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve come to favor verbal and written language over visual imagery. I like language’s range of expressiveness, from the poetic to the logical, and its potential for melding different styles within this spectrum. I like the intentionality in writing and speech, how its structure is crafted. But thinking about it now I’m reminded that visual langauge can also meld the precise with the poetic, the mathematical with the irrational, and much of its effectiveness is how it does so within the subconscious.

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