I find this paper to be interesting mostly for the fact that it is widely encouraging the common knowledge of Creative Technology and Design (specific in digital imagery). It was found that although people are constantly bombarded with media and images in the modern day, it doesn't necessarily mean they have the skills to categorize and understand the information that they are consuming. It was also found that even though you are constantly exposing them to the mass amounts of imagery, that doesn't mean that they are going to slowly learn to understand just through exposure. People tend to start to shutdown due to overstimulation of information and imagery that they don't know how to sort through. I, and many others living in the modern age, have experienced at least some form of this in my daily life. I often find that I avoid extra image stimulation (like social media) due to the fact that its overwhelming and I gain virtually no extra world or digital literacy from consuming it. That in turn makes me less likely to continue to consume mass amounts of imagery because it overstimulates me to the point where I don't want to interact with it. This doesn't always happen, because if you provide the consumer with tools to dissect what they're actually looking at, whether that be context clues or actual tutorials, they will be more open and willing to understand what your digital art / imagery provides for them or what it means to them. Often times, we run into media that simply provides no ulterior meaning, therefore just providing overstimulation and not offering us any opportunity to analyze and interpret the image (weakening our visual literacy).
I also think its interesting that they would want to include creativity and technical skills as basic skills that people should be taught in school. While reading through the later half of the paper, I was finding that many of the skills listed are skills that people in the CTD/TAM major are currently sharpening or learning. This especially includes being INFORMED on what effect your work could have on the world. This not only requires you to have the basic visual design and media
skills, but it also requires you to, "...Be aware of emotional, psychological, physiological, and cognitive influences in perceptions of visuals." In short, we are learning how to make better visuals to help us solve problems! This can be shown in a variety of different ways:
You could be making a video game (which includes digital images) and you would needs to learn visual literacy to quickly convey what NPCs are good or bad, what items would do what, if a place is scary, any interaction that could have contextual clues based off imagery.
You could be making an interactive art installation, which you would need visual literacy to be sure that you are visually conveying the theme of your art. Without this, the consumer is missing a key element of why the piece exists.
You could be making a series of digital art images, which you would obviously need visual literacy to understand the tutorials that you are given (through video or image) and to understand other artists' art if you were to use it for inspiration.
I wonder how our ARTS and CTD curriculum would change if we all had a more basic understanding of visual literacy and the consequences of our artistic actions. Without these vital visual literacy skills, we as a society will have a much harder time navigating anything because we won't be able to pinpoint the important underlying themes and facts from the visual stimuli that is now widely available to us.
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