I would have thought that "understanding" this is almost impossible?
There would be so many things that operate on our cognitive processes
when we are trying to make sense of an image. This would include such
things as age, experience, relationships, education, up bringing, sex,
heritage, in fact everything that makes us us?
It's not impossible to understand pieces of the puzzle. That's why we
have the social sciences. You might have to go get a degree in
Anthropology or something to understand things in this way. I did. :-)
The social sciences tend to make much less "scientific progress" on
what makes us all tick, precisely because humans are so much more
complex than natural phenomena. But the social science types do make
some headway.
What is interesting is that people who share the same cultural and
environmental experiences can often see the same thing in an image, or
more interestingly one can be directed by the other to _see_ what the
first sees. Given the right description, it is possible to make
another person see something that they would not have seen unassisted.
A very illuminating example of this, is to play the game "Pictionary."
A person gets a word on a card, and has to draw it for the other
person. There are many words which lots of people can draw and
decipher rapidly, because we share a common inventory of pictoral
descriptions for them. Like "sun."
Perhaps that is what you meant by providing the narrative? A means
of "showing" the observer what is really there?
I don't know about "what is really there." More like, "some ways I
have seen it." As opposed to leaving it totally up to the viewer's
free will to decide what's there. We share a common base of meanings
and conventions, and I'd like to explore the commonality of those
conventions on the Surrealist level. It's the commonality that makes
our works mutually interpretable, I think. It's the divergence which
makes them either novel and inspiring, or totally meaningless and
hence boring.
> This is Dadaist irrelevance. It has nothing to say about my earlier
> essay. The point I am trying to make, and that you resist, is that
> most people will attempt to come up with _rational_ interpretations of
> Surrealist pieces, due to the "years of societal conditioning." What
> I want to do is understand the process, so that I can lead the viewers
> _away_ from the strictly rational and obvious, if I so choose. Yes, I
> want to manipulate the viewer. I have no moral dilemma about this.
That sounds like a reasonable goal. Though I would suggest that
without educating the observer of your intention, and finding willing
participants, most would dismiss it as madness (which has largely been
the case with surrealism).
That's acceptable. TV is madness. Video games are madness. VR is
nothing short of psychotic. That's why everyone compares it to LSD
all the time. :-)
> In fact, when I look at my own essay, I realize that my fear of it
> falling apart is primarily borne of the rapid succession of images and
> symbols that are developed. Very few of them are repeated or
> developed further, so I fear that we may be left with the afterburn of
> a rapid slide show. Repetition and linkage are necessary to produce
> _pattern_, which in turn is what is needed for a viewer to produce
> narrative.
I'm not sure that the analogy is a slide show? I understood it be
be a landscape of adventure. More or lessa a path that could be
traveled if one so desires?
But if the path travelled is a narrative, it has a beginning, a
middle, and an end. It has a coherent story. If it doesn't tell a
story, then it is merely a sightseeing tour about unrelated events.
And then one could just view the vacation snaps in any particular
order.
Cheers,
Brandon