Shaping Media | Pedagogical Media Theory

“Closure” is a cognitive prerequisite for reading comics, as explained by Scott McCloud – but this holds also true for all media and the cultural medium. It may be also valuable for your project approaches, for the ‘space of (re)action’ you try to construct for your passersbys, pupils or family members to (re)act in, where they are free to generate new meaning.
Some connections to former concepts we disucssed:

Foerster’s “Blind Spot”: Obviously we do not see that there are blind spots. The neurophysiological blind spot in our field of vision gets ‘stitched shut’ by our brain, so we have no gaps in our world(view). Generating continuity where there is none is an effect of closure.

Bateson’s “Context and context markers”: No situation is exactly as any one we encountered before. We need generalized context markers that let us decide upon a current context in a situation. A ‘room’ with ‘rows’ of ‘tables’ and ‘seats’, all ‘aligned’ and ‘directed towards’ a kind of ‘presentational medium’ – and we ‘see’ a classroom-context, with closure smoothing over anything that is situational or does not exactly fit into this picture.

Arts and media: See the examples below by Rene Magritte and Scott McCloud.

Education and didactics: By softening, recontextualising or sabotaging context markers, we may become aware of them as cognitive constructs: generating a big, continous picture will then turn into a willing, conscious act of (inventive) closure (McCloud may call this “Non-Sequitur”; though there may be a medial step-up). The awareness may be a temporary dip into a higher type of learning.

Exposing closure: Lateral thinking questions

A fun way to train lateral thinking (“thinking outside the box”) are questions of the following ilk, where our usual mechanisms of “closing” a mental image, based upon just a few facts, leads us astray:

“(…) Sometimes a problem seems difficult or insoluble because our assumptions about it are wrong.
A classic example: A father and his son are involved in a car accident, as a result of which the son is rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. The surgeon looks at him and says “I can’t operate on him, he’s my son”. Explain.
A variant of this involves a father and son travelling on a scheduled flight; the father asks the flight attendant if his son may visit the cockpit and she takes him there. When he’s gone the pilot explains to the co-pilot “That was my son”. For a few people there’s no ‘puzzle’ here, but most of us are so used to seeing only male surgeons and pilots that we too easily overlook the obvious explanation: the pilot or surgeon is the boy’s mother.”
(quoted from eluzions.com, Jun 14th 2012)

Try this story with kindergarten-teacher, a dancer, or a hairdresser and see if the results are the same (this kind of deceptive gender stereotyping can also be measured by an implicit association test).
Have another story, a bit more complicated:

“In a room with an open eastern window and a southern breeze blowing through the south eastern orchids, near the scenic view of a european country, lyes the bodies of Romeo and Juliet. Two lovers that have died. Their bodies are near a table and surrounded by a pool of water. How did they die?”

Do you have a mental image in your mind after reading this text?
This is the helpful, but also sometimes restricting effect of closure.

We are closed/open

One of the best books (or medium) to explain comics, is Scott McCloud’s comic “Understanding Comcis”. The title is a hommage to McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”, written three decades before. McCloud not only explains comics, but also aspects inherent to all media and human cognition, aspects like closure or amplification by simplification.
Famous game designers like Chris Crawford and Will Wright (“The Sims”) recommend McCloud’s comic. How come?

• Scott McCloud (1993), “Understanding Comics.” Chapter 2 and 3 [XXX]
• Chris Crawford (1993-1994), “Book Review: Understanding Comics” [X]

“Our industry-culture has raised visual verisimilitude to the status of a stairway to heaven; McCloud’s points might help bring us down to earth. He presents a sequence of decreasingly detailed renditions of a human face. At the left end of the sequence is a photorealistic representation; at the right end is a circle with two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth. “By stripping down an image to its essential ’meaning’, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t. … The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe.” ”
– Chris Crawford (1993-93), “Book Review: Understanding Comics”
(Compare also to Will Wright’s simplified language “Simlish”.)

With other words: The artist, educator, therapist creates the demarkation for a nearly ’empty’ medial space – for you to fill with individual meaning!

Creating a space for you!

If we talk, there’s magic happening. A sequence of sounds – or letters – become words, and evoke meaning. By saying “egg”, “huevo”, “Muna” or “Ei”, a concept of a white, ovoid form comes to our minds, without there being a necessary connection between the sequence of sounds and its denotation. Where is this connection coming from?
But there’s even more potential magic to discover:

René Magritte (1930): “The Key to Dreams”.

Scott McCloud (1993), “Understanding Comics”, p. 72

“See that space between the panels?” – What about the space between words and images, between the lines of the image, or between the words? Do you see these spaces?
That, what you do not see, is a medium at work: Creating a space for you.

Transfering ideas to a medium, or even a try to represent reality in a medium, requires the artist, edcuator, propagandist to leave out a medium-specific ‘gutter’, where the reader, viewer or learner fill in the gap (e.g. words in a text are not ‘connected’; a camera never shows the place behind the objective; a painting ‘stops’ at its frame).

“You do not see what you do not see.” (Heinz von Foerster) – This is the power of a medium, and the responsibility of an educator, designer or artist: working with and within a blind spot of medial reception, for the learner to discover, and play with.

Task:

What is “closure” (McCloud 1993, “Chapter Three. Blood in the Gutter”)?
There seem to be different kinds of closure, based on the physiological limits of our senses to the limits of our (culturally affected) cognition.

“In electronic media, closure is constant, even overpowering!”
– Scott McCloud (1993), p.65

Can this phenomenon of medium design and medium usage be found in other media as well? How can closure be used in learning/teaching?

For a take on closure as predominant in electronic media, see e.g. also “Database as symbolic form” in Lev Manovich (2001), “The Language of New Media.” Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. [X]

“After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate – database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.”
– Lev Manovich (2001), “The Language of New Media”, p.194

Some thoughts that came to my mind, when reading Wey´s posts and Bateson´s text about learning as the changing of choice(s) one is able to make.

From “reply to Jenny”, Wey wrote:
“One other problem is a more pedagogical one: How can I raise and keep up curiosity and a childlike sense of wonder in face of constant uncertainty and changes (For kids, there are benevolent parents providing safety and stability after all…)? And how can I keep up communication with diverse people all over the world to exchange views without tiring?”
I´ve always thought that in a way it is much easier to teach young children from age 4 to 10. It seems that it is easier to amaze them and keep up the curiosity in a classroom. On the other hand, working with teenagers (or adults too) can be more challenging – it takes more effort to keep up the curiosity lets say in Arts, because there are so many other things in life for them – friends, relationships, movies and so on…BUT, because life is so diverse and people in it more diverse there will always be things to surprise with in the classroom:). Still, I agree with Wey´s point that “effective cognizance will some time lead to disorientation, anger, guilt or frustration, too. This is something we have to take into account”. I´ve had some students who started to cry a couple of times in class. Once it was a case of the “right red color” – this boy couldn´t find the right color from the pencils (it had to be the color of the red Lego piece) and he couldn´t draw. For the next time he had to take his Lego magazine and show all of us, which kind of color is “Lego-red”. Then there was a case, when a girl started to cry when we painted aurora (revontulet in Finnish). It was a little lesson, were I asked them to paint aurora. Through that we painted the whole color circles, mixing colors and so on. And she cried because she was afraid of the colored paint…So I took her brush, but it into yellow paint, red paint, green paint and showed that there is nothing to be scared of…And she calmed down:)
From “Notes for Noora”:
One more example that is similar to yar bombing is moss art, or moss graffity that I find is very amusing and looks good in urban streets:

(moss invader)

Wey: “What illusion of community, safety and belonging did we use before the arrival of networked social media? ;)”
Maybe those were something like collecting stickers, fog-pics (I am not sure how are they called in English, but they were very popular to collect, when I was 12: pictures of dolls, horses, flowers in very pastelled, foggy colors and hard to see), caps, having a tamagotchi?:)

And about the last comment Wey gave to me:

“We presume that everybody wants to express her- or himself, e.g. within an artistic medium – but does the result, does the expression have to be interpretable? Could it also be meant to be deliberately not interpretable, because that’s what is wanted to be expressed: the lack of an expression for something felt or experienced, but the want to express this lack?”

This is a very good point! In fact, I´ve always thought that the expression doesn’t ´t always have to be interpretable as long as I see that it comes from the heart, or I can feel that the artist is not lying. (How can you tell that is another topic.) When I was teaching young children at art studio, usually after the course parents came and asked what is this picture or sculpture or “thing” that their child has done…And I didn´t know always because I didn´t want to ask their child:) (Usually, when they wanted to tell me, they came and told me voluntarily.) Then I made up something to say to their parent, because I had a feeling that if I don´t know, I would be a teacher “who doesn´t care”. Or there is this other fear, when parent sees that his/her child is using, lets say, too much black color, their cild has immediately something wrong. But it is not so simple – maybe their child likes night a lot:) But usually parents assumed something negative. Very stereotypical – black color=death…?

From Bateson´s text, page 9:
“There is, in fact, almost no formal theory dealing with analogue communication and, in particular, no equivalent of Information Theory or Logical Type Theory. This gap in formal knowledge is inconvenient when we leave the rarified world of logic and mathematics and come face to face with the phenomena of natural history. In the natural world, communication is rarely either purely digital or purely analogic. Often discrete digital pips are combined together to make analogic pictures as in the printer’s halftone block; and sometimes, as in the matter of context markers, there is a continuous gradation from the ostensive through the iconic to the purely digital. At the digital end of this scale all the theorems of information theory have their full force, but at the ostensive and analogic end they are meaningless.”

I would like to comment that part with to examples:

1)A video from Stefano Mancuso´s TED talk. I especially liked the question he asks from the first part of the talk, showing a picture called “What is wrong in this picture?” and answer is: “Where are all the plants?”
Error in communication?

2)Or another example from John Baldessari, a video made in 1972 – “Teaching a Plant the Alphabet”:
and here a short video about it
In my opinion this is an early approach how to interact with a plant…And I think it shows very well how we estimate the plants intelligence…or how we try to force our “knowledge” to others thinking that they deserve it.