For today’s exercise, Sara E. Crawford wants us to see some visual art. Find a local art gallery that has an exhibit, go to your local college or community center and see if they have anything on display, and/or Google art events in your area. If the event is happening later, write it down on your calendar and complete this exercise by observing a random piece of art on a website like deviantART or flickr.
Look at the piece of visual art and study it for a moment. What does this piece make you feel? What does it remind you of? In your opinion, what did the artist intend to express?
Free write in your journal for at least 1-2 pages about the piece of art. Jot down any characters or storylines it inspires you to imagine.
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I use a lot of visual images in my teaching. I think an image has the power to convey so much and spark discussion. In good years, I even teach lessons from Robert DiYanni and Pat C Hoy’s book Frames of Mind: A Rhetorical Reader with Occasions for Writing (2005) to teach visual analysis. The idea, as the authors write in their introduction, is to “(provide) approaches to analyzing and interpreting many kinds of texts, both visual and verbal, and to (consider) aHS of thinking as well as ways of writing.”
Put more simply, I use images to get students into the mindset and habit of thinking critically. This is something that many students do without realizing it.
I recall one student a few years ago who argued that he did not have the ability to do a literary analysis, that he couldn’t analyze what he read:
“What if I walked down your street …,” I started to ask.
“Oh, you don’t want to walk down my street. You’d get jumped,” he said. (For the record, I have run, bikes or walked safely down many streets in the city.)
“Okay, if you we with me walking down your street and you saw people walking toward us, could you tell me if they were dangerous?”
“Yeah. It depends on how many here are, what they’re wearing, how they’re walking.”
“So you would be able to read them and analyze what you saw?”
I then fed on the subtle aha moment that all yea he rs live for.
So as I looked at this exercise and my goal of directing my free writes toward something I can use later, I landed on the image above. This ambiguous image shows a man who is either looking straight ahead in half-face or looking to the right in a side profile. The profile looks straight at the text, “Life is all about how we see things.”
Students love the image, as well as other optical illusions that I share. It looks cool. Yes, but what else?
What does it make you see?
What thoughts singin have when you look at it?
What questions do you have as you look at it?
As I was researching the origins of the image, I came across a TEDtalk by neuroscientist Beau Lotto entitled “Optical Illusions Show How We See” (https://youtu.be/mf5otGNbkuc). He also is the author of Deviate: The Creative Power of Transforming Your Perception. In his talk, he shows examples of how our brain sees and how it can trick us. “(T)he light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters.”
Like the image above, information is malleable. It can be seen in different ways. There is something to be said for having a strong single-minded focus, but being able to see more than one side of an issue gives you more flexibility in describing, arguing or manipulating information. “So, how do we see?“ Beau Lotto asks. “Well, we see by learning to see.”
And learning to see things differently. Because being able to see things in many different ways is
like having different perspectives on the same information,
So life really is all about how we see things, Mr. G?
In my mindset, not really. To me, Life is all about how we CHOOSE TO see things.
That’s what I try to teach. With images and optical illusions.
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As I write this, I realize I am not satisfied that it is in its final publishable format yet. And that’s okay. It’s a start. And it’s something I can return to later. That’s the writing process.
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