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Re: Reading pictures??
Nicholas Gessler (gessler@UCLA.EDU)
Fri, 4 Oct 1996 10:52:45 -0700
Ron wrote:
>For what it's worth: In Aymara (Bolivia), if you have a picture of, say, a
>house, and you ask an Aymara speaker "What is this" (Akax kunasa?) you get "It
>looks like a house" (Utajamawa.), not "It's a house" (Utawa.). The reason is
>that in Aymara only the real thing can be a house- a picture is not the real
>thing.
Which Reminds me of Magrite's famous painting of a pipe with the painted
caption "This is not a pipe" below. (Actually, it was in French.) He
played around a lot with various conceptions of what a picture (painting) is
and is not: Painting of a broken window wherein some of the pieces on the
floor still "window" the landscape outside. Painting of a painting in which
one is not sure whether the latter is a clear glass "window" or a canvas.
It might be worth looking at his work for some ideas and references. (For
anyone in LA there's an exhibition of his work now at the Armand Hammer Museum.)
And following through on John McCreery's recommendation of the "Diagrammatic
Reasoning Conference," I note the sequel workshop below:
Thinking with Diagrams Workshop
http://www.mrc-apu.cam.ac.uk/personal/alan.blackwell/Workshop.html
Paintings, photos, maps, charts, diagrams --- all "visualizations" and
worthy of a comparative study.
Nick Gessler
gessler@ucla.edu
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