Sunday, February 8, 2009

Definitions from Ch.2 of Grammar of Visual Design


Not quite, but almost exhaustive list of terms from the second chapter, "Narrative Representations": 

Locative: relate landscape to subject by locating them in a particular place (subject is passive)

Instrumental: relate tool to subject as an instrument (subject is active)

Vectors: like action verbs, they connect Participant (Actor) to Goal.

Participants: are either Interactive (participants in the act of communication) or Represented (which constitute the subject matter of communication). In formal art theory: participants are "volumes" or "masses" with their own distinct weight or gravitational pull. 

Processes: In formal art theory are called "vectors" or "tensions."

Visual Schemas: reducing visible world to simple geometric forms.

Transaction/Transactional Structure: something done by an Actor to a Goal. 

Classificatory Structure: includes analytic structure; lines without arrows; Participants can lost their separate identity to different degrees; never have a vector. 

Analytical: the Participants are not Actor or Goal, but Carrier and Attribute. Like a map. 

Embedded analytical processes: detail (or Attributes) in naturalistic images say things about the Carriers: the men wear hats, scarves, and socks. 

Squares & Rectangles: can be stacked and aligned; form geometric patterns with each other; does not exist in nature.

Circles: self-contained, complete in themselves, warmth, protection.

Triangles: unlike square, it is tilted, so it is both a Participant and a Vector because it can convey directionality; sense of process; symbol of generative power.

Vertical/Horizontal Elongation

Interchangeability: of visual and verbal participants in a diagrams.

Narrative: connected by a vector; doing something to or for each other.

Conceptual: represent participants in terms of class, structure, and meaning; generalized, stable, timeless essence.

Narrative Visual Proposition

Indicator of Directionality: like an arrow, pointer.

Realist/Abstract images: the latter are harder to transcode, or translate into language. 

Transport: movement from one place to another.

Transformation: causally determined. 

Non-transactional structure: has not goal, is like an intransitive verb.

Transactional process: the Participant (Actor) instigates movements.

Actor: from which the vector emanates.

Goal: participant at whom or which the vector is directed. 

Events: representations of actions which include only the Goal.

Interactors: double role of Actor and Goal.

Reactional process: when a vector is formed by an eyeline.

Reacter: the Participant that looks at the Phenomenon.

Phenomenon: formed either by being looked at by the Reacter, or by a whole visual proposition, like a transactional structure. 

Speech/Mental processes: dialogue and thought balloons.

Conversion processes: a chain of transactional processes. 

Relays: do not just pass on, in unchanged form, what they receive, they always transform it. 

Geometric symbolism: does not use an participants, only a vector; like a helix; get meaning from symbolic value; abstract patterns extend the "Vectorial Vocabulary" by drawing our attention to possibilities. 

Locative Circumstances: relate participant to Setting.

Setting: a type of Participant. 

Circumstances of Means: like tools, but no clear vector between the tool and its user.

Circumstances of Accompaniment: like penguin with baby pic, no clear vector between the two but they form two distinct participants. 

Linguistic events: have processes that are happenings which cannot have an Actor.

Behavioral process: the meanings of visual non-transactional reactions form a more restricted filed, tied up as they are with one kind of behavior: looking (77). 

Projective processes: mental and verbal processes, processes of perception, affection cognition. 

Senser: the person that does the seeing.