Visible – Experience

Something I’ve noticed when trying to draft my Experience posts is that I keep going back to my Part I posts, seeing my Emblem, and am reminded wholly of the concept for that quality. Anyways, I saw the image of the Parker pen and I remembered that Calvino’s quality of visibility has everything to do with the writing! As a child, Calvino would see images and make up a story line from his imagination. When he became an adult, he realized that the more important feature of a story is the writing. The writing should guide the story in such a way that the visual imagination has no choice but to tag along.

This quality was best expressed in Bossypants when Tina Fey is describing some of the managerial tactics that she adopted from  her mentor and friend, Lorne Michaels. Lorne once remarked, “Never cut to a closed door” and Fey extrapolated meaning out of his advice. The situation happened as such that the camera cut to a closed door before an actor entered and Lorne felt that they lost the audience in the moment: “Lorne would have preferred that the camera cut follow the sound of the actor knocking on the door. Which is to say that the sketch should lead the cutting pattern, which is to say content should dictate style, which is the say that in TV the writer is king”

I feel that this quote (and managerial tactic)100% conveys the feeling of Visibility from Calvino. Maybe Lorne wasn’t making this point, but it is still a good point to follow and one that I think has resonance between Calvino, Bossypants, and Krevolin.

 

Visibility: Graphics

For this Graphics example I was really limiting myself to entries that contained text in some way. When I first great Graphic Design: The New Basics, I was really drawn to this creation and I even used it an as example for our exam on this book.

Surface Manipulation The textural physicality of these type studies artfully reflects the active processes featured in the words. The crisscrossing lines of an artist’s cutting board resemble an urban street grid.

It really irritates me that the author says that the cutting board resembles an urban street grid (not sure where she was going with that one). Regardless, this piece really does bring life to the creative process. Just as I believe that the pen is the emblem if a writer is trying to bring life to words, I believe that the EX-ACTO knife would be the emblem for an artist who is trying to bring life into a design project such as this. My sister is an architect so when she was in college she would make many miniature sized models of buildings. Wielding her EX-ACTO knife she would cut the balsa wood into various different shapes and sizes and there would be a decent amount of spray painting involved with her projects. Looking at this project it is easy for me to image the artist in his/her creative process. This is something we should strive for as writers: we want a reader to be transplanted into our vision so that they can experience it for themselves; we want to achieve the quality of visibility.

Visibility: Emblem

In this visually spoiled culture, Calvino was right to assert that our writing must be vivid enough to catch a reader’s attention. The image should follow the story and not vice versa. We should be inspired by our visual imaginations, and be skilled enough to convert this visual image into the written word. And so we say, the pen is mightier than the picture!

I chose to use a pen as an emblem for Visibility because it is the vehicle that drives the imaginative process. With this tool we are able to give form to our thoughts and make our dreams tangible. I chose to use a Parker Pen not for any specific reason other than that I just really want one.. This pen is $95 and beautiful… but think of all the dreams that I could make materialize with the help of this pen!

Visibility: E-Lit Example

Strings

Handwriting is rarely seen in works of electronic literature, or on the screen at all. Dan Waber’s delightful Strings presents a scrawl that has a life of its own, embodying certain human activities (arguing, flirting, laughter) in the form of animated lines of handwriting that pull themselves into the shape of ideas.

I chose to only show one of the examples from the Strings set because I didn’t really care for any of the other .gifs. They all demonstrate Visibility well I just didn’t like the concept of the other ones. But I thought that “argument” was the best out of all of them and was the best choice of E-Lit for Visibility. I think that “argument” does a good job of illustrating that the image follows the words. When you watch the back and forth motion in “argument” from yes to no, you really get a sense for the meaning of those words.