Diary 21/10

Jon Fri Oct 24, 2008 2:43 am

Jonathan Windsor
Diary 21/10

For the first exercise on Tuesday, I unsuccessfully tried to draw what Mel was describing. It was very time-consuming to get any useful information just through yes/no questions. To my mind the picture Mel had drawn could have been an infinite amount of things, so there was a lot of narrowing down to be done.
Next it was my turn to describe my masterpiece to Mel. Again, this was quite a time-consuming process, surprisingly so considering I was able to say exactly what I had drawn. It was interesting to realise that the words we shared meant slightly different things, for example I had to clarify what I meant by castle or hills in order to make the picture accurate. So, there seems to be a gap between language and what we visualise in our mind's eye, and what happens in that gap depends ourselves and our imagination. On reflection I can see the significance of this – the exercise showed the value of both clear communication, and of pictures themselves to account for our slight differences of perception.
Then there was the picture-story about the mouse. As the pictures were being described to me, I automatically tried to impose a story on them from other stories I have experienced. From the page-chewing and the grain-munching at the end I inferred that this was a classic hungry-mouse story, and so retold it that way when the time came – I should have read the front cover when it popped up. Nevertheless, it's interesting that I took hold of this narrative form, and used other conventions too such as once upon a time... and the end. One final convention was the way I told the story, I used a certain structure and was able to use emotion and intonation accordingly, whereas Mel's description of the individual pictures only required an objective account of what was on the page.
As I had got the narrative wrong (!) I was not able to match the pictures to the story I was planning to tell as well as I had hoped. Overall then, I learnt not only the difficulty of describing a picture using only language, but also the role that language plays in story-telling, even with visual stories.