Tunnel Vision
My first thought when I was looking at our assignment for this week was, “Why are we LISTENING to something for VISUAL Studies?” Even as I read and looked at the supplements given in addition to the recording, I still was at a loss for what to really reflect on.
But then I closed my eyes and I really thought about it.
I know have always been a more visual learner, needing to see words on a screen or pictures to actually GET what I was being taught. So I started listening to the picture that was being painted for me; I saw a city divided by a wall, each side with people and buildings near identical and huge amounts of guards keeping watch for anyone trying to cross. I imagined families separated by mere hundreds of feet, with no hope of possibly seeing each other again. Then I imagined Tunnel 57, and the countless students who worked for over half a year to dig a tunnel to breach the wall separating the East and West.
We weren’t shown these images (the complete opposite compared to last week, in which all we had were images) but we were forced to imagine them for ourselves. The writing and the storytelling urged our brains to use the methods of gestalt to form these images within our minds. The main concept used was closure, because our minds took the only information we were given and finished the pictures for us (and between any two of us, neither could say they ever saw the same thing).
This is why we’re listening for Visual Studies, because even without using images, our minds are powerful enough to create the images for us. Our minds want to fill in the blanks and tell a story, simply because that’s what our minds do.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2014 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.