Movement

Livingstone’s discussion of the way advertisers manipulate our what and where systems in order to force us to pay more attention to what their ad says was both interesting, and a little off-putting to me. The tactic of disorienting one of the systems so we have to try harder to figure out what the distorted text says and, thus, spend more time looking at it and taking in what it says, is fairly ingenious, particularly since spending that time isn’t a conscious decision on our parts. Yet, the unfortunate downside to this tactic is that often the text, particularly equiluminant text, is unpleasant to look at. I know from personal experience that if a product’s ad is actively painful to look at, as much equiluminant text is, I am less likely to seek that product out, regardless of how much I absorb about the product while looking at its unfortunate ad. I admire the advertisers’ inventiveness and the insight involved in figuring out how to exploit our visual systems, but I have to wonder if their own methods aren’t backfiring on them.

Since I am doing my conference work on ballet, it is less than surprising that I was fascinated by many of the points Arnheim raised in his chapter. Aside from his discussions of dance, I really enjoyed much of his discussion of how we contextualize movement and how we see it in relation to everything else around us. His descriptions of experiments where a room spins around a stationary chair, during which the observer sitting in the chair experiences a “sensation that the chair is turning…so compelling that the observer will fall unless he is tied down” (379), reminded me of sitting on a stationary train while another train goes by out the window. There is something so compelling about the sight of the windows of an adjacent train whizzing past that fools me nearly every time. I almost invariably have to look out of a window across the aisle to see whether we have, in fact, started moving without me realizing it. Even though, like the observer in the experiment, all of my kinesthetic sensations indicate that the train I’m sitting on is not moving, the visual cues are so convincing that I have to double check.

I was also fascinated by Arnheim’s discussion of our visual hierarchy, simply because I had never thought about how I categorize things before. As he so astutely points out, we see things based on a hierarchical order of dependence: “[t]he mosquito is attached to the elephant, not the elephant to the mosquito. The dancer is a part of the stage setting, not the stage setting the outer rim of the dancer” (380). It honestly would never have occurred to me to think of the mosquito/elephant relationship any other way, but once he pointed it out it seems bizarre that this is the case. And I have to wonder if this is a natural tendency or something that we just pick up on when we are very young. And if it’s a natural tendency, where on earth did it come from? Is it just another mechanism we have adapted to cope with and make sense of the world around us? Or does it serve a greater purpose?

Finally, I really enjoyed all of Arnheim’s discussion of dance, but particularly when he pointed out that “[t]he movement of the dancer can be more extensive than that of the actor, whose visual behavior is subservient to speech” (408). One thing I have noticed over the course of my conference work is just how much dancers use specific, carefully planned movements to convey extremely complex themes and situations. I realize this sounds obvious when stated so simply, but understanding to what extent this is the case has been incredibly eye opening. In depriving themselves of speech, dancers are forced to compensate with their bodies, to draw upon familiar gestures and shapes and distort them or make them their own in order to communicate. They create entire stories, entire characters out of movement, allowing their bodies to speak for themselves.