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This is an ideal place to explain it.
This is the house that belonged to Jim
Ede, who is the first curator of modern art at the Tate Gallery in London.
His house here in Cambridge.
He used his personal collection
to explain to Cambridge students about theories of art and painting.
So on his walls, we have examples like this
painting by Christopher Wood of a snowy scene in Paris.
So you chose this painting, but why did you choose it?
Why didn't you choose a photo which seemed to be a better representation?

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Sure.
So there are other ways I could use technology
to give us an impression of where we are.
So I could use Google Earth to look at Paris, for example.
Or I could come right here on Google Maps
and we could say, Here we are at this house.
Seems to be more accurate.
Well, yes, but a map is one kind of an image of a place,
and it doesn't really give you an idea of what it's like to be here.

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So to some extent, he's giving you a picture of what it's like to be here.
If you look at this, though, the perspective is extremely unusual.
It is. It looks almost childish, in fact.
But there are no real rules about perspective.
Perspective as any system by which you take a two
dimensional surface and use it to represent a three dimensional scene.
So the camera picture that I took of you just before,
that's camera lens perspective and particular distinct way.
Those artists, Leonardo Da Vinci and so on, they had their own schemes.

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At most periods in history, there have been different kinds of perspective.
Willis was completely self-taught, and he invented his own perspective,
invented it in much the same way that children do
to show the things that are important and the things that interest them.
In fact, this is directly relevant to something like the scene that we see
on the screen of our computer.
When you see the Microsoft Windows screen or the Macintosh or the Xerox star,
what they do as this system does this
this painting does their representations of the important things.

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Some of them are memories. Some of them are ideas.
And they're arranged on the screen.
This shows you the things that are important.
They're a kind of perspective, but not a pictorial perspective.
So we need to be aware of those options,
the ways that we can arrange the graphical elements
and our two dimensional seem to carry different meanings.
This sculpture is also a representation, perhaps as a clue.
I could tell you.
It's name is Bird Swallowing Fsh.

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So this
is a sculpture of a bird swallowing a fish.
Although even that is a little hard to see.
For many years, I wasn't clear which part was the bird in which was the fish.
But there's a clue. Here.
Here we have the bird's foot.
In fact, it doesn't resemble the foot of any bird.
But I can see it's a bird's foot.
Precisely. It's a symbol of a bird's foot.
It's completely generic.
And this is telling us this shape is saying this is.
This is a bird.

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But, of course,
there's a lot of other interesting symbolism here.
For example, why is the fish...
The fish actually doesn't look very much like a fish... And it comes from above.
Well, yeah, that's right.
This shape is like the shape of a torpedo or a hand grenade.
He was working around the time of the First World War.
So the fact that we have a very violent scene in which fish
is looking like a hand grenade is meaningful.
So visual representation is actually all about symbolism.

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You could say. Absolutely.
Sometimes it's done well and sometimes it's done badly.
So as an example, once for a project that I was involved with,
they wanted Icon to represent the button.
You should click to change what you're working on.
And what they did was, in English,
the word “change” means modifying
something, but it's also a pile of coins like this.

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The icon they used on the button was a pile of coins
to indicate this is the button you should use to change your work. Quite confusing.
So if you don't speak English, of course that picture is not meaningful at all.
So symbols are about correspondence.
This is a correspondence to the foot of a bird.
This is a correspondence to war and visual puns, correspondences.
We can use all of these things
when we design visual representations for technology.
Some are good and some are bad.

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It depends on what the people who are going to be seeing are displays
understand.
This preparatory sketch of the bird swallowing the fish.
In fact, it is a representation of a very distinctive incident
in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska´s life.
He was sitting by the Serpentine Lake in Hyde
Park in London, and he saw the actual event.
He saw a bird swallowing a live fish.
And the drama of that event was captured
in a very small number of pencil lines in this sketch.

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The water system movement that he was part of their main
priority was to capture expressive movement in art.
So with only a few lines, you can see precisely what it was.
The dynamic that he has captured in sculpture.
So this is one of the other real values of visual representation
is that there were many things going on that day in Hyde Park.
There were there was grass, there was sky, There was other people sitting around.

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There were probably waves.
There's many other things in his sculpture.
There's the texture of the bronze and so on.
But when we make a visual representation, it's possible to abstract away
all of those things and convey simply the essentials.
And this means that visual representations can be a tool for conceptualization,
for analysis, and for making plans about what we intend to do.
So those things also are true of technology
that we use visual representations to remove the complexity of scenes

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that we would see in a photograph or a visual representation.