WEBVTT

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This is an ideal place to explain it.

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This is the house that belonged to Jim

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Ede, who is the first curator of modern
art at the Tate Gallery in London.

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His house here in Cambridge.

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He used his personal collection

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to explain to Cambridge students
about theories of art and painting.

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So on his walls,
we have examples like this

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painting by Christopher
Wood of a snowy scene in Paris.

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So you chose this painting,
but why did you choose it?

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Why didn't you choose a photo which
seemed to be a better representation?

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Sure.

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So there are other ways
I could use technology

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to give us an impression of where we are.

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So I could use Google Earth
to look at Paris, for example.

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Or I could come right here on Google Maps

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and we could say, Here
we are at this house.

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Seems to be more accurate.

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Well, yes, but a map is one
kind of an image of a place,

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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.

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If you look at this, though,
the perspective is extremely unusual.

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It is.
It looks almost childish, in fact.

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But there are no real rules
about perspective.

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Perspective as any system
by which you take a two

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dimensional surface and use it
to represent a three dimensional scene.

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So the camera picture that I took of you
just before,

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that's camera lens perspective
and particular distinct way.

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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.

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Willis was completely self-taught,
and he invented his own perspective,

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invented it
in much the same way that children do

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to show the things that are important
and the things that interest them.

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In fact, this is directly relevant
to something like the scene that we see

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on the screen of our computer.

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When you see the Microsoft Windows screen
or the Macintosh or the Xerox star,

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what they do as this system does this

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this painting does their representations
of the important things.

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Some of them are memories.
Some of them are ideas.

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And they're arranged on the screen.

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This shows you
the things that are important.

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They're a kind of perspective,
but not a pictorial perspective.

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So we need to be aware of those options,

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the ways that we can arrange
the graphical elements

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and our two dimensional seem
to carry different meanings.

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This sculpture is also a representation,
perhaps as a clue.

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I could tell you.

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It's name is Bird Swallowing Fsh.

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So this

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is a sculpture of a bird
swallowing a fish.

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Although even that is a little hard
to see.

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For many years, I wasn't clear which part
was the bird in which was the fish.

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But there's a clue. Here.

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Here we have the bird's foot.

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In fact,
it doesn't resemble the foot of any bird.

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But I can see it's a bird's foot.

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Precisely. It's a symbol of a bird's foot.

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It's completely generic.

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And this is telling us
this shape is saying this is.

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This is a bird.

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But, of course,

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there's a lot of other interesting
symbolism here.

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For example, why is the fish...

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The fish actually doesn't look very much like a fish...
And it comes from above.

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Well, yeah, that's right.

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This shape is like the shape of a torpedo
or a hand grenade.

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He was working around
the time of the First World War.

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So the fact that we have
a very violent scene in which fish

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is looking like a hand
grenade is meaningful.

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So visual representation
is actually all about symbolism.

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You could say.
Absolutely.

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Sometimes it's done well
and sometimes it's done badly.

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So as an example, once for a project
that I was involved with,

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they wanted Icon to represent the button.

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You should click to change
what you're working on.

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And what they did was, in English,

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the word “change” means modifying

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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

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to indicate this is the button you should
use to change your work. Quite confusing.

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So if you don't speak English, of course
that picture is not meaningful at all.

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So symbols are about correspondence.

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This is a correspondence to the foot of a bird.

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This is a correspondence to war
and visual puns, correspondences.

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We can use all of these things

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when we design
visual representations for technology.

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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

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understand.

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This preparatory sketch of the bird
swallowing the fish.

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In fact, it is a representation
of a very distinctive incident

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in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska´s life.

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He was sitting by the Serpentine
Lake in Hyde

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Park in London,
and he saw the actual event.

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He saw a bird swallowing a live fish.

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And the drama of that event was captured

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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

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priority
was to capture expressive movement in art.

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So with only a few lines,
you can see precisely what it was.

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The dynamic
that he has captured in sculpture.

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So this is one of the other
real values of visual representation

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is that there were many things
going on that day in Hyde Park.

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There were there was grass, there was sky,
There was other people sitting around.

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There were probably waves.

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There's many other things
in his sculpture.

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There's the texture of the bronze
and so on.

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But when we make a visual representation,
it's possible to abstract away

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all of those things and convey
simply the essentials.

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And this means that visual representations
can be a tool for conceptualization,

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for analysis, and for making plans
about what we intend to do.

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So those things also
are true of technology

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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.