After Class - Feb 4th 2009

In class we talked about the most primitive form of communication/graphic design. Cave paintings! We took a look at cave paintings from France, some of which are the oldest in the world, and tried to see what understanding we could get from them. Most of the pictures were of animals, and we concluded that the dots on the animals were probably to show the best places to shoot and try to kill the animals. Almost like a dart board.

But before we looked at actual cave paintings we tried our hand at creating some of our own. Going downstairs to the 'cave' of a basement, we each scooped up some dark brown clay and were given a short phrase to try and re-create the message in 'cave painting' style not using any words or numbers. Most of the groups took the clay and sculpted figures to represent the various words. However, when you don't have a very artistic ability with clay it's hard to make a clear message. Our text was especially difficult to translate because it not only dealt with an object but the passage of time as well. 'There were three brown cats and two black and white cats.' So what we did was smooth out our clay and then draw the cats and a moon and sun. Ours was pretty easy to understand except for the 'passage of time' part of our sentence. I was really impressed with how creative my other classmates were. Especially "your smile (laughter?) in a window to your soul." I think that just by adding an open mouth, an open smile, might have made the whole thing easier to read.

I think that today made me appreciate the use of symbols to convey a meaning and how difficult it is to convey the exact message through only pictures if someone doesn't have the key to the code. So how do you explain the code if all you have is images as a form of communication? Did words come before the pictures, or pictures before the spoken word? It's a question that is bugging me.

I think playing with this concept of only images will help me look at my own graphic work and find the meaning I am trying to convey and if my true meaning really comes across, what visual cues give that meaning away?