VAROOM!

           Thursday 22nd October – ISHE Lecture

REAR VIEW MIRROR

In this peer reviewed paper, Stephanie Black compares newer forms of illustration to older forms. She discusses how older forms of illustration provide a ‘truly engaging sense of time’, arguing that developers of New Media should look to older forms of navigation in media that can engage and involve readers in much richer ways. 

Black tries to explain that in a fast moving media world, traditional illustration often manipulates time with more grace than digital devices such as smartphones, iPads, digital billboards,etc… Her objective is to extract very relevant lessons from non-digital illustration in order to gain a deeper understanding of how illustration negotiates time. 

She mentions that digital illustration tends to be insensitive to its content and that it should use the possibilities it is afforded by the technology, to enhance the relationship between image and viewer. Black examines how illustration achieves such temporal manoeuvring and identifies methods and principles that may be transferable to other media. Methods and principles such as ‘sequential illustration’ which provides examples of how time can be made multi-directional within the form of the book. She discusses various and different principles used by David Hughes and Andrzej Klimowski. Such as stratifying time by presenting simultaneous events separately and simultaneously; or merging past and present times by employing an unsettling memory of events shown in other sections of the book ‘to accompany the events pictured’.

In her paper Black explores many different methods and principles and discusses ‘time’ in illustration and the issues it presents, and by doing so Stephanie Black challenges the modern time media and modern illustrators to reconsider what we can learn from older forms of illustration and to see how these lessons can indeed be applied and/or merged to our modern day methods and media.

To arrive at a conclusion I leave you with a quote from Black that I believe summarises well the purpose and discussion of her paper; 

‘’Scrutinising and articulating the methods and principles used, equips illustrators for pushing the perceived boundaries of illustration and creating provocative pieces of work that extend the debate surrounding the time we live in.”

-Stephanie Black