Re: From abstract to concrete visual representations

José,

> http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~mfram/Media/0505-UC-triangle-all.jpg
> http://www.scottmccloud.com/inventions/triangle/triangle.html 

I a big fan of -Understanding Comics-. I have some troubles with some of his terminology and I have some questions about the triangle/pyramid itself but I think it's an important book that reaches well beyond the comics world.

Below is a bit of a January, 2004 interview I did with Scott. (Brief excerpts appeared in Michael Dooley and Steve Heller's -The Education of a Comics Artist- but the whole interview hasn't been published. If anyone has a suggestion of a good venue that has a audience beyond comics world for publication of a longish lunch chat about visual meaning and artistic intent, please get in touch.)

Gunnar
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
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at East Carolina University:
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GS:  . . . that whole question of the Piercean icon, that is, the natural correspondence, visual similarity versus the similarity of most linguistics. Languages are arbitrary but if I’d have seen your photograph before we met I’d say “Oh, yeah. There’s the guy” but if I didn’t know you and you walked up and said “Hi. My name is Murray Franklin” I wouldn’t have said “You look like a Scott McCloud to me.”

SMcC: [laughs] Right. Exactly.

GS: The thing that confuses me most about the book is. . . I think your triangle with the two sorts of abstraction—formal abstraction and iconic abstraction—and realism. . . I think that’s incredibly useful, something that the conversation we were talking about before attacked as naïve but they didn’t explain anything that made sense to me as to why there’s a problem with that. It struck me that they lacked an interest in looking at images and saying “How were they built?” or “Where did they come from?” I thought it was very important for that. The place where you lose me is where it. . .

SMcC: knocks into language?

GS: Yes. 

SMcC: I think that’s a little tacked on. I was very entranced with the idea of a unified theory. It’s very hard having mapped out all of that territory of visual communication to have this one other form of visual communication standing by, up at bat [laughs] sort of jumping up and down and calling my name and saying “Where do you want to put me, huh?” and I put it there for two reasons. One of them was just that—the seductive desire, to see if I could put it together on one canvas and that was the best I could do—the other reason was that even though I couldn’t necessarily justify moving from written language from pure abstraction, to formal abstraction (which is where it breaks down a bit) it’s kind of a dotted line on that side of the triangle if you know what I mean. I was very interested in the bottom edge and I thought there was a lot to be said about how that abstraction away from resemblance while still retaining meaning would ultimately break past pictorial representation entirely and wind up at written language. That I thought was important and worth talking about because the dynamics of words and pictures in comics is very important but it leaves me with the dotted line. In fact there is a line dividing the pictorial part of the triangle and the language part of the triangle and it’s a shaky one and it always has been but that’s the thing with unified theories: sometimes things are put together with Scotch tape and popsicle sticks. [laughs]

GS: If you gave me an image and said “Where do you put this on the left hand part of the triangle?” I would have no trouble saying “This is where it belongs.” If you asked me to even explain how writing could go from top to bottom on that. . .

SMcC: Right. Obviously we can take writing and make it more abstract. I suppose that Raygun would go a little higher up—you know, that magazine from the ’70s—would go higher up on the triangle than the lettering in a Dr. Seuss book.

GS: That’s interesting. It was from the ’90s. It gives you an idea of how. . .

SMcC: [laughs] Was Raygun from the ’90s? Really? I’d have thought it was earlier.

GS: It in some ways seems so long ago.

SMcC: The last ten years have run slowly for me. I feel like Understanding Comics was thirty years ago. It seems strange that it was only ten. Because I fell down the rabbit hole. I immediately fell into the whole digital thing and ever since then a lot has happened. [laughs] I know that when you get older time goes faster but if you can fill your days with enough you can actually counteract that, apparently. 

GS: I think there’s something really interesting in that edge between what you’re calling iconicity—I’m sure I’m stepping on a land mine to refer to it as a “natural abstraction”. . .

SMcC: [laughs] I tend not to refer to it that way myself but we can say it’s natural to this extent at least, and that is that it’s innate, that children naturally go in that direction so we have some built in skill for it.

GS: And then at some point there’s—I don’t know if it’s a hard line or a fade between adaptations of that and something that really is a purely cultural thing. In some ways you can say that the bathroom door guy is iconic in the sense of a human form simplified so it’s broadly recognizable as a human form but its meaning of “males go in this room to pee” is purely cultural. We could easily say all language, even if you factor in onomatopoeia and bow-wow theory of language development, still it’s all completely cultural where there’s an aspect of pictures that isn’t.

SMcC: The basic structure of language is open to debate as to how much we’re hard wired to recognize grammar. That’s a whole other kettle of fish but yes, it’s culturally arranged, culturally originated set of signs and symbols.

GS: There’s a whole different group of people who argue with Noam Chomsky other than the political ones.

SMcC: [laughs] Yes. Let him take the heat on that one.

GS: My next question, if you’d have fully defended that right hand triangle was. . .

SMcC: No. It’s messy. I’m standing on the base and looking up. I’m standing somewhere in the middle there, in fact, and looking up. It gets a little cloudier at the top and it gets a little cloudier at the right but this is the shape of the land as I’ve been able to map it so far.

GS: Let’s assume that the unified theory works out and we figure out where the Dark Matter is. . .

SMcC: [laughs] Yes. That’s sort of what I’m waiting for.

GS: Are you imagining this as a triangle with a strong frontier running though it or as a pyramid. That is, does it become three dimensional in your mind?

SMcC: It starts to look like it. To carry the visual analogy to its extreme end, having it be a pyramid gives me an out, doesn’t it? If you’re turning a corner for language then you’ve obviously introduced another axis—you know, x, y, and z—but you can say “Yes. It’s different. But it’s different because we turned a corner.” [laughs] It helps, maybe, as a device to think of it that way.

GS: Actually it could be two sorts of pyramids, that is, we could construct a pyramid by folding a sheet of paper or we could have a pyramid that’s solid. While most of us see that as the same shape, topologists—a weird part of mathematics where they deal with surfaces and they can curve them all sorts of ways. . .the old joke is that a topologist is a person who can’t tell a coffee cup from a donut. . . because in each case it’s a surface with a single hole through it. . .

SMcC: [laughs] That’s great.

GS: So from a topologist’s standpoint there’s an important distinction. I’m wondering if in your thought that distinction is there. That is, if this is made by a triangular piece of paper that is folded so it will stand up on its own and has surfaces viewable from different directions then it does what you were just describing. I was wondering if in the back of your mind it was solid, that is if we went directly back from the picture plane and directly back from the language plane if there would be something there that would be different from both.

SMcC: I don’t currently have any reason to think that. It’s a funny question. Needless to say, nobody has ever asked me that before. [laughs] I think that, as with additive color, there are only so many vertices to a given subject. In the case of additive color there are three. Red, green, and blue will, for our visible spectrum. . . I suppose the answer to your question would be something like the acknowledgment of ultraviolet or infrared where we’re not trained to see and aspect of it. For instance, time is not contemplated by the diagram. So obviously there are other things you can introduce. It’s a tool for thinking, it’s a filter that you could then go back and look at the world through this filter and see the world differently but there are, of course, many filters.

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