The five papers we publish in this
section of Opus et Educatio emerged from the
7th Budapest Visual
Learning Conference, directed by Professor András Benedek, held
on Nov.
11–12, 2016, at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In the
framework of the conference, altogether 34 talks were presented.
Fourteen of them have been chosen for publication in the seventh volume
of the
VISUAL LEARNING series,
volume title:
Virtual
reality – real
visuality: Virtual, Visual, Veridical, edited by András Benedek
and
Ágnes Veszelszki, to appear later this year.
1 Another five of the
talks given last November have been selected to form the cluster of
papers published in the present section.
The first of these papers, “Visual Argumentation in
Commercials: the Tulip Test”, by
Hédi
Virág Csordás and
Gábor Forrai,
claims that, contrary to what until recently was definitely the
mainstream view, it is indeed possible to construct arguments on a
pictorial level. Csordás and Forrai show that such arguments display
significant parallels to verbal arguments. Their case study is a
commercial advertisement. Advertisements are one of the topics in the
paper by
Vladimir Dimovski and
Irma Puškarević, “Creative
Approach to
Visual Learning: The Use of Filmmaking Techniques and the Rhetoric of
Typography”. How can advertisements exploit some prominent semantic
properties of specific typefaces? Another topic the paper discusses is
the way in which the moving image – animation, video, film – can
enhance learning in the field of art history. The moving image is the
enframing theme of
Matthew Crippen’s
paper “Politics and Visual
Rhetoric in Film: The Apologetics of Pleasantville”. As Crippen puts
it, analyzing the 1998 film Pleasantville, “Moving images – whether in
film, television or videogames – are primary modes through which most
in industrialized regions encounter the world. In this sense, they are
virtually reality for many.” An intriguing, sometimes perhaps
frustrating, phenomenon of the virtual reality surrounding us is the
genre of digital memes, analyzed in the paper of
Laura Ambrus from the
perspective of cognitive linguistics. Digital memes are “a combination
of pictorial and textual elements, created and shared online”. Ambrus
elaborates a new theory of memes – memes traveling via the internet –
which she contrasts with the traditional theory by Dawkins and by Susan
Blackmore, who argued that “a meme is what travels from brain to
brain”. The final paper in the present Opus et Educatio section, “The
Veracity of Adolescents’ Drawings”, by
Judit
Hortoványi,
is a study of
the way emotions can can be communicated, not from brain to brain, but
from mind to mind, through pictures drawn in a specifically designed
framework of symbolic images. As Hortoványi shows, visual communication
can often achieve what verbal communication cannot. And this indeed
sums up the central message of our Visual Learning conference series.
Education in visual thinking, visual creativity, and visual literacy,
is the paramount new task pedagogy today faces.