Visual Literacy Lecture

The purpose of the last lecture was for us to understand what Visual Literacy means and how can we use it in our favour, as it is our job to communicate, to solve problems of communication through type, image and/or motion and to be able to reach different audiences.

It was very interesting to be proven how images can be read based on an agreement across the world, no matter what language a person speaks. Anyone could say everything on the talk was obvious, but Fred nailed it when he said that we all know this stuff, but we do not know that we know it, therefore we cannot control it until we do.

I found also intriguing the way the Visual Syntax works and how the same thing can be represented in an unlimited ways. It is our job to pick an specific one for the right context. The Visual Synecdoche reminded me a film a really liked: Synecdoche New York. When I watched it I did not know the meaning of that word, so I will watch it again to see how the title fits in the argument. I also found myself a little bit struggled understanding the difference between synecdoche and metonym, but after some research on my own I could understand that the metonym is the substitution of a term, either visual or linguistic, that is related with the cause or dependency. Sometimes the difference is not clear between these two terms because they are based on the same fundamentals. But the Statue of Liberty as example for synecdoche and being burned by the sun (actually the heat produced by the sun) made me understand it much better.

Summarising, I found the talk very useful, so now we can identify better what we see and apply that knowledge to future works.