WEBVTT

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I’ve been involved in visuals all my life, 
so have you.

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But it was brought to my attention pretty early:

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My father practiced as an architect.

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So, quite early on, I learned the difference 
between a segmental and a triangular pediment,

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gables, a mansard roof.

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When I was thirteen, an aunt of mine 
sent me an art postcard for my birthday

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and she said, "I'll send you one a month 
if you'd like to collect them."

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So, I started collecting, 
she slowed down sending.

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I started to go to art classes 
at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin

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with Dr. James Wright, the Director,
who is an enthusiast for artworks.

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And by the time I went to college 
I had 5,000 postcards.

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Now, think about a postcard; 
it's not like ripping things out of a book,

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or slides or anything, 
they are all the same size,

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so that's a manipulation. 
The shape, the size is made the same.

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But, you can take 40 Rembrandts 
and put them all on a table,

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and you can write the dates of them all, 
and you can see the progression

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of an artist's career 
right in front of your eyes.

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The imaginative process is something 
that happens with our eyes,

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our actual eyes seeing, 
and the eyes of our minds:

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the blind Milton,
able to create such visual poems.

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What do we really see? 
Why do we use the word visionary?

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Visionary: farsighted. Well, the issue is that 
everything is an image.

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Everything we see is an image.

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We see it binocularly and with a retina, 
it’s upside down,

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connecting to our optic nerve, 
to our brain cortex.

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We see millions of things every day,

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but unless we connect
cognition and memory,

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we don’t remember what we see.

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So, visual literacy, what is it?

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It’s the ability to construct 
meaning from images.

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It’s not a skill; it uses skills as a toolbox.

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It’s a form of critical thinking 
that enhances your intellectual capacity.

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It’s not a new concept.

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In 1969, the International Visual Literacy Association 
was established.

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It has an annual conference; it has a journal.

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But something happened on the way 
from there to here.

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And we kind of lost visual literacy 
amid visual studies, and visual culture,

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and visual communications, and visual graphics.

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And what’s necessary now, 
surely it seems to me,

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is that we integrate, that we re-integrate 
the capacity of our senses.

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And why? Because we are now in the digital age.

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I am so excited for college and university students 
all over the world.

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In December 1991, the World Wide Web went live.

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That means that eighteen-year-olds 
going to college everywhere

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are digital natives and I am one 
of the before-and-after people.

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I know what it was like before 
and I know what it is like after.

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I’m one of what you might call 
the Gutenberg people.

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Can you imagine what it was like, 
you had all these illuminated manuscripts

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and along they came and said,
“Here’s a book; we got hundreds more of them!”?

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It’s fascinating, in the near-Eastern world 
you have this great invention

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of cuneiform writing and it took us 2,500 years,

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whether in Korea or in Germany, 
to develop a printing type

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that would change everything.

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And it took us only another 500 years

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to get to where we are now: the digital age.

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So, what indeed was visual literacy like 
in a pre-literate past?

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We understand sign language 
before we understand the printed word.

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When you think about those cave paintings 
in the Dordogne region of France,

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what were people painting?

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There are no figures in them; 
they were looking out,

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they were looking out 
at the landscape and at the animals.

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They were looking out at the world.

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And when you think of those wonderful 
stained-glass windows

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that we hardly give time to now, 
but people read one pane after the other,

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the entire story.

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We fast-forward to the graphic novel, 
to cartoons.

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We need integration now of text and image.

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I’ve been finding our text scholars, 
they say, “Everything’s a text.”

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And I’m equally imperious because I’m saying,
“Everything’s an image.”

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The truth is everything’s an image and it's a text.

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Visual literacy is multi-modal, it’s multi-disciplinary,

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it’s interdisciplinary and it’s collaborative.

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It’s actually a universal language.

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Now think about universal languages: 
dance, mime – universal languages.

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Visuals: universal language. 
You don’t have to know Japanese or Gaelic or Polish.

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We can understand visuals all over the world.

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So if that’s the case that we can enhance 
global understanding with visuals,

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what is it we are doing to learn 
how to really see visually?

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When we were babies, we took in everything.

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So much so that we actually used up brain cells.

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Today we use them up for different reasons.

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We learn the difference between 
marked and unmarked space.

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Can you imagine the difference 
between one face and another?

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Basically they all look the same! 
So, how did we learn the difference?

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Well, let’s try a little game.

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Clifford Geertz, the great anthropologist 
in the interpretation of cultures,

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he quotes a story which is the story of the wink. 
So let’s try it.

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People at home looking in the mirror, 
you're looking at me.

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OK, what I want you to do is twitch your eye. 
Go on, twitch.

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Now, just wink.

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Now, I want you to wink conspiratorially.

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Try winking romantically.

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A wink can have multiple meanings

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and means different things in different cultures.

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The thing about the visual is 
90% of all the information

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we take in from the world we take in visually.

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Now, I’m not saying that that makes that 90% 
more important than the 10% that isn’t taken in visually,

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and of course those who cannot see 
learn to enhance those powers of the other senses.

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But I am noting the percentage; 
a full 30% of the brain cortex is given over to vision.

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We actually read non-text 60,000 times faster 
than we can read text.

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So what I’d like to advocate 
is a little bit of slow-looking.

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I’d like all of us to be able to look 
so that we would really, really see,

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just like we hear 
so we could really be listening. Why?

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Because we need to put some order 
on our chaos

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and we like the idea of harmony 
among our disharmony.

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Here’s a method for slow-looking; you can all use this 
anywhere – see this thing here?

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Look at it. When you’ve actually looked at it, 
you can begin to see it.

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And when you see it, 
then you can begin to describe it.

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Quite difficult.

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And when you can describe it, 
then you can begin to analyze it.

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What’s it made of, for example?

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And only after looking, and seeing, 
and describing, and analyzing,

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can you begin to interpret it, 
to construct meaning from it.

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So how much do we look at 
where we don’t engage that process?

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What we actually need is the alphabet 
and the grammar of visual literacy.

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I’ve worked all my life in art museums – 
most of it anyway.

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And I actually believe in the elements 
and principles of art.

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There was a time we all used to know them. 
Here’s a little painting I painted earlier.

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How is it that we know digits and we know letters, 
but we don’t know what ways to approach that?

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There was a time we would've.

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We could begin to talk about 
that in terms of its shape, 


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and its form, and its volume,

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and its line, and its composition,

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its color, its rhythm, its pattern, 
its movement, its composition,

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its unity, its value, its hue, its intensity… 
and so on.

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A visually literate person can read 
and write visual language,

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can encode and decode visual language.

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You know there’s lots of help available, 
especially with the Internet.

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There’s a fantastic thing on the Internet, 
you can all look it up,

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it’s called The Periodic Table 
of Visualization Elements.

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No matter what subject you’re using, 
you can go and look at that.

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It's fantastic, puts Mr. Tufte and all the people 


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who’ve worked on visualization 
into full focus for us.

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What visual literacy does –

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it helps us with classification, 
that’s what I learned with my postcards,

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the similarities and the differences 
between things.

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Stars,

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cells,

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flowers, trees;

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When you walk out on the green 
and all those poor trees are saying,

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“They didn’t notice me!”

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Every one different: photographs.

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All the ways throughout curriculum 
that we engage the visual.

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Two towers and a plane…
the power of visual images.

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Did you feel your response 
as I evoked that image?

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Visual images have the power 
to bring our senses together simultaneously

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and to impact viscerally our emotions.

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There’s a book called Crashing Through.

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It’s an incredible story.

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It’s about a man called Mike May.

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He had sight until he was three. 
He lost it.

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But it was in a chemical explosion, 
so, when he was forty-three,

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through stem cell technology, 
his sight was recovered.

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Can you possibly imagine

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what it would be like to find that sight again

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and to begin to negotiate the world?

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Close your eyes: go on, close your eyes.

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What color is my tie? 
How would you describe me?

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What number is on the side of the, 
I hope, the racing car?

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I hope you noticed.

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What was on the top of the shelves, 
on the cases?

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Open your eyes. OPEN your eyes!

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The visual is learned before the verbal.
We then start to learn digits and letters.

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Why is it that we study and are tested 
for textual literacy

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and for computer literacy, 
but not for visual literacy?

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We need to train our visual capacity.

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We need to train our ability 
to construct meaning from images.

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What we actually need is leadership 
that recognizes that visual literacy

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is needed in the curriculum, 
across the curriculum.

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We need a visual literacy curriculum.

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And I don’t mean what generally happens 
in art education,

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I mean across the whole curriculum.

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How did it happen that we didn’t train everybody 
to be visually literate?

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I’d like us to be able to use our greatest gifts 
as fully as possible.

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I’d like us to recognize that 90% of what 
we take in in the world, we take in visually.

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I’d like us to really think about 
how extraordinary it is to be in the digital age.

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How exciting!

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Hundreds of years pass 
and then suddenly something happens

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that really has changed everything.

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If we have something that is capable of 
enhancing our communication

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across the entire world, 
something truly universal,

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if we have something 
that can truly promote communication,

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if we have something in visuals 
that can quite simply change your life,

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it can change the way that you live, 
as we walk out of our house,

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as we walk out into the world 
and start to look, and see,

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and describe, and analyze, and interpret.

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My simple case: visual literacy, we need it.

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Enjoy your life. Thank you.

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(Applause)