The infinite landscape…shift happens
February 4, 2009dominique Comments OffSomehow in the last 24 hours I have managed to stumble upon two very insightful but totally different Scott McLeod/McCloud’s. The first is a cartoonist, Scott McCloud, and I saw his TED Talk referenced in a blog so decided to check it out. I’ve been exploring the TED Creativity themed videos lately – which is how I discovered Jay Walker’s Library of Human Imagination, (one of the few things that truly deserves the modifier “awesome”).
So besides being a beautiful use of video presentation tools, the real “A-Ha!” moment I had watching Scott cartoonist McCloud was his observation that the web environment is not limited to the page. Yeah, duh, but beyond that it is a window to an infinite landscape. So much of how we view text is entrenched in the necessary evolutions of print based environment (like page limitations, the reading of left to right or vice-versa depending based on the physical limitation of a page). It is this visual iconography that is being redefined, and is at the center of how we interpret, well, everything.
Speaking of interpreting everything is Dr. Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch Shift Happens, which emphasizes once again the need to rethink how we see the world (a very Brechtian/Galileo/Thomas Kuhn concept and one I like inherently). The video speaks for itself, but tied in nicely to my stumbling across a HASTAC discussion in which the Global Middle Ages project was referenced. Amazing to consider how ethnocentric most readings of history are.
Perhaps it is an Enlightenment of some sort we are hurtling towards…