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C'mon Feel the Noise!

Communication Theory for SL Artists, Designers and Builders

I'd like to talk to you today about some aspects of communication theory that I feel are relevant to our activities as artists and designers, either here in SL or out there in RL.

First of all, I'd better introduce myself and explain why I feel qualified to talk to you about this. In RL I have an Honours degree in Visual Studies and the History of Art from Oxford Brookes University. I lectured for 7 years in Art & Design theory at a tertiary college in Oxford and have had my own art related businesses in RL. In SL, I operate a number of shops and I am an SLACC exhibitor. Tonight's (it's night where I am anyway) talk is based on a lecture I used with my first-year graphic designer students, and I hope you will also find it useful.

Making art, making design, even making environments, can all be seen as acts of communication. People look at a painting and talk about what "it means" to them, Advertisers try to tell us to "buy more of something", even a building can "speak" to us. But just how well does the message get across?

Let's look at some of the things that can affect this communication.

The first of these that I want to look at, and a personal favourite, is NOISE.

It was only after WW2 that people began to question the processes of communication, initially just the technology. In 1947 two researchers, Shannon and Weaver produced this analysis of command communication for the US military.

It shows us a "straight-through" relationship between the origin of the message and it's destination. But they also identified another component in this relationship:

They characterised noise as being "anything that occupies the same channel as the message, but is not part of the message itself".

Now at this point I had been going to contrive some slides to illustrate this - a mount with a hair trapped in it, or a painting hung crooked, but they looked exactly that, - contrived. So instead I'm going to describe a recent visit Azure and I made to a quite prestigious art gallery that specialises in country themes - huntin', shootin' and fishin' stuff. There we saw a beautifully worked botanical water-colour, with a random paint mark in the white space to the lower left. The trouble was that even thought it was an exquisite picture, the first thing you notice is this mark - I have absolutely no recollection of the subject of the picture, just that it was flawed.

Ah, I can hear you say, but this is a digital environment, there are no stray hairs, and everything is straight and lovely and we have no random marks! Ha! But we still get noise….

Like this, where you can see an unfinished element in a build

….or here where prims are badly aligned causing the textures to strobe.

Of course we can deal with noise simply by being better craftsmen, but other obstacles are harder to manage.

Consider this:

Each of us is defined by our experience, knowledge, ability and history - we are the sum of our experiences. We might represent this as a circle. When two individual communicate effectively, that communication takes place in the space where our experiences overlap - simplest example of this is speaking in a common language.

For visual communicators this is complicated by the meanings we ascribe to images.

Look at this a moment and think about what a dog means to you….

Notice the dog in this picture? It's there deliberately, not just as a bit of local colour, because the original audience for whom this was painted would know how to "read" it. A contemporary audience would have seen the dog as a metaphor for lust - an indication that this image is perhaps not as innocent as it might seem.

In this example, we, the modern audience, have lost that vital area of overlap with the artist, we don't see his original intended meaning.

My final point is perhaps the most demoralising……

Once we have made a piece of work and shown it to the world, we have no control over how people will interpret it… Some of our audience may not see the world quite as we do, they may not even recognise our work as art at all. All we can do is carry on making our art, our designs and constructing our spaces in the hope that some of it, just some of it, works as we intended it to….