The Watchmen
Helpful hints when reading the Watchmen
Options: listen to the video or read the text from the video
http://db29.linccweb.org/login?url=http://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=95568&xtid=48395
Of the five senses, vision is the one
that I appreciate the most, and it's the one that I can least take for
granted. I think this is partially due to my father, who was blind. It
was a fact that he didn't make much of a fuss about, usually. One time in
Nova Scotia, when we went to see a total eclipse of the sun -- yeah,
same one as in the Carly Simon song, which may or may not refer to
James Taylor, Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger; we're not really sure. They
handed out these dark plastic viewers that allowed us to look directly at
the sun without damaging our eyes.But Dad got really scared: he
didn't want us doing that. He wanted us instead to use these cheap
cardboard viewers so that there was no chance at all that our eyes would
be damaged. I thought this was a little strange at the time. What I
didn't know at the time was that my father had actually been born with
perfect eyesight. When he and his sister Martha were just very little, their
mom took them out to see a total eclipse -- or actually, a solar eclipse
-- and not long after that,both of them started losing their
eyesight.Decades later, it turned out that the source of their blindness was
most likely some sort of bacterial infection. As near as we can tell, it
had nothing whatsoever to do with that solar eclipse,but by then my grandmother
had already gone to her grave thinking it was her fault. So, Dad
graduated Harvard in 1946, married my mom,and bought a house in Lexington,
Massachusetts,where the first shots were fired against the British in 1775, although
we didn't actually hit any of them until Concord. He got a job working for
Raytheon, designing guidance systems, which was part of the Route 128
high-tech axis in those days -- so the equivalent of Silicone Valley in
the '70s. Dad wasn't a real militaristic kind of guy; he just really
felt bad that he wasn't able to fight in World War II on account of his
handicap,although they did let him get through the several-hour-long army
physical exam before they got to the very last test, which was for
vision.
(Laughter) So, Dad started racking up all
of these patents and gaining a reputation as a blind genius, rocket
scientist, inventor. But to us he was just Dad, and our home life was
pretty normal. As a kid, I watched a lot of television and had lots
of nerdy hobbies like mineralogy and microbiology and the space program and
a little bit of politics. I played a lot of chess. But at the age of
14, a friend of mine got me interested in comic books, and I decided
that was what I wanted to do for a living. So, here's my dad: he's a
scientist, he's an engineer and he's a military contractor. So, he has
four kids, right? One grows up to become a computer scientist, one
grows up to join the Navy, one grows up to become an engineer, and
then there's me: the comic book artist.
(Laughter) Which, incidentally, makes me
the opposite of Dean Kamen, because I'm a comic book artist, son of an
inventor, and he's an inventor, son of a comic book artist.
(Laughter) Right, it's true.
(Applause) The funny thing is, Dad had a
lot of faith in me. He had faith in my abilities as a cartoonist, even
though he had no direct evidence that I was any good whatsoever:everything he saw
was just a blur. Now, this gives a real meaning to the term "blind
faith," which doesn't have the same negative connotation for me that
it does for other people. Now, faith in things which cannot be seen, which
cannot be proved, is not the sort of faith that I've ever really related
to all that much. I tend to like science,where what we see and can
ascertain are the foundation of what we know. But there's a middle ground,
too. A middle ground tread by people like poor old Charles Babbage, and
his steam-driven computers that were never built.Nobody really understood what
it was that he had in mind, except for Ada Lovelace, and he went to
his grave trying to pursue that dream.Vannevar Bush with his Memex -- this
idea of all of human knowledge at your fingertips -- he had this vision. And
I think a lot of people in his dayprobably thought he was a bit of a kook. And,
yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say,yeah, ha-ha, you know -- it's all
microfilm. But that's -- that's not the point. He understood the shape of
the future. So did J.C.R. Licklider and his notions for computer-human
interaction.Same thing: he understood the shape of the future, even though
it was something that wouldonly be implemented by people much later. Or
Paul Baran, and his vision for packet switching.Hardly anybody listened to him
in his day. Or even the people who actually pulled it off, the people
at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Boston,who just would sketch out these
structures of what would eventually become a worldwide network, and
sketching things on the back of napkins and on note papers and arguing
over dinner at Howard Johnson's -- on Route 128 in Lexington,
Massachusetts, just two miles from where I was studying the Queen's Gambit
Deferred and listening to Gladys Knight & the Pips singing
"Midnight Train to Georgia," while --
(Laughter) -- in my dad's big easy chair,
you know? So, three types of vision, right? Vision based on what one
cannot see: the vision of that unseen and unknowable. The vision of
that which has already been proven or can be ascertained. And this third
kind of vision, of something which can be, which may be, based
on knowledge, but is as yet unproven. Now, we've seen a lot of examples of
people who are pursuing that sort of vision in science, but I think it's
also true in the arts, it's true in politics, it's even true in personal
endeavors. What it comes down to, really, is four basic principles: learn
from everyone, follow no one, watch for patterns, and work like
hell. I think these are the four principles that go into this. And
it's that third one, especially, where visions of the futurebegin to
manifest themselves. What's interesting is that this particular way of
looking at the world,is, I think, only one of four different ways that
manifest themselves in different fields of endeavor. In comics, I know
that it results in sort of a formalist attitude towards trying to
understand how it works. Then there's another, more classical, attitude which
embraces beauty and craft. Another one which believes in the pure
transparency of content. And then another which emphasizes the
authenticity of human experience -- and honesty, and rawness. These
are four very different ways of looking at the world. I even gave them names. The
classicist, the animist, and formalist and iconoclast.Interestingly, it seemed
to correspond more or less to Jung's four subdivisions of human thought. And
they reflect a dichotomy of art and delight on left and the right; tradition
and revolution on the top and the bottom. And if you go on the diagonal,
you get content and form --and then beauty and truth. And it probably
applies just as much to music and to movies and to fine art, which
has nothing whatsoever to do with vision at all, or for that matter, nothing
to do with our conference theme of "Inspired by Nature" -- except
to the extent of the fable of the frog who gives the ride to the scorpion
on his back to get across the river because the scorpion promises not to
sting him, but then the scorpion does sting him anyway and they both die, but
not before the frog asks him why and the scorpion says, "Because it's
my nature" -- in that sense, yes.
(Laughter) So -- so this was my
nature. The thing was, I saw that the route that I took to discovering this
focus in my work and who I was,I saw it as just this road to discovery. Actually,
it was just me embracing my nature, which meansthat I didn't actually fall
that far from the tree after all. So what does a "scientific
mind" do in the arts? Well, I started making comics, but I
also started trying to understand them, almost immediately. And one of the
most important things about comics, I discovered, was that comics are a
visual medium, but they try to embrace all of the senses within it. So,
the different elements of comics, like pictures and words, and the
different symbols and everything in between that comics presents are
all funneled through the single conduit of vision. So you have things like
resemblance, where something which resembles the physical world can be
abstractedin a couple of different directions: abstracted from
resemblance, but still retaining the complete meaning, or abstracted
away from both resemblance and meaning towards the picture plan. Put all
these three together, and you have a nice little map of the entire
boundary of visual iconography which comics can embrace. And if you
move to the right you also get language, because that's abstracting even
further from resemblance, but still maintaining meaning. Vision is
called upon to represent sound and to understand the common properties of
those two and their common heritage, as well. Also, to try to
represent the texture of sound to capture its essential character through
visuals. And there's also a balance between the visible and the
invisible in comics. Comics is a kind of call and response in which
the artist gives you something to see within the panels, and then
gives you something to imagine between the panels. Also, another sense which
comics' vision represents, and that's time. Sequence is a very important
aspect of comics. Comics presents a kind of temporal map.And this temporal
map was something that energizes modern comics, but I was wondering if
perhaps it also energizes other sorts of forms,and I found some in
history. And you can see this same principle operating in these
ancient versions of the same idea. What's happening is, the art form is
colliding with the given technology, whether it's paint on stone,
like the Tomb of the Scribe in ancient Egypt, or a bas-relief sculpture
rising up a stone column, or a 200-foot-long embroidery, or painted
deerskin and tree bark running across 88 accordion-folded pages. What's
interesting is, once you hit print --and this is from 1450, by the way -- all
of the artifacts of modern comics start to present themselves: rectilinear
panel arrangements,simple line drawings without tone and a left-to-right
reading sequence. And within 100 years,you already start to see word
balloons and captions, and it's really just a hop, skip and a jump from
here to here. So I wrote a book about this in '93, but as I was
finishing the book, I had to do a little bit of typesetting, and I
was tired of going to my local copy shop to do it, so I bought a computer. And
it was just a little thing -- it wasn't good for much except text entry -- but
my father had told me about Moore's Law, about Moore's Law back in the
'70s, and I knew what was coming. And so, I kept my eyes peeled to
see if the sort of changes that happened when we went from pre-print
comics to print comicswould happen when we went beyond, to post-print comics. So,
one of the first things that were proposed was that we could mix the
visuals of comics with the sound, motion and interactivityof the CD-ROMs
that were being made in those days. This was even before the Web. And
one of the first things they did was, they tried to take the comics page
as-is and transplant it to monitors, which was a classic McLuhanesque
mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the
content of the new technology. And so, what they would do is,they'd have
these comic pages that resemble print comics pages, and they would
introduce all this sound and motion. The problem was, that if you go with
this idea -- this basic idea that space equals time in comics -- what
happens is that when you introduce sound and motion, which are temporal
phenomena that can only be represented through time, then they break with
that continuity of presentation. Interactivity was another thing. There
were hypertext comics. But the thing about hypertext is that
everything in hypertext is either here, not here or connected to here; it's
profoundly non-spatial. The distance from Abraham Lincoln to a Lincoln
penny, the Penny Marshall to the Marshall Plan to "Plan 9"
to nine lives: it's all the same.
(Laughter) And -- but in comics, in
comics, every aspect of the work, every element of the workhas a spatial
relationship to every other element at all times. So the question was: was
there any way to preserve that spatial relationship while still taking
advantage of all of the things that digital had to offer us? And I
found my personal answer for this in those ancient comics that I was
showing you. Each of them has a single unbroken reading line, whether
it's going zigzag across the walls or spiraling up a column or just
straight left to right, or even going in a backwards zigzag across those
88 accordion-folded pages. The same thing is happening, and that is that
the basic idea that as you move through space you move through time is
being carried out without any compromise, but there were compromises when
print hit. Adjacent spaces were no longer adjacent moments, so the
basic idea of comics was being broken again and again and again and again. And
I thought, O.K., well, if that's true, is there any way, when we go
beyond today's print, to somehow bring that back? Now, the monitor is
just as limited as the page, technically, right? It's a different shape,
but other than that it's the same basic limitation. But that's only
if you look at the monitor as a page,but not if you look at the monitor as a
window.And that's what I proposed: that perhaps we could create these comics on
an infinite canvas:along the X axis and the Y axis and staircases. We
could do circular narratives that were literally circular. We could do a
turn in a story that was literally a turn. Parallel narratives could be
literally parallel. X, Y and also Z. So I had all these notions. This
was back in the late '90s, and other people in my business thought I was
pretty crazy,but a lot of people then went on and actually did it. I'm
going to show you a couple now. This was an early collage comic by a
fellow named Jason Lex. And notice what's going on here. What I'm
searching for is a durable mutation -- that's what all of us are searching
for. As media head into this new era, we are looking for mutations that
are durable, that have some sort of staying power.Now, we're taking this basic
idea of presenting comics in a visual medium, and then we're carrying it
through all the way from beginning to end. That's that entire comic you
just saw is up on the screen right now. But even though we're only
experiencing it one piece at a time, that's just where the technology is
right now. As the technology evolves, as you get full immersive
displays and whatnot, this sort of thing will only grow. It will
adapt. It will adapt to its environment: it's a durable mutation. Here's
another one I'll show you. This is by Drew Weing;this is called, "Pup
Contemplates the Heat Death of the Universe." See what's going on
here as we draw these stories on an infinite canvas is you're
creating a more pure expression of what this medium is all about. We'll
go by this a little quickly -- you get the idea. I just want to get to the
last panel.
(Laughter) There we go.
(Laughter) Just one more. Talk about
your infinite canvas. It's by a guy named Daniel Merlin Goodbrey in
Britain. Why is this important? I think this is important because
media, all media,provide us a window back into our world. Now, it
could be that motion pictures -- and eventually, virtual reality, or
something equivalent to it --some sort of immersive display, is going to
provide us with our most efficient escape from the world that we're in. That's
why most people turn to storytelling, is to escape. But media provides us
with a window back into the world that we live in. And when media
evolve so that the identity of the media becomes increasingly unique. Because
what you're looking at is, you're looking at comics cubed: you're looking
at comics that are more comics-like than they've ever been before. When
that happens, you provide people with multiple ways of re-entering the
world through different windows, and when you do that, it allows them to
triangulate the world that they live in and see its shape. And that's
why I think this is important. One of many reasons, but I've got to go
now. Thank you for having me.
If you use the above reference please do not forget to cite. See below
Reference
Ted Talks.(2016). Scott McCloud-Undertsanding Comics, Films on demand-2009. Retrived from
No comments:
Post a Comment