Visual literacy, �creativity and �authorship in the age of �algorithm-driven media
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Has anyone noticed the proliferation of AI images cropping up everywhere? The images are often labelled as AI but not always. For example, a clearly Midjourney image of a stunning gown in a Facebook group, Ancient Wonders popped up in my feed recently. This group usually discusses historical artifacts and the group instantly started debating the magnificent workmanship, how heavy it would have been for the wearer and clearly missed entirely that this gown never existed in either historical or contemporary reality.
I have been playing around with both MidJourney and DALL-E2 recently with amazing results and all the time have been thinking about how this effects the CH sector and all who sail in her. By association, once AI become more mainstream, the copyright issues and metadata descriptions could be challenging. I have been following these debates on places where MJ and DALLE-2 fans collaborate, and discussions are fascinating. I would love to hear our community weigh in here. Maybe this is not a new discussion for some so please let me know where they are happening.
At the same time, and like Fortnite, TikTok, etc people are getting their front-page news from these platforms. One person mentioned that they only heard about the Queens’ death once a plethora of Elizabeth II, RIP images flooded all the platforms. �
2022/09/09 Dr. Hazan, CEO, Digital Heritage, Israel; Chair Europeana Network Association, (2021-22)
Emeritus, Senior Curator of New Media and Head of the Internet Office at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1991-2020)
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visual media as multimodal representational system
visual media produced by human through the combination of skills and technology the content author as a coder of messages and meaning-maker visual media produced by generative pre-trained transformer who is the coder? who is making the meaning? medium is the message but who is the messenger? what is the medium? are we capable of interpreting these new semiotics? what counts as originality and authorship in the post-digital age? hot or cold media is the content created by ChatGPT4? And by Dall-E or Midjourney?
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Big concept
Bring the attention of your audience over a key concept using icons or illustrations
This is a generic slide, included in the theme
A picture is worth a thousand words
A complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image, namely making it possible to absorb large amounts of data quickly.
This is a modified slide, based on the generic one included in the theme
Want big impact? Use big image.
What about moving pictures?
combined with music?
Human cognition is unique in that it has become specialized for dealing simultaneously with language and with nonverbal objects and events. Moreover, the language system is peculiar in that it deals directly with linguistic input and output (in the form of speech or writing) while at the same time serving a symbolic function with respect to nonverbal objects, events, and behaviors. Any representational theory must accommodate this dual functionality.� Allan Paivio (1986)
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SEMIOTICS
Ferdinand de Saussure - Swiss philosopher, father of semiotics
According to Saussure, language is made up of systems of "signs", which are its basic units. Every message is a system of signs, or a system of sound images and concepts. The sign has two mental aspects:
Sign�Signifier/�Representamen
Signified/Referent/�Object
the physical form
(sound, letters, image)
mental concept�(e.g. object, event, idea)
Thoughts that give meaning to signs and phenomena; links between signs and real world phenomena
Dual-coding theory�both sensory imagery and verbal information is used to represent information
logogens
imagens
verbal system
nonverbal system
асоциативна структура
associative structure
verbal stimuli
nonverbal stimuli
referential connections
sensory systems
representational connections
[visual, �auditory, �motor]
[multimodal]
phone
ring
♫
gossip
verbal responses
nonverbal responses
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Dual-coding theory (DCT)
(i) an internalized nonverbal system that directly represents the perceived properties and possible uses of nonverbal objects and events
(ii) an internalized verbal system that deals directly with linguistic stimuli
and responses
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Systems are made up of "mental" representational (or “codes”) units, structures, and dynamic processes that are acquired in a cultural context, given perception, memory, and other innate abilities that result from biological evolution (Alan Paivio, 2007).
According to this theory, all cognition is built on two functionally independent but interconnected multimodal systems. the basic DCT mechanisms can be used to model diverse educational phenomena.
Today it is inconceivable that any publication, daily or periodical, could hold more than a few thousand readers without pictures. For both the pictorial ad or the picture story provide large quantities of instant information and instant humans, such as are necessary for keeping abreast in our kind of culture. Would it not seem natural and necessary that the young be provided with at least as much training of perception in this graphic and photographic world as they get in the typographic?�
Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
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Definitions
A group of vision-competencies which enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment. Through the creative use of these competencies, he is able to communicate with others. Through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication.
the founder of the International Visual Literacy Association – John Debes (1969)
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Definitions
A set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials. A visually literate individual is both a critical consumer of visual media and a competent contributor to a body of shared knowledge and culture�� (Visual Literacy Standards Task Force, ACRL, 2011)
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Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body. There is, for example, no way of refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or sense "closure" evoked by the TV image. But the effect of the entry of the TV image will vary from culture to culture in accordance with the existing sense ratios in each culture.
In audile-tactile Europe TV has intensified the visual sense, spurring them toward American styles of packaging and dressing. In America, the intensely visual culture, TV has opened the doors of audile-tactile perception to the non-visual world of spoken languages and food and the plastic arts.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
Questions to ask yourself
What is the origin of this image?
Is it part of something larger (a page from a book or website; a clip from a movie) or is it a stand-alone creative expression (a piece of art, a poster, an ad)?
What is its purpose?
Who is it for?
What message does the story convey?
What thoughts does it evoke in you? Why?
How do feelings, emotions awaken from you? Why?
What puzzles you?
Does it evoke any association with something seen, experienced?
What connections can you make to other texts and experiences?
What might be left out of this image, missing?
Why did its creator choose to display this image this way? What alternative ways are there?
How and why would another mode of depiction produce different effects on the viewer?
Arizona Archives Online
Visual literacy as a component of other media and information literacy
oтвори в Jamboard
What’s Going On �in This Picture?
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oтвори в Jamboard
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The pale blue dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers. In the picture, the visible size of the Earth is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot in the middle of vast space, among bands of sunlight scattered by the camera's optics. Voyager 1 has already completed its primary mission and is leaving the solar system when, at Carl Sagan's request, NASA sends a command to reorient its camera for one last image of Earth before its image is finally lost.
While I think it is good that such technology (generating AI images) is expanding the range of artistic expression, I am also wary of AI stepping into the creative sphere.
I thought AI was supposed to do the more boring jobs for us…
Hirofumi Ikawa, Project Manager at International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM)
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The US Copyright Office has received applications to register a wide variety of arguably creative objects for copyright protection in recent years, including driftwood that has been shaped and smoothed by the ocean, a photograph taken by a monkey, a mural painted by an elephant and the look of natural stone for its cut marks, defects and other qualities. In every instance, its response has been the same: no. The Copyright Office Compendium, its guide to policies and procedures, explicitly states that works created by nature, animals or plants cannot be registered. That also includes “works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author”.
Some wiggle room may be added to this realm, the result of the new guidelines issued by the Copyright Office and a recent decision regarding the copyright registration of a comic book, �Zarya of the Dawn, authored by New York-based artist and artificial intelligence (AI) consultant�Kris Kashtanova with images generated through Midjourney.
The Copyright Office granted copyright to the book as a whole but not to the individual images in the book, claiming that these images were not sufficiently produced by the artist.
Break-out rooms
We will use Midjourney to generate images
Midjourney creates four versions with every attempt
Discuss and formulate a prompt in your room
Choose one of the four results to be placed on a slide here
Remember your prompt but don’t tell it loud
Let’s play: prompt or dare - what could be the prompt of the other teams? How you interpret what you are seeing? What was the idea behind the original prompt of the group?
Stay curious. Explore, invent, and bring your students with you and encourage them to experiment. Share you practice and experiences.
Further readings
If you want to, you can join a private Discord server set for MEL members where MidJourney is invited: https://discord.gg/Sd7jdUsXqU
Library with the resources and the Midjourney experiments: https://mediumisthemessage.eu/ai-in-the-classroom-visual-literacy-creativity-and-authorship/
Everything you want to share with others inspired by this webinar will be added to the site and the slides. Please, contact Devina and Jocelyn, or me directly: iglika@mediaeducation.lab
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And please, please feel free and appreciated to participate and contribute - these are all open knowledge resources for and by you