How can I communicate communication?

Using content to inform aesthetic decisions

Perhaps this is a normal trait of a visual thinker, but while I am in the process of collecting and amassing content for my publication there is a continual stream of visual representations running through my head. I can’t seem to stop thinking about how I will compose and design the content to create a form. Images of layout and composition and styles of photography and typography pop into my head while I’m trying to decipher an academic text. It’s very distracting, and while it’s probably a positive sign that I am in the right profession, I’m struck by the lack of coherent thought behind my brain’s visual choices. Why did I suddenly, and unjustifiably, think that this publication has to be set in HTF Didot?

Unlike my professional work, where each design decision is researched and then backed up with a substantial, and yet often oversimplified, explanation for the client, the aesthetic choices I make for this personal project can be as complex and abstract as I like. The reasoning behind my decisions doesn’t need to be simplified down to “I chose this colour because it represents innovation”. This is a chance to explore design thinking without boundaries, to let content inform design, to question why my intuition says “Didot”, to run with it, turn it over, and see what is produced.

With that in mind, I came across an interesting text by Mieke Bal, a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emeritus in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. I found her essay Lost in Space, Lost in the Library in a book of essays about the cultural practice between migration and art making. The purpose of the text is to question and explore “migratory aesthetics”, a term she coined herself.

The section of the text that caught my attention was an example she used from a piece of work she produced, Lost in Space, a 15 minute short film. From what I gather, the video was designed as an experiment; it aimed to question cultural differences and explore globalisation. The subject matter of the film was displacement, dislocation and the subjectively experienced consequences of migration through an intimate approach of interviewing migrants. It was also intended to be an aesthetic work concerning movement, people, objects and places. However, the aesthetic wasn’t set from the beginning, and would be “left open to what would happen”.

As a reference point, this appeals greatly to me as it ticked two boxes that I am working on: a) interviews with migrants and b) aesthetic informed by content.

Bal explains how the content of the interviews lead her to create a specific aesthetic. She describes an interview with migrant:

This man, called Daryush, spoke very limited English, and clearly suffered from his difficulty in saying things that mattered to him. Yet, he had volunteered for the project and even insisted, when we were hesitant, to be included. So, both his desire to speak and the difficulty he experienced both became relevant factors. The difficulty of speaking was important.

She tried to solve the communication problem but trying another language, but it soon became apparent that wrestling with broken English was the only way to converse. The conversation was difficult and she began to wonder if they would be able to use the footage.

Then something happened that made his speech absolutely central to the project; it determined the aesthetic style of it. At one point. when I asked him what he missed most about home, he fell into a frantic expression of the incapacity to speak. He was most desirous to speak, but incapacitated by the foreignness of the language we were using.

She told him he could speak in Farsi and she would translate it later. After a couple of minutes of silence he broke into a passionate speech in a language completely incomprehensible to Bal.

Words and sounds that I did not understand came tumbling out his mouth, for me only musical, with a distinct melody and rhythm, while his face had also changed: previously cramped with pain, now more relaxed. The differences…were more striking as his speech so far had shown the typical a-melodic flatness of depressed speech.

When she was able to get his words translated she was surprised and delighted to find that he was saying that what he missed most was speaking in his own language.

As I could only acknowledge belatedly, this was the crucial, performative moment of the production… The double discrepancy between speech and understanding, and between meaningful sound and senseless sound — then became the basis of the film.

Bal used this moment to craft the aesthetic of the video. Instead of presenting a traditional interview format, she displayed the sound, words and vision as separate entities. This method disrupted conventional communication by disintegrating the flow of language and structure of narrative. It’s purposely frustrating to watch.

She goes on to explain her aesthetic decisions in more detail, and, as a cultural theorist, relates these decisions to a broader perspective of globalisation and migration.

But what struck me as important in this text is how Bal utilises a profound moment of cultural communication to create an informed aesthetic decision. The text made me think about the challenges I’ve had with communicating with my interview subjects, and how those obstacles could be translated into the design of the publication.

As I speak to my interviewees about their experiences with communicating with foreign audiences, we are often experiencing communication issues of our own. A simple example: I had an interview recently with a painter who was living in New Zealand. We conducted the interview over Skype, it was 8pm my time and 9am her time. It sounded like a good idea in theory, but the whole interview was wrought with communication issues. Skype dropped out several times. As she was waking up to the day and wanting to chat more, I was getting tired and wanted to wrap it up quickly.

So, the concluding questions for myself are: How do I showcase not only the communication issues within the content I’ve collected, but also the communication issues that comes with collecting that content? What style of aesthetic should be used to communicate these two layers?

Like always, my mind fills up with unhelpful visual ideas. The answer is obviously Didot.