Communication – Art and Visual Medium
Communication has always been a means to express thoughts and feelings, even before establishing a spoken language system. Effective communication is required for emotive expression as well as to establish authority and gain control. It is used to inform and motivate others as well as themselves.
Significance and Type of Communication
It wouldn’t be wrong to claim that language and communication are essential for human survival. Over the centuries, the modes of communication have evolved – from cave paintings to social media tweets and blogging, human beings have found endless ways to express themselves. It is something that will continue to progress and get morphed into whatever comes next.
It isn’t just human beings who’ve found a way to communicate – animals have designed a system as well. They’ve got a unique method of communication that helps them survive and express needs. Coming back to human beings, you can look at disabled people as an example; even mute individuals have a language through which they communicate. And the bottom line is that communication is amongst the first things that a baby learns when it’s born –to express the basic needs.
You can further understand the significance of language and communication by examining the role it plays in the life of a student. They are taught to nourish their communication skills from the beginning. You could be a student of mass communication or linguistics or any other subject. Still, at the end of the day, you’re going to be marked based on your effectiveness – how well you articulate and execute your ideas into writing as well as in verbal discussion.
You’ll be assigned tasks like presentations; you’ll be asked to give oral examinations and also the traditional writing tests. In a way, these modes of communication are used to evaluate your understanding of a subject. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that students seek law essay writing service UK because of their lack of communication skills.
Visual Medium
By now, you’ve probably understood the relevance and necessity of language and communication. Now you must also understand that amongst other formats, one of the most attractive and stimulating modes of communication is via the visual medium. We have different forms of art that will serve as a testament to this claim – movies, paintings, music videos, etc.
Why do you think visual communication is available? Why do you think singers come up with a music video even after releasing audio? Why are some books adapted into a screenplay? It’s to provide a deeper understanding and to stimulate your brain visually.
There have been various forms of communicational methods over the years – some more popular than others. And amongst them, storytelling is the one that has long been used to convey information, even before language existed in writing.
In the Stone Age, communication was a bit complex and challenging – you could use your communication language only within your tribe. Just to give you an example, some tribes would use smoke as a signal for one thing but other predatory animals and enemy tribes would get attracted since they would have a completely different understanding of it. Hence, we can safely say that, at the time, communication methods were not standardized, resulting in more obstacles and barrier.
As we mentioned earlier, paintings and drawing have long been used to express yourself. These paintings and drawings are indicative of their time, they are the reflection of what society was like at the time, and they’re deeply impactful even today. The most interesting aspect of those paintings is that they can be interpreted in different ways – all depending on subjective experiences.
Similarly, the communication standards included drawings that can be interpreted and projected in different ways. We’ve discussed some of the primitive art in detail below.
The Cro-Magnons
This drawing format can be dated back to ca. 40,000 years – Homo sapiens who lived in the Upper Paleolithic time of the Pleistocene epoch. If you study them, you will find that they’re all modern and suggestive of robust physiology. They were responsible for bringing in sculptures, music and all kinds of body ornamentation.
They used to paint on rocks and caves – from their walls to the ceiling. Most of the times, it was the shamans and the elders who would draw abstract patterns with animals being the common theme. It is rare to find human beings’ drawings because they preferred drawing pictures of animals and their nature.
These paintings were drawn using charcoal and manganese oxide, with yellow and red being the chosen colors. You’d also find these sculptures to resemble beasts like a lion but not enough explanation is available. But you can imagine that these drawings were to alert or suggest the presence of danger because colors like red and yellow are so bright that they instantly gauge your attention.
Petroglyphs
These are basically images drawn by people of the Neolithic times. These drawings have important symbols – the communication used during 10,000 BC. It gives insight into the times and the kind of culture there was at the time. The fascinating thing about these symbols is that they’re still used today.
The writing system that comprised of particular pictographs and ideograms was found much recently until the 20th century by the western countries. Some experts have claimed that these symbols hold religious significance.
Geoglyphs
These are large motifs or designs that are usually 4 meters long and was used by western Australia and areas near the Great Basin Desert in the United States. These drawings are highly complex but resemble hummingbirds, monkeys and spiders. Most of the lines aren’t coherent but it seems like they try to explain the motivations and abilities of the people of the time.
The idea behind all of these art form was to communicate – today; it is done through tweets, memes, and TikTok videos. At the end of the day, communication – in whatever form – is there to express your motivations, ideas and feelings.
