A Brief Introduction To My Research

The following is an introductory text produced for an exhibition of research staff currently teaching at Gray’s School of Art.

Throughout my career as an artist and academic, I have always been interested in the theory as well as the many practices of representation. During the last 5 years this interest has developed to the point that my research has become wholly devoted to the theory of representation and its wider implications, most especially as it pertains to perception, communication and consciousness.

What is representation? By "representation" I mean precisely what we commonly mean by the term in ordinary language. Representations are stand-ins typically, although not exclusively, used for the purposes of communication. Even political representatives act as proxies for the people whose political views they represent. In short, representations are useful substitutes for the things they represent (although substitution alone is obviously not sufficient for representation).

The means by which representations function might seem to be extremely varied, because they are can involve so many different techniques. But in fact representations can be divided into three distinct categories (vide Donald Brook 1997, 2013), two nonverbal and one verbal. The two nonverbal strategies of representation rely on two importantly different sorts of resemblance, whereas verbal communication relies upon the capacity to accept almost anything as a symbolic substitute for anything else. This is an extremely sophisticated skill, almost entirely restricted to most humans.

It is my view that our prodigious skill in the use of symbolic communication is the result of a long history of tool-use and especially of practices of social exchange in which objects and behaviours become interchangeable due to socially negotiated attributions of value that are ascribed to them. It is this process—this technique—of value attribution that I regard as such a vital factor in the emergence of practices of symbol-use and the ascription of symbolic meaning.

It will be clear then, that I regard symbolic meaning as an exclusively human invention because it is fully dependent upon the capacity to treat objects and circumstances as having significance that is not a quantifiable property of them. When we say that a ball means "playtime" to a dog, we need not be committing ourselves to the belief that the dog regards the ball as a symbol of playtime. We merely mean that the dog knows that the ball usually accompanies playful activity. In other words, we take the dog to be capable of forming associative responses to things and thus to know what they mean in this limited sense.

Returning to nonverbal representations, we find that language enables us to treat these also as verbal constructs, but it does not follow that it is always appropriate to do so; to treat them as messages, signifiers, descriptions or texts. What a nonverbal representation is of is what we might regard as a first-order representational feature. What it is about, on the other hand, is a second-order representational feature and thus depends on a different set of interpretive resources on our part.

There is another common confusion that my research seeks to disentangle. Images, for example, do not resemble things in the same way as models. Models, copies, replicas, reproductions, re-enactments, and exemplification etc. all function because they share features in common with the things they represent. These shared features may be approximate to various degrees, but they are not the result of effects. Images, on the other hand, are only fully like the things they represent in certain ways and under certain conditions. In other words, depictions can sometimes be mistaken for the things they represent, but such mistakes rely to a very significant degree on the particular circumstances of presentation or encounter (i.e. the level and evenness of light, our point of view, our level of attentiveness etc.). This is the basis of many illusions of course.

Finally, to say that an image is a description or that a description is a picture or that a picture is a model or that models delineate the world etc. is to talk in circles. My research is intended to show how the theorisation of philosophers, researchers and sometimes even scientists can go awry when they carelessly confuse, misunderstand or mischaracterise distinct categories of representation.