RI - Chapter 5 - Modality: designing models of reality

Here are my notes from reading this book from authors Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen.

This chapter looks at the truth behind and image to understand if it is valid or not; social groups can change the validity of a given image because they foster different beliefs and reasonings.

Modality definition: reliability of messages; truth value or credibility of statements about the world; visually, we regard our sense of sight more reliable than another other sense (hearing, taste, etc.). While the camera may not lie, those who use it can and do. Modality cues - "motivated signs which have arisen out of the interest of social groups who interact within the structures of power that define social life, and also interact across the systems produced by various groups within a society." (154)

Representation of visual - people, places, and things as though they are real (exist), or imaginings, fantasies, caricatures, etc. (non-existent).

Reality is in the eye of the beholder: what is regarded as real depends on how reality is defined by a particular social group.

• Naturalism reality - basis of how much correspondence there is between the visual representation of an object and what we normally see of that object with the naked eye. Hyper-real shows 'too much detail', 'too much depth', 'too much color' to be true, which makes it have less modality for this naturalism reality.
  
• Scientific reality - defines reality on the basis of what things are like regularly; goes beyond the visual appearance of things.

Realism is produced by a particular group: as an effect on the complex of practices which define and constitute that group. Particular kind of realism is itself a motivated sign, in which the values, beliefs and interests of that group find their expression.

Dominant criterion for what is real or not: based on appearance of things, on how much correspondence there is between what we can 'normally' see of an object, in a concrete and specific setting, and what we can see of it in a visual representation.

Judging a pictures modality: pictures which have the perspective, the degree of detail, the kind of colour rendition, etc. of the standard technology of colour photography have the highest modality, and are seen as 'naturalistic'. As detail, sharpness, colour, etc. are reduced or amplified, as the perspective flattens or deepens, so modality decreases.

Modality markers: realized by a complex interplay of visual cues below. The same image may be 'abstract' in terms of one or several markers and 'naturalistic' in terms of others.

• Colour saturation - a scale running from full colour saturation to the absence of colour (black and white).
• Colour differentiation - a scale running from a maximally diversified range of colours to monochrome.
• Colour modulation - a scale running from fully modulated colour (use of many different shades of red, to plain, unmodulated colour.
• Contextualization - a scale running from the absence of background to the most fully articulated and detailed background (e.g. depth of field - standard lenses have accustomed us to images in which the background is less articulated than the foreground).
  
• Representation - a scale running from maximum abstraction to maximum representation of pictorial detail.
• Depth - a scale running from the absence of depth to maximally deep perspective.
• Illumination - a scale running from the fullest representation of the play of light and shade to its absence.
• Brightness - a scale running from a maximum number of different degrees of brightness to just two degrees (black and white / dark grey and lighter grey / two brightness values of the same colour).

Coding orientation: the ability of modern colour photography to render detail, brightness, colour, etc. constitutes for our culture today a kind of standard for visual modality. The world 'as we see it' has become the measure for what is 'real' and 'true'. "So visual modality rests on culturally and historically determined standards of what is real and what is not, and not on the objective correspondence of the visual image to a reality defined in some ways independently of it." (163) Set o abstract principles which inform the way in which texts are coded by specific social groups, or within specific institutional contexts.

• Technological coding orientations - 'effectiveness' of the visual representation as a 'blueprint' (e.g. colour is useless for the scientific or technological purpose of the image - low modality)
• Sensory coding orientations - pleasure principle is allowed to be dominant: certain kinds of art, advertising, fashion, food photography, interior decoration... (e.g. colour is source of pleasure and affective meanings - high modality - vibrant reds, soothing blues).
• Abstract coding orientations - used by sociocultural elites - in 'high' art, in academic and scientific contexts (e.g. higher modality - achieved when an image reduces the individual to the general, and the concrete to its essential qualities).
• Naturalistic coding orientations - dominant in society; all members in culture share. (e.g. watching television or reading a magazine...)

Abstract realism - naturalism modality does not apply: attitude which does not equate the appearance of things with reality, but looks for a deeper truth 'behind appearances'.