Design – Directed, Controlled, and Persuasive
The frame started its history accompanied by the image. It shifted its form from the spatial environment, virtual image, spatial object, and once again into the spatial and time-based environment.
In cinema, it is possible to speak a message through the narrative or by an actor’s line. The narrative consists of the movement of the shot and changing the scene, and a linear timeline. In design, rhetoric leads a role as a speaking person. Meaning of the term rhetoric is “the art of using language so as to persuade or influence others.” It could be a colour and a form that contains information about the speech. As soon as they move from concept to visible manifestation is made, and especially to a manifestation as highly organised as a timetable, then the means used become rhetorical. Another definition of rhetoric might be tried, the art of directed communication – directed, that is, both internally to organise the material communication and externally to persuade an audience. Moreover, rhetoric in design can be delivered by another form/medium. To persuade or influence, narrative and rhetoric are shifting the form ‘frame’ as a directed vision. As the frame guides the order of the image in the comic books or traditional Egyptian wall paintings, it implies the order of the event and strengthens the message, as narrative and time do in the cinema frame.
Technologies open narratives and make the construction of a navigatable and immersive narrative environment. Now, each frame does not shows a fixed and decided narrative, but is exchangeable and discovered. Now, not only do viewers’ gaze moves, and the subject in the narrative’s movement influences the message. However, The movement of the UK’s government shows that the frame could make two separate stories into one. The frame in the Youtube channels applied cinematic language, for example, ‘cinema mode’.
The impact of the frame, I believe, is not only limited to the interface but also individual laptop screens. The narrative or rhetoric is already made to some degree and the user opens their device up. The physical frame is not playing a role as a spatial environment that configures the image. Expanded physical frame space, such as multi-user, distributed, mobile, ubiquitous, wearable, and mixed reality, increasingly broadens the range of experimental representation.
On the other hand, within the interface, which is controlled by a system and operators offered imagery inhabited information spaces, ‘typical results are self-reflexive products where the ideological underpinnings of their commercial stratagems remain unchanged (Shaw, 2012)’. No matter how much new digital technologies seduced the user with an enhanced image, ‘they tend to promulgate reactionary paradigms of the cinematic experience and of societal engagement with new media (Shaw, 2012)’. This comment can be interpreted in a way that, this is the time to design language at interface should be studied toward a new type of the language.
The cinematic imagination dominates the screen world. However, the distortion of the experience derived from the physicality of the frame, the immateriality of the new media, and the old design language is greatest than ever before. The messages easily become perverse and misdelivered. The noise of the language widens the creativity of the imagery. However, we should wisely distinguish between noise and distortion.
Shaw, J., 2012. New-media art and the renewal of the cinematic imaginary. Technoetic Arts, 10(2), pp.173–177.