Category: Unit 2

I. Reading THE IMAGE

Framing changes meaning. The same image, placed under different frames, produces different readings, and the heavier the frame’s symbolic weight, the more obvious the shift.

Take the flag: the same image reads as unity to one viewer, threat to another. That weight has been embedded so deeply, through history, through repetition, through power, that it feels self evident. What surrounds an image reshapes the image itself.

The question begins with the frame, everything placed around an image to tell it what to mean. But a frame is a kind of instruction, and instructions have limits.

So what happens when the instruction disappears? When there is no border at all, only image against image, and meaning has to be built in the space between them?

Because this is not only how we read pictures. It is how a person is built. For bell hooks, popular culture is where the learning happens, where so much of who we become is taught. The images around us were never neutral. They shaped us.

II. Reading MANHOOD

And nothing shapes how we read manhood more than who first showed it to us. Usually, that is the father. But for many of us, a generation raised on the absent provider, he was not fully there.

Not gone, but distant. Present as a provider, rarely as a presence.

The primary male figure in these lives was also the one they knew least. So the picture of manhood came from elsewhere. From their mothers, less a picture of the actual father than a picture of what a man should be, shaped by her own desire and her own disappointments. From mass media, which filled the gaps with its own projections. Between them, a standard a man could never quite meet.

The man built in the mind never quite matched the man who was there.

Stuart Hall gave us a way to describe this. Meaning, he argued, is never simply passed from sender to receiver. A message is encoded by someone, shaped by their position, and then decoded by someone else, from theirs. Meaning lives in the gap between.

Here, the message was manhood itself. Encoded by a mother, a woman translating a gender she did not inhabit. And decoded by a child, too young to read it, with no original to check it against.

So the search began. For the missing image, in the places that seemed to hold it. In books. In magazines. In films. In a mother’s words, gathered up and assembled into a man. Fragments collected and held against each other, looking for a shape, piecing together a picture of what a boy was supposed to become.

It was happening without anyone knowing. We were reading before we knew we were reading. Image placed beside image. Meaning built in the space between.

Arthur Jafa worked this way on purpose. His notebooks gather clippings from magazines, newspapers, and advertisements, juxtaposed across decades to hold the contradictions of Black life in view. He lets the images speak against each other. He does not resolve them.

This is what Borrowed Instruction does, for a different question: how a son assembles a picture of a man. It takes those fragments, the borrowed pictures, the secondhand instructions, and places them back into dialogue. Image against image, with no caption, no father to fix their meaning, only the source, which fixes nothing. It does not resolve them. It lets the gap stay visible.

What once happened to us without our knowing, we now do on purpose. This time, we choose how to read them. Because that gap was never empty. It was where we did the building all along.

Footage:
•20th Century Women (Mike Mills, 2016)
•The Pagemaster (Maurice Hunt, 1994)
•Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)

References:
•Hall, S. (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’, in Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds.) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–138.
•hooks, b. (1997) Cultural Criticism & Transformation. Directed by S. Jhally. [Film]. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation.
•Jafa, A. (1990–2007) Untitled notebook (object no. 1131.2018). [Artwork]. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

[critical analysis]

Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding (1980) challenges the assumption that communication transmits meaning transparently from sender to receiver. Hall argues that media texts are encoded with preferred meanings shaped by dominant cultural and ideological frameworks, but that audiences decode these messages through their own social positions, producing dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings. Meaning, for Hall, is never fixed but always contested in the gap between encoding and decoding.

This framework becomes unexpectedly generative when applied beyond broadcast media to more intimate circuits of transmission. In my own practice, the “text” being encoded and decoded is not a television programme but masculinity itself, a set of codes, behaviours, and expectations passed from mother to child in the absence of a father. Here the encoder is not a media institution but a woman translating a gender she does not inhabit, shaping a preferred meaning of manhood from the outside. The decoder, the child, receives this transmission and negotiates it not against institutional ideology but against the lived reality of who is actually present, who is actually looked up to. The result is neither a clean dominant reading nor a straightforwardly oppositional one: it is a negotiated, approximate, and deeply personal decoding of what it means to be a man, assembled from instructions that were always secondhand.

Hall’s model, even in its most nuanced form, depends on one underlying assumption: that the encoder possesses, at least partially, the code they are transmitting. Institutional authority derives from this possession, the broadcaster knows the preferred meaning of the national interest, even if the audience resists it. But in the circuit this project describes, that possession is structurally impossible. The original referent, the father, masculinity as directly inhabited experience, is absent from both ends of the transmission. The encoder cannot possess what was never fully present to her. The decoder cannot verify what he receives against any original. There is no source to return to. This is not a failure of communication in Hall’s sense, not a misalignment between meaning structures 1 and 2 that could in principle be corrected. It is a condition in which the original encoding never existed in a stable form. What circulates instead is a construction that presents itself as a transmission, a preferred meaning of masculinity assembled from approximation, desire, and absence, passed on with the confidence of someone who believes they are relaying something real. The distortion is not in the gap between sender and receiver. It is built into the message from the beginning.

Formally, this theoretical understanding shapes the logic of juxtaposition in the work. The project places found imagery from magazines and instructional print media, confident and authoritative encodings of what a man should look like, how he should behave, what he should provide alongside images drawn from the domestic and the habitual: objects, gestures, and traces of the life that was actually being lived. These are not paired as simple opposites, false masculinity against real warmth. The pairings are more uncomfortable than that. They recreate the condition of receiving a fractured transmission: the official instruction sitting next to quiet evidence that the life surrounding it told a different story.

This is the experience Hall’s framework describes but cannot fully recreate analytically. The gap between meaning structures 1 and 2, between what was encoded and what was decoded, becomes something the viewer stands inside rather than reads about. The juxtaposition does not illustrate a contradictory transmission. It enacts one. The viewer feels the instability before they can name it, which is precisely the condition of a child assembling identity from instructions that were never internally consistent to begin with.

[critical analysis]

Batia Suter’s Parallel Encyclopedia (2007) is an artist’s book composed of found images sourced from vintage encyclopedias, spanning subjects such as science, nature, anatomy, and architecture. Removed from their original captions and reordered into a non-linear sequence, the images form unexpected visual associations that disrupt their initial classificatory function. Through juxtaposition and sequencing, Suter collapses distinctions between disciplinary categories, encouraging viewers to read images through resemblance, rhythm, and visual intuition rather than through scientific taxonomy. The absence of explanatory text destabilises the authority typically associated with encyclopedic systems of knowledge, transforming the publication from a didactic reference tool into an open-ended visual field.

The formal qualities of the book are central to this process. The sequencing of full-page images across spreads creates connections between otherwise unrelated subjects, allowing meaning to emerge relationally rather than hierarchically. For example, microscopic organic forms may visually echo architectural structures or mechanical systems, producing associations that blur boundaries between the natural and constructed world. In this sense, Suter uses editorial design not to clarify information, but to complicate and destabilise it. The work challenges the conventional role of graphic and communication design as a tool for order, legibility, and categorisation, rather than functioning as a neutral support system for pre-existing information, graphic design in Parallel Encyclopedia becomes a generative mechanism through which meaning is actively produced.

Although Suter’s process appears intuitive rather than overtly political, the work implicitly critiques encyclopedic authority by dismantling systems of classification and linear organisation. However, the project’s emphasis on visual openness also reveals certain limitations. While Parallel Encyclopedia encourages associative interpretation, Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding suggests that viewers never approach images from neutral positions; meaning is always shaped through culturally situated processes of interpretation. bell hooks extends this critique by arguing that spectatorship is further structured by power relations, particularly through race, gender, and histories of representation. Together, these perspectives complicate the apparent openness of Suter’s work, revealing that visual interpretation is never entirely free from ideology or social conditioning.

This tension between openness and conditioned spectatorship is particularly relevant to my own project. While I am interested in Suter’s use of archival imagery, fragmentation, and associative sequencing, I also want to critically examine how meaning is shaped by culturally embedded assumptions and structures of power. Rather than treating interpretation as unlimited, my project explores how viewers project ideological and emotional frameworks onto visual material. In this way, Suter’s work has influenced my understanding of graphic design not simply as a neutral system of communication, but as a medium that actively constructs relationships between knowledge, perception, and interpretation.

Week1:

Starting this brief I decided to drop the framing devices as it is quite limiting and in some ways disrupting to my exploration on the dialogic interaction between imagery(symbols).

So I changed the enquiry line to:   

I am trying to explore graphic design as a system of “cognitive intervention” that exposes biased perception. 

Although I have dropped the framing devices, these 3 from the previous set of iterations drew my attention.

At the beginning of the project, I was experimenting quite intuitively — pairing different symbols with contrasting imagery to see how they interact. For example, placing something that feels clean or structured with something more nasty or chaotic, to create a kind of visual tension between what we usually think of as good and bad.

Take the cockroach, for example. My initial instinct was to frame it as something undesirable, something we want to eliminate. But actually, cockroaches are incredibly resilient. They’ve survived for millions of years, and now they’re even being studied for their potential role in breaking down waste, including plastic. So instead of being purely negative, they can also represent sustainability and adaptation.

That shift made me look again at the other pairings, like Guanyin and nuclear energy, or the nun and BDSM mask. At first glance, these feel like opposites, even contradictions. But the more I think about them, the more I feel they share a similar underlying energy.

They’re all tied to ideas of control, belief systems, discipline, and transformation, just expressed through very different cultural, temporal, or moral frameworks.

So what I’m interested in exploring now is how our cognitive lens categorizes things too quickly. We label things as sacred or dangerous, but those boundaries are often constructed. Underneath, there can be shared meanings that just manifest differently depending on context and time.

[test01] Shared Meaning: Energy

From [test01], I began thinking about alternative ways to connect imagery together, using Jacques d’Amboise Playing with His Children, Seattle, 1962 by John Dominis as a reference point.

In Parallel Encyclopedia (2007/2016), Batia Suter employs a method of visual sequencing based on rigorous formal resonances, linking disparate images across history and discipline by matching their shapes, surfaces, textures, and lines. She arranges these decontextualized elements to reveal unexpected structural homologies, moving away from thematic or narrative sorting to investigate how pure visual morphology can bridge entirely unrelated subjects.

[test02] Formal Resonances

In On Patterns and Proxies (2018), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun examines how images function as proxies, stand-ins that represent complex or inaccessible realities. She argues that proxies both clarify and obscure meaning: they reduce uncertainty while simultaneously introducing new ambiguities.

Crucially, the same image can generate opposing interpretations, fostering both belief and skepticism depending on the viewer’s ideological position.

[test03] Proxies

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Week2:

After experimenting with different ways of associating and combining imagery to create meaning, this week I’ve started refining my process into more intentional approaches.

[test01] Theme: Father

The first approach is working with a theme, and then intuitively selecting images from random books that somehow feel connected to that theme, whether visually, emotionally, or symbolically.

I decided on my theme based on a collage i did from previous experiment:

While assembling this collage, I drew on Batia Suter’s approach, focusing on formal resonance between the works. At the same time, there was an intuitive quality to the selection process—I found myself choosing images not only for their visual similarities, but also for an underlying urge to describe the father as a figure. There is a sense that it’s complicated and difficult to fully articulate.

[test02] Communicate in Imagery

The second approach is having conversations using only imagery, and then dissecting those exchanges by looking at how I interpret them, how the other person interprets them, and how an audience might understand them differently.

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Week3:

For my final week, I decided to expand the theme of the father into a broader context, considering the role father figures play in shaping the upbringing of men in my generation. I think the father figure is an interesting and deeply complicated role, not only on a personal level, but also in the way it reflects wider ideas of masculinity and how these ideas influence identity.

In most cases, mothers have been the emotional center of the family: physically present, emotionally accessible. Fathers, on the other hand, have historically occupied a more distant position — the structural pillar of the home, but rarely its emotional center.

I think my generation’s fathers may be among the last to exist in that particular way. As gender roles shift and family structures evolve, fathers are no longer defined solely as providers. But what I want to document is the contradiction many children of that generation grew up with. It was often through our mothers that we learned what a man was supposed to be. She described him, interpreted him, handed us the blueprint. But my father, when I actually looked at him, never fully matched that image. My understanding of him was assembled from fragments — things I was told, brief encounters, gestures caught in passing.

We inherited an idea of manhood secondhand. That contradiction is what I want to revisit through this project.

The project places found imagery from books, magazines and instructional print media alongside images drawn from domestic life and everyday habit, objects and traces of the life that was actually being lived, creating the sensation of receiving a fractured transmission, where official instruction sits beside quiet evidence that the surrounding reality was telling a different story.

By using juxtaposition. Placing two ideas alongside one another to produce a third meaning that neither contains on its own.

In my case, the 2 ideas are: The instructions of what a man should be, communicated through my mother and through media representations; and, The absence of a father figure to reference, learn from, or measure oneself against (absence vs interpretation). What emerges from this tension is a third space: an awkward and the continually understanding of a manhood…

And that leads to my new enquiry: 

Through juxtaposition making a visual field, I am trying to expose the instability of messaging and the ways we learn to navigate conflicting narratives. As seen in the publication, the imagery comes from a range of different sources, each carrying its own context and assumptions.

Framing Thought

This project investigates the dialogic relationship between visual subjects and their framing devices, specifically exploring how nationalistic and sociocultural symbols dictate the interpretation of an image. I am exploring the central question:
What are the dialogic processes behind the framing of visual images and meaning? How does understanding these dialogic structures help us dissect engrained (sociopolitical or sociocultural) power structures?

By placing identical photographs within different symbolic frames and presenting them side-by-side, I aim to expose the “silent dialogue” that occurs between the viewer’s existing biases and the visual cues provided. This methodology serves to dissect hidden sociopolitical power structures, revealing how institutional symbols can weaponize or sanitize a single reality depending on the cultural lens applied.

Ultimately, this work challenges the notion of “objective” sight. It examines the recursive loop of cultural framing: how we, as a society, frame our culture through icons, and how those very icons, in turn, frame our understanding of the world. Through this juxtaposition, the project seeks to reveal the engrained power dynamics that govern our visual literacy and political empathy.

Bibliography

1. Laranjo, F. (2014) ‘Critical graphic design: Critical of what?’, Modes of Criticism, 1. Available at: https://modesofcriticism.org. (Accessed: 22 April 2026) – from reading list

In this essay, Francisco Laranjo questions the ambiguous use of the term “critical” within graphic design, arguing that work is not inherently critical simply by addressing social or political issues. Instead, he outlines different modes of criticality, including reflexive practice, disciplinary critique, and engagement with broader societal conditions.

This text is relevant to my practice as it challenges the assumption that visual experimentation alone produces critical meaning. While my work explores how framing devices such as flags or symbolic icons alter interpretation, Laranjo’s argument prompts a deeper question: does the work merely illustrate bias, or does it actively construct conditions in which viewers confront their own assumptions? His emphasis on design as a form of inquiry supports my approach to collage not as aesthetic composition, but as a method for testing how meaning is produced through context, selection, and perception.

2. Drucker, J. (2014) Graphesis: Visual forms of knowledge production. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – from reading list

In Graphesis, Johanna Drucker argues that visual forms are not neutral representations of information, but active producers of knowledge. She introduces the concept of “graphic interpretation,” emphasizing that design structures how information is understood by shaping the conditions through which it is perceived. Rather than conveying fixed meaning, visual systems construct interpretive frameworks that guide how viewers read and make sense of content.

This is relevant to my practice, which investigates how framing devices influence perception. By applying different symbolic frames to the same image, I explore how interpretation shifts depending on the visual structure imposed. Drucker’s argument supports the idea that these frames do not simply alter meaning externally, but function as interpretive systems that produce distinct readings. This positions my use of collage not as aesthetic manipulation, but as a method for examining how meaning and knowledge are constructed through visual form.

3. Gómez-Peña, G. and Fusco, C. (1993) The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey [performance]. – topic

Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s The Couple in the Cage (1992–1994) explores how cultural identity and “otherness” are constructed through pre-existing colonial and national frameworks of understanding. By presenting themselves as fictional “undiscovered Amerindians” displayed in a cage, the work reveals how audiences interpret unfamiliar bodies through inherited narratives shaped by colonial history, exoticism, and institutional authority. The reactions of viewers ranging from belief to amusement demonstrate how perception is guided not by what is seen, but by what cultural expectations already exist.

In relation to this project, the work is relevant for its focus on how cultural and historical frameworks shape interpretation of identity and difference before direct engagement with the subject occurs. It highlights how meaning is not neutral but constructed through social and national narratives that condition the viewer’s reading of visual and embodied information. This directly connects to the project’s investigation into how symbolic framing devices influence interpretation.

4. Shibuya, S. (2021) Headlines. New York: Abrams. – method

In Headlines, Sho Shibuya paints over the front pages of The New York Times, using the newspaper not only as material but as a framing device. While much of the original content is obscured, the recognizable layout and authority of the newspaper remain intact. This frame situates the work within the context of daily news, implicitly signalling “what happened today.”

As a result, the painted surface becomes a subjective response to current events rather than a direct representation of them. The work translates information into atmosphere, where colour and composition reflect an emotional reading of the day. This is relevant to my practice, as it demonstrates how a frame alone can impose meaning. Even without explicit content, the New York Times format conditions the viewer to interpret the image as timely and significant, suggesting that context can define perception as much as visibility.

5. Tillmans, W. (2005) Truth study center. London: Tate Modern. – critical position

Tillmans’ installation resists the logic of the singular frame. Rather than imposing an interpretive structure, Truth Study Centre distributes material across tables in a way that stages the instability of meaning — proximity creates association, but no arrangement is authoritative. The viewer’s navigation becomes part of the work’s meaning-making, and the “truth” of the title is deferred rather than delivered.

This functions as a productive counterpoint to my own methodology rather than a direct precedent. Where Tillmans suspends the frame to expose the contingency of interpretation, my project imposes frames explicitly, testing what happens when symbolic authority is made unavoidable rather than withheld. Placing the two approaches in dialogue raises a question my work needs to answer: is an imposed frame a more honest or more coercive form of meaning-making than one left deliberately open? Whether imposing a frame is more honest or more coercive than withholding one remains genuinely unresolved.

5. The Warburg Institute (no date) Virtual tour: Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Available at: https://www.sas.ac.uk (Accessed: 22 April 2026). – critical position

Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1920s) is an unfinished visual research project that assembles images from art history, mass media, and cultural artefacts onto black panels. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, Warburg employs juxtaposition to produce meaning through visual relationships, allowing images to be reinterpreted across different historical and cultural contexts. This approach positions the display as an active site of knowledge production, where meaning emerges through association rather than being inherent to individual images.

In relation to this project, Warburg’s methodology is significant for its use of juxtaposition and contextual framing as mechanisms that generate interpretation. By placing identical or related images within different symbolic frameworks, the project similarly activates multiple readings shaped by sociopolitical context. Warburg’s emphasis on the migration of symbols and cultural memory reinforces the idea that visual meaning is contingent, constructed, and dependent on the conditions in which an image is encountered.

Week1: Shape thoughts through shape

My practice has mainly focused on social issues around perception and hidden bias, often inviting viewers to reflect on their own assumptions through interaction. A recurring method in my work is the “cutout” as an act of revealing, uncovering what is otherwise obscured. Through this project, I want to push this further by examining how the cutout itself can shape meaning, and how subtly it can influence perception.

In the first part, I used different national flags as cutouts to view the same image. Each country carries its own cultural, political, and emotional associations, which may influence how the image is interpreted.

In the second part, I used familiar, widely recognized symbols to create the cutouts. I’m interested in whether these symbols also affect how we perceive an image even when the symbol itself has no direct connection to what is being shown.

In the third part, I experiment with using different symbols to reflect on how I relate to my partner. Through these associations, I begin to question whether the connections I make reveal something about the relationship itself, almost like an informal, visual form of self-examination.

In the forth part, I took a more literal approach, using shapes to define and constrain other shapes or patterns.

In the fifth part, I draw on something similar to the hangman word game. I focus on which words come to mind immediately, and consider whether these instinctive responses are linked to my personal habits, interests, or subconscious patterns. However, this part is less about how shape influences meaning, and more about how limiting information shapes what can be perceived and understood.

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Week2: Framing Thoughts

Previously, I focused on how the “cutout’s shape” — which I now prefer to call it “frames” — alter the way we see and interpret images. I found that symbols carrying a high density of meaning tend to dominate interpretation. But, when a symbol becomes too powerful, does it reduce our capacity for critical judgment? 

This led me to ask:

This week, I extended this enquiry through a series of iterations focusing on national flags as a case study. I explored not only how to construct image combinations that encourage reflection, but also whether anything can counterbalance or exceed the influence of such dominant symbols.

In the first set, I used crowds. Depending on the framing, the same group can appear like a group of ‘celebrants’, a ‘threatening mob’ or even people ‘in hiding’. Does the frame creates the ‘why’ behind the gathering?

The second set I used a hand. A raised hand is a universal symbol, but it’s incredibly malleable. Is it a sign of participation? A question? Or a salute? Does the frame decide the intent of the body?

The third set I used an empty room. We often learn a lot about a person by the traces they leave in a space, but when the room is stripped of everything, that sense of identity disappears. It becomes ambiguous. Could it be a quiet gallery hallway, or a cold detention room somewhere remote?

The fourth set I used one of the inkblot from Rorschach inkblot test. Apparently people would see completely different things in the same inkblot depending on their experiences and mindset. And I wonder if this would be effected by the frame. What do you see? 

In the fifth set, I tested a highly symbolic imagery. Here, I am testing whether one powerful symbol can offset or destabilise another, particularly the strong visual authority of national flags. Does it give civil war or does it just give world peace?

 

Through this juxtaposed mode of viewing, I wish to highlight that strong symbols such as national flags can both unify and divide. At the same time, they often suppress alternative interpretations and reinforce existing sociopolitical power structures.

This raises a broader question about how meaning is constructed.