Drawing on conversations

A visual conversation about a pain that felt like an insect or scorpion sting

The images above are from a range of drawings done in response to a conversation with someone about a pain they had, which at one point they described as being similar to being stung by an insect or scorpion. Some of the drawings were done during the time of the conversation, reminders of what had been said. Others were drawn up after the conversation was over and then taken back into a further conversation, whereby the first conversation was reflected upon and the more 'worked up' drawings were shown to the other conversationalist.  This was part of an iterative process, designed to eventually get to a point whereby the other person was able to say, "Yes it felt like that," or "I imagined the situation to look like that". This process is hopefully helping someone see what was initially invisible but felt, it was experienced but the experiencer had as yet no visual shape for it. 

A large part of my practice is devoted to listening to people in conversation. Over the years these conversations have varied, from stories about the terrible journeys people might have made to get to Leeds from often war torn areas of the world, via the drama of world politics, to more recent ones about ageing bodies or the trauma of injury. Sometimes we forget that the glue that ties us all together is made out of the grain of conversations.
Conversations are complex things and although informal, they instigate the interactive exchange of thoughts, ideas and feelings between people. Conversation is vital to the way our species socialises, comes to an agreed understanding and maintains connections between individuals and groups.

Conversations are though not always what we think they are; only part of the content of a conversational exchange derives from the actual words said. The tone of voice can be extremely influential, as can facial expressions, women may understand things differently from men, people of one generation may have a world view totally different to another, someone from another culture may have preconceptions that you don't and many other psychological and physiological factors may interfere with clear communication. Even so, without someone being prepared to listen as carefully as possible and someone else being prepared to try hard to explain themselves or their understanding of a situation, we would never be able to come to any form of coauthored agreement on the nature of our existence.

These blog posts are a type of conversation, but they are very one sided. My views are put down, but nobody is probing them, no questions are asked as to what I mean, (well not immediately, I do get questions by e mail or verbally when I meet people) and whatever I think at the time is frozen in place. If you compare this to a real time conversation you will see a huge difference. When we’re in one to one conversation, our brains literally sync up. This is something called "neural coupling" or "neural entrainment". It is when the electrical impulses in two brains become synchronised. When you talk and another person listens. you gradually find yourselves “on the same wavelength”. This is why a conversation can be transformative. But you have to leave yourself open to what the other person is saying. For instance it can be too easy to dismiss a conflicting belief or to agree with something that fits your opinion. It is in the back and forth of conversation that meaning is made.

There is something called the 'Johari Window' that was proposed by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, as a way to visualise conversational and other relationships.

The Johari Window

The Johari Window is a rectangle that has within it four areas representing different aspects of self knowledge or self awareness. The Open Area is where we find the common or shared knowledge about our lives and our feelings about the world. The Blind Spot is where others know things about you and the world you inhabit, but which you don’t yet know about. The Hidden Area, is what is hidden within yourself in terms of knowledge and perspectives known only to you. Your intensions for instance, might be very different to your actions, we all have things we would like to keep private. The Unknown Area, which is what is unknown to both you and others, is the area represented in black in the diagram and in reality it would have to be of a cosmic scale, as we can only know what we experience and we can only experience that tiny, fleeting moment given to us by a conscious life, everything else that has ever existed is unknown to us. Even so, it is within that moment that conversations take place and as they do the open area can grow and become fertile ground for the development of new thought. 

But in conversations with people that you have only just met you need to build some sort of trust, especially if they are going to open up to you in any meaningful way. Therefore you need to listen closely to them, then when they finish talking, it is useful to summarise their side of the conversation. You can then ask questions about what they said, all of which makes it clear to the other person that you are listening carefully to them.

The conversations that form part of my art/research practice are usually drawing led. This means that my summaries of what is being said are quickly drawn sketches. These sketches form a kernel around which a particular understanding will grow, one that I might in some ways know more about than the other person, simply because drawing is my language of choice. However we both engage with the process of critiquing what is being drawn. The part of the conversation that is centred on, "it's more like this drawing than that one", or "it this line should be darker or thinner", being where an exchange takes place that gradually builds an image in my head and in the head of the person telling me a story about themselves. Hopefully this image is new to both of us, it is something discovered through the conversational process. For myself, this helps me in terms of my own validation of a working practice, as it reinforces my belief in the importance of interactive exchanges with others in order to develop ideas. It places socialisation at the centre of my practice and most importantly I have to develop an agreed understanding of a visual language, something which I feel is often lacking when I see artwork placed within a context where non-art trained people have to encounter it. 

Even so when I show the work done outside of the conversation from which it emerged, other people who were not party to the conversation, often find it a challenge to understand what is being communicated. I have had to accept that there is no such thing as a universal language and that instead I now believe that languages are constantly evolved by some sort of social interaction, always being re-negotiated and changed in response to new experiences. 

In order to get a better theoretical grasp of what it is to develop ideas and knowledge through conversations, I have looked at the work of Gordon Pask. His  major contribution to communication research was the development of Conversation Theory.  This grew out of his work with cybernetics and his analysis of the dynamic process whereby both people and machines learn about each other. He first came to my notice because of the 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity which included his robotic courtship model, whereby biomorphic shapes moved in relation to each other, responding to a program that the audience could interact with.  

Gordon Pask: Display for Cybernetic Serendipity 

Pask believed that the more we learn about how we learn from interactions with others, the more tolerant we would become and society would be a much better thing. If only listening and sharing had become the norm, instead the role models we now have are much more about bullying and getting your own way and his early computer learning models have fostered an AI that seems to be linked to the worst of human nature, rather than Pask's idea that learning should always be beneficial and generative.  Even so it might be useful to go through Pask's major ideas and see how useful they might me, especially when it comes to evaluating a practice like my own, that relies on conversation as a methodology. 

 

 

Gordon Pask's model of conversation in the form of a diagram

The five major elements of conversation in the diagram above are:

• Context: when and where it happens: the conversational content must suit the situation and be something agreed or at least accessed by both participants. 
• Language: people's interests are related to their sub-group pre-occupations, such as particular words that only those involved in that sub-group would know. Language is not just about understanding English or Chinese, it’s also about tone and intention and having shared values, as well as a recognition that in my case drawing is a language too; all of which need to be dealt with in a conversation if we are to continue to…
• Exchange: the back-and-forth of messages that we usually think of as conversation
• Agreement: what we understand from each other and believe together, even if we agree to disagree about everything, at least we have understood that we have different points of view.
• Transaction or action: what happens afterward as a direct result of the conversation.

In an earlier post on communication theory I pointed out that the central weakness of a transmission theory of communication is that it is not concerned with the production of meaning itself, which is a socially mediated process. This is why there are several constitutive theories, because meaning production is complicated. In particular how can we say something novel or different to one another? We need the capacity for new messages to be generated and the resultant understanding confirmed or denied. The best method I know that can deal with this is 'conversation'. In conversation we can learn new concepts, share and evolve knowledge, and confirm agreement. Diagrams can both be used to describe how this works and to reinforce the idea that drawing is a language.

Conversation for Agreement
As a result of conversation, two people believe that they agree.

Gordon Pask would suggest that conversation as a process is a bit like this:
Step one: Open a channel. When one person sends an initial message, the possibility for conversation opens. For conversation to follow, the message must establish common ground; it must be comprehensible to the other participant.

Step two: Commit to engage. The other participant must pay attention to the message and then commit to engaging with the the person that initiated the conversation. Such a commitment may amount to nothing more than continuing to pay attention. For conversation to persist, the commitment must be symmetrical and move back and forth and there must be the possibility for either side to break off from the conversation for any reason, at any time.

Step three: Construct meaning. Conversation enables the conversationists to construct meaning, including meaning that is new to one or other of the participants. This 'meaning' will though come out of a shared context, so will be to some extent socially determined. I.e. The person that opens the conversation uses it to convey what the topic of discussion is; the technical term is 'descriptive dynamics', they will often try to explain how the topic might be used to understand a new concept, (prescriptive dynamics or "what should we do next?"). The other conversationalist “takes all this in” and “puts it all together” in an attempt to reproduce the other person's meaning. In most conversations it is presumed that there is some sort of sharing, a common language is often developed, but some work is often needed for this to happen. Think of two people carrying a heavy weight, as one person shifts their grip the other person responds, until between them they have a better grip on the situation. The moving of the weight is in effect what the two of them share and without this sharing the weight would be dropped. This is the inherent coherence at the centre of the conversation concept, one that allows myself to introduce drawing as part of a conversation; it helps me 'shift my grip' and as I do so, the other person has to 'shift their grip' in order not to drop the weight. As our human nervous system has evolved especially to make sense of the messages that arrive, “meaning making”, the taking in of what both yourself and the other person are saying and putting it all together, is the most natural thing to happen.

Step four: Converge on agreement. One participant may wish to confirm their understanding of the other's ideas. To do so, they might create a different formulation of the topic(s) under discussion, to see if it holds water when reformulated. The other person then attempts to make sense of this new formulation and compares it with their original. This is an iterative process that often leads to further exchanges. When both judge that the concepts match sufficiently, they have reached “an agreement over an understanding.” It is at this point that hopefully in my work where I hold drawing conversations with people, that we stop for a while and I take the drawings done away and try to refine them, before bringing them back and resuming the conversation.

Step five: Evolve or stay. After the interaction of conversation, either one or both people may hold new beliefs, make decisions they would not have made before or develop new ways of thinking about relationships, with other things, people or themselves. On the other hand it is always possible that both people's mindsets will remain as they were.

Step six: Act or Transact. Sometimes one or both of the participants agree to perform an action as a result of the conversation that has taken place. For example, in my case I may agree to develop a series of images in response to the conversation and bring the results back in a week's time. The other person may agree to think about their situation in a new way as a result of our conversation, especially as we would have spent quite some time reflecting on their interoceptual experiences and trying to devise a language to describe them.

Conversation to Learn
Conversation is a means to convey concepts and confirm agreement.
A conversation changes one of the participants. That participant has “learned” something

In my work in the hospital it is critical to consider what can’t be talked about. Conversations may be limited in fundamental ways. For instance the conversational infrastructure may prevent certain things being talked about. If asked, “How well does the infrastructure support the conversational connection?”, I would have to respond with a few reservations. For instance a hospital ward is not private and there are constant intrusions by others wanting access to the patient. Therefore patients find it hard to be totally open about their experiences. I am also a new person in their lives so it is natural for patients to have certain reservations about opening out to myself, especially in relation to private matters.
The situation is potentially loaded with emotional dilemmas. I leave it to the clinical consultant to make the initial contact with a patient, trusting that they will only select people for the experience, that the consultant feels are emotionally robust enough to take part in conversations designed to get them to face their current situation, that of being in a spinal injury ward. Even so, I have to reflect carefully on how far to go in relation to descriptions of people's injuries, so that I don't trigger emotionally negative responses. Just as importantly the conversational participants will have different capacities for responding to the type of conversations I initiate. Each individual will contribute what they know in their own style of interaction and it can take me a while to recognise this. Even after all these considerations some drawing led conversations may go nowhere, whilst other conversations create their own energy and are generative, leading to new and unexpected knowledge but at the beginning of these conversations I never know which ones will be productive.

Conversation to Collaborate: Agreeing on goals and coordinating actions to achieve them

If the conversation is to work, it has to offer something for both participants. As a conversation develops the ongoing exchange has to identify the potential benefits in continuing the engagement. There ought to be some learning or interest stimulated, or at least some sort of delight in the situation, such as the positive experience of someone actually being prepared to listen to your story.

In this very one sided conversation I suppose it's now time to see if I can convince the reader that there is more to it than a simple break down and exploration of the stages that make up conversations and how they help in the production of meaning.

Tim Ingold has pointed to the fact that all we are is an intermingling. We are part of an ever forming universe where everything is enfolded into everything else. He argues that we live in a ‘con-crescent’ world. (Concrescent: in biology, a growing together of initially separate parts or organs). In response to this situation he further argues that when seeking the truth a conversation will be everything, not just between people but between all the possible things that you might be able to connect with. The process he states is fundamentally democratic and is concerned with conjoint actions; bodies in correspondence being engaged in democratic conversations forming communities of open-endedness. He finally argues that ‘Commoning’ or the joining with others will be the key drivers behind sustainability. The holding of conversations being not just about how we develop empathy for other people and learn from them, we need to develop conversations with plants, other animals, minerals, electrons, quarks and energy forces, if we are to overcome the hubris of thinking that we have any form of separation from or dominance over nature. In her book, 'Finding the Mother Tree', Suzanne Simard establishes that trees not only 'talk' to but co-operate with mycorrhizal fungi and that they are central to an interconnected eco system that at one time always included human beings. She reminds us that the indigenous humans understood this and that the Secwepemc, the first nation people who inhabit the interior of British Columbia in Canada, have a word Kw̓seltktnéws (pronounced kw-selt-kt-news), a fundamental principle that translates to "we are all related", a worldview that acknowledges that all people, animals, plants, water and soil are interconnected, requiring stewardship, respect, and reciprocity. 

I am I know repeating myself when I write about these ideas but perhaps that's a good thing, the art of rhetoric suggesting that repetition is very useful if you want to convince your audience that you strongly believe in the message you are trying to deliver. 

References:

Pask, G. (1976) Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology London: Elsevier Science Ltd

Simard, S. (2021) Finding the mother tree: Uncovering the wisdom and intelligence of the forest London: Penguin

See also:

Drawing conversations
Drawing and communication theory
Is drawing a language?
Is drawing a language? Part 2
Is drawing a language? Part 3
Is drawing a language? Part 4
Tim Ingold democratic conversations

Shamanism and art