The Perception And Appreciation Of Abnormality
In our everyday life, we hold habitual perception to previously encountered situations. Both mentally and physically we have developed a default tendency to habituate what is familiar to us and bypass conscious thoughts, thereby escaping from the tension of new responses. Once something has become familiar and habitual, it becomes an easy-acceptable component of our daily reality.
I believe it is critical to take situations which should never be regarded as normal and habitual into consideration. 'If we degrade something extraordinary as merely normal, we are either denying our pleasure of appreciating the abnormally good, or wilfully subjecting us to the horrors of the abnormally bad. '
Through media like free daily newspapers, magazines and online media, we are exposed to a largely one-way mode of cultural consumption, we come to accept the cultural, social, political and economic structures surrounding us as normal, natural, inevitable and ultimately unchangeable, and therefore we perceive them as pragmatically acceptable, authoritative realities. We slide into the a passive spectatorship which decreases our critical faculties and active responses to everyday experience.
The term Perception Management well explain the situation, which originated within the U. S. Military as part of their Psych-ops program. For instance, it argues that the phenomenon surrounding UFOs in the 1990s was born out of a counter-intelligence operation designed to make the public believe that secret airborne high-technology weapons systems the US military tested during and after the Cold War were alien visitations. In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others depending on the government’s needs.
Now we live in a world with even more chaotic messages, outstanding issues and illusory authenticities. We are instilled with so-told truth and facts happening around and are getting automatically numb to promote genuine criticality and argument. Graphic designers, ‘the creators and shapers of the cultural society’ are deeply involved in the operation and production of perceptions for spectators. For instance, all the familiar symbols designed for road users to enjoy a safe and efficient trip, bold fonts of the headlines for news readers to skip the long articles. While it should be noted that this impacts of design can enrich/enhance the perception or decrease/deny the experience of sensing abnormally awful and extraordinary. Given that we are limited by everyday illusions which are habitual, inevitable, unchangeable, ambiguous, an unsettling moment of psychological disorientation might be vital for the pursuit of critical argument. We should work to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, to disrupt the habitual experience. Dialogic approach is a connective model of visual rhetoric with polemic nature and polyphonic visual form.
By subverting the expectations of the visual communication, it opens up a moment of de-familiarisation in which the visual elements presented form an unresolved sphere of debate. It calls for the viewers to evaluate and judge the given situations, and to develop their own positions in relations to the matter in question. Through the creation of a dialogic experience of abnormally normal from all sorts of cultural consumptions we encounter every minute, therefore I aim to awake the spectators from their cognitive lethargy, to draw them into the struggle with an imbalanced experience. Simultaneously, I hope both the spectators and the designers involved could gain new interpretations and develop critical faculties in this process.
