Martyn Woodward is a visual communications designer who has been researching the limits/ limitations of understandings of visual communication since 2004. He began his Ph.D in October 2008 at the University of Plymouth with a research focus on developing new strategies for Visual Communication which are analogous with the emerging research into the Embodied human condition. He is also the research Assistant on HERA project based within Transtechnology research. Previous to this Martyn studied at the University of Wales in Newport, Obtaining a Bachelor‚ Degree in Graphic Design / Visual Communication in 2005 and his Master‚ in 2007.
Current research:
Enacted Creativity and Audio Visual Media
This research questions current and dominant models of visual perception and the complimentary practices and theories underpinning audio-visual media and technologies through the lens of emerging models of enacted perception. By applying contemporary understandings of the enacted processes that structure and underlie perception, it aims to open up insights that could add a new dimension of understanding of audio-visual media as itself underpinned by enactive processes. The research outlines the nature of visual perception within an enacted model of reality (Varela 2001, Noe 2004), which provide a middle ground in which idealist or realist representational accounts of reality are inadequate to describe human perception. Perception and cognition are here governed by a non-representational ontology within which no one sense modality is privileged within the imagination of the enacted reality (Verrips 2006). This provides a situation in which ‘visual perception’ becomes a constructed extraction which is redundant to the entire enactive dimension of experience. As such, ‘visual perception’ necessarily involves the contribution of the entire enactive imagination of the beholder, as a holistic ‘in-divisible’ (Woodward 2009), invisible enacted perception In which bodily based imagination (Gombrich 1964) and creativity become a necessary part of human ‘visual’ experience, perception and ultimately cognition (Varela 2001).
Proceeding from this non-representational, and thus non-textual, understanding of the enacted processes, the research incites a move away from the domiant representational ‘readings’ of media such as the Psychoanalytical and Sociological positioning of the spectator, Cognitivist readings of internal representations and ideological / Phenomenological introspections, toward an understanding of the enacted processes that may underpin their production and reception, supported by the body/world co-dependence.
In recognising the non-representational, non-textual enacted processes that underlie visual perception, the research aims to open up a rich well of insight below the layer of constructed textuality, that aims to reveal social, enacted processes that underpin the theories and practices of audio-visual media and technologies.
For a full list of Martyn’s papers and publications, please click here.
