Something I’ve been interested in for a while is the ways that we interpret our inputs; the way we make sense of what we’re observing and experiencing. This is very connected to semiotics and representation. Perhaps my interest in it is a result of being educated in a creative arts institution like the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and tending to have a fairly ‘artistic’ lens. I don’t mean that as a brag — I’m merely pointing out that I have tended to see the world as, or in terms of, art and representation.

Representation to me is the core of the arts. It’s the way that certain pieces of art and creative media represent certain meanings that we apply to our own lives and experiences. Certain characters within texts resonate with us differently than the next audience member, because we relate to them differently; we might have gone through similar experiences to what they’re going through, and we’re intuitively comparing what they’re doing to what we did or would do. For another audience member, that character’s experience might be completely foreign, and there’s far less of a way to relate to them. We see a tree in the world, but to some, a tree represents concepts like growth, branching, and lineage. A tree is really just a tree, but to the beholder, it can mean more. A painting of a tree is just a series of lines, shapes, textures and colours. But that painting represents a real-world tree, which in turn represents growth, branching, and lineage. This is the fundamental experience of experiencing art.

The world and everything around it can similarly be read like a text. So-called ordinary things come to represent something for us. This is the domain of semiotics, where images, sounds, words, stand in for and link to other things, either real-world objects, or abstract concepts. For example, the word ‘dog’, consisting of the squiggles ‘d’, ‘o’, and ‘g’, represents to English-speaking people our furry little animal friends. But simultaneously, that furry friend can represent play, joy, vitality, curiosity, or companionship, depending on its behaviours. This is the same experience as above, of observing a piece of art. But the same processes exist outside of the world of art — we do them all day long, and it’s at the core of human creativity.

We can apply this to broader phenomena. What does the gradual move towards isolating technologies such as noise-cancelling headphones say about us? That we don’t enjoy the company of strangers? What about the efforts of tech giants to build social media platforms that pit us against each other, causing massive engagement, increasing revenue from advertisements? That the powerful in our culture prioritise revenue over the wellbeing and cohesion of the social fabric?

The same applies for reading historical artistic movements. In the late 40s, composer-engineer, Pierre Schaeffer pioneered Musique Concrète, a new compositional method based entirely on recorded sounds — fragments of everyday life, musical instruments — manipulated through tape editing and playback. Around the same period, in Cologne, German composers such as Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen developed Elektronische Musik, built exclusively from electronically generated tones. What do these approaches mean? The two schools represent contrasting philosophies of sound: the empirical and phenomenological (building from the concrete) versus the rational and synthetic (building from the abstract). In 1956, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge united the two approaches, combining a boy’s recorded voice with electronic tones in a single composition. What does this mean? The fusion can be read as a collapse of mid-century dogmatism — an early sign of the move toward pluralism and post-modern openness in the arts, where boundaries between methods and materials were no longer seen as absolute.

This process of drawing conclusions about events — of ‘reading’ history in particular ways, and using history as evidence for certain conclusions — is a difficult skill to develop. However, I believe it’s fundamentally creative work. Perhaps more precisely, it’s a combination of creativity and critical thinking. It entails making connections between disparate phenomena and justifying the conclusions critically. Reading historical events like a text and drawing creative conclusions, is a very similar — if not the same — process as drawing interpretations of pieces of art. It all involves considering what things mean; what can be made of them; what they represent.

It’s the process for any interpretation of data. Researchers go through it when analysing interview responses or quantitative statistical data. It’s all ‘read’; it’s the researcher’s role to make meaning of these forms of data, in the same way that it’s the audience member’s task to make meaning of the art they observe. (Of course, I’m referring here to the more active approach to cultural consumption, rather than the passive ‘lean back’ consumption that is encouraged by streaming platforms.)

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This process is one I teach my students. Consider these two images that represent disabled people in our society. These are universal symbols these days, and you find them in most public settings. In my Cultural Studies class, I get the students to compare the two images, looking at what they mean.

Figure 1 – the passive disability icon

Figure 2 – the active disability icon

In my Cultural Studies class, I get the students to compare the two images, looking at what they mean. Compared to the first image, the second is far more active; it pairs disabled people with a representation of agency. Once the meanings of the images have been established, I ask what it means that people in our society designed this second image. Perhaps it means that parts of our society value the wellbeing of disabled people, and would like to recognise their agency. Perhaps it means that parts of our society want to break the stigma of disabled people as entirely incapable. What does this mean? Perhaps it highlights that our society values inclusion and the wellbeing of members of society, representing a streak of altruism.

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Getting students to really see the world around them and think about what it all means, in my opinion, is a crucial part of their education. While the above example relates to social justice, these sorts of exercises develop the students’ capacity more broadly for creative and critical thinking. It really brings them to the question, ‘What does it all mean?’ I think the more we can strive to answer that question, the less confusion will be in society, and the more connection we will have with the world around us, and the people living within it.