Research Meeting Joost Schilperoord
In this talk I want to shed some light on the rhetorical uses of depictions of cast shadows. In advertising images and editorial cartoons, shadows are sometimes used to transmit special kinds of meaning. In a campaign for the children’s Toy blocks Lego we see very simple block structures casting shadows of T-rexes, planes, army tanks and other bog stars of the child’s imagination. These kinds of incongruent shadows – an object cannot cast the shadow of another object – visually inform viewers about what the depicted objects ‘truly’ are, at least in the fictive world of child-play. The same template, have object X cast object Y’s shadow, can be seen in editorial cartoons, where it is used for the same revelatory potential. In this talk I will give some historical ‘background’ for these kinds of shadows. In addition, some other types of incongruent shadows will be demonstrated. In the 2nd part of the talk I present data from a recent experiment in which we compared shadow-based combinations of two objects ( a set of Lego blocks and a T-rex, for example) with the well-known template of juxtaposing two objects, especially with regard to the meaning construal effects of these two templates. We hypothesized what while the juxtaposition-template evokes metaphorical meanings with regard to the depicted objects, the experienced relation between them in caster-shadow visualizations will be much stronger. Our data appear to confirm this hypothesis.
Location:
Potgieterszaal, University Library
Singel 421-427
1012 WP Amsterdam