CHAPTER 9 | Expression, form, content, and narrative

Digital modeling can be thought of as a visual language. In that capacity, it functions in the same manner as any traditional art form. As with other media, modeling can be used for narrative, expressive, or purely formal purposes. So we’re covering what appears to be an intimidating boatload of visual art theory in one title because it is important to demonstrate how the following topics interrelate and inform 3D modeling when employed as a visual language.

This text can thus be read in one sitting to get that general overview. However, it’s also organized to be read selectively and non-sequentially as a reference. Principle topics include:

• Expression: ways of seeing | Discovering how realism, abstraction, and non-objective artistic expressions relate to one another and the work of digital modeling. 12-minute read.
• Form: Gestalt 3D | Understanding how Gestalt principles and laws, familiar from their use in 2D expression, inform digital modeling. 4-minute read.
• Content: visual metaphor | Making meaning through a visual language: semiotics for visual artists. 12-minute read.
• Narrative: elements of storytelling | Applying elements of storytelling to a visual language. 12-minute read.

Expression: ways of seeing

Digital modeling has been characterized by a quest for competing expressions: representational realism on one hand, and on the other an exaggerated stylization known in the art world as abstraction.

The quest for realism is driven by a demand for visual fidelity with reality to illustrate the future presence of a design or by the need for an economical means to model alternate worlds in entertainment media. The quest for abstraction emerges from the needs of animation, stylized gaming modes, and toy design.

Meanwhile, a strain of modeling has emerged with the development of generative art, works that require the use of scripting to generate hermetic, self-contained form. This is a kind of expression some mislabel as a quest for abstraction; it instead relates to what artists call non-objective art.

Realist, abstract, non-objective — these are ways of seeing. Before we explore how modeling inhabits them, let’s create a matrix that helps us understand the relationships among them. For that, we need a little backstory…

A case study: Dada v. De Stijl

Much of 20th-century art can be seen as two sides of an artistic coin tossed at the kickoff of the Armistice that ended World War I. One side of this coin was the Dada movement. Because the utter destruction of the War was the fault of the establishment, Dadaists reasoned, the antidote was anti-art that stuck its thumb in the establishment’s eye. The other side was De Stijl, a Dutch group dedicated to building a utopian vision for a new society through art.

These artists loved to theorize and publish! In their journals, compare the typographic expression of Dada’s nihilism to De Stijl’s utopian sense of order. Both challenged the European establishment by any means, but they seem to reflect opposing points of aesthetic departure.

Irreconcilable differences?

Van Doesburg attempts the same thing visually in his De Stijl paintings. Here Abstraction, the unleashing of form from the grip of representation, is the game that reconciles the machine-like precision of De Stijl with the dirty tricks of Dada. He gives us a key to understanding this using, of all things, a cow:

Through the systematic process of simplification and the gradual introduction of geometric structure, van Doesburg manages to transform a drawing of a cow into a total abstraction. This process indicates how De Stijl artists felt that natural forms contain the essence of universal harmony… .

— Stephen Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History

Theo van Doesburg, Studies and final image, Composition (the Cow), c. 1917-8

But he goes beyond abstraction! De Stijl artists were among the first to distinguish between abstraction of recognizable form and a non-objective expression they called neoplasticism. Through a systematic process of distillation and a gradual but eventually relentless introduction of geometric structures, van Doesburg neatly encapsulates these three ways of seeing:

This seems like a simple polarity in which Non-Objectivity is nothing more than a reduction of Realism. But it is something much more…

The object-subject matrix

Think of the actual object “cow” as a thing that is not art, and we can add a fourth category: ~Art. Combine this with Van Doesburg’s evolution and the following matrix emerges:

These four states combine to reveal relationships between object and subject. It is important to understand this as a motivational, not grammatical, distinction. For a visual artist, the subject is why one makes art, while the object is a physical manifestation that provokes a why:

• ~Art | Simply, an object with no artistic intervention — therefore no “meaning” because a cow is not “about” anything: it’s just a cow. The object has no subject.
• Objective Art | Also known as Realism: recognizable objects, with the representation of an object becoming the subject of the work. Correct to ask “What is the work about?” with the answer being “The work is about a cow.” The object is the subject.
• Abstract Art | Also known as Abstraction: recognizable but highly distilled objects, emphasizing an artist’s perceived essence of them. Correct to ask “What is the work about?” with the answer being “The work is about a person’s expression of the essence of a cow.” The subject becomes an object.
• Non-Objective Art | Also known as Non-Figurative or Non-Representational art: a work based on a unique perception. The work is not “about” anything but simply “is” — just like a cow! So why is this Art and not ~Art? With ~Art, there is no subject, while with Non-Objective Art the artist’s subjective experience becomes a state of pure expression unpinned from any objective experience. The subject is the subject.

Let’s drill a bit deeper into Objective, Abstract, and Non-Objective expressions.

Objective Art

In a tradition dating back to Masaccio’s The Holy Trinity in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, the quest for trompe-l’œil — French for fool-the-eye — has long been a pursuit of artists in the West. But trompe-l’œil is not the only manifestation of Realism.

Types of realism

Renaissance perspective gave artists the ability to create convincing illusions of objects or spaces. Yet some artists, notably Surrealists like Rene Magritte, began to use realist techniques in decidedly non-traditional ways, exploring the eye of the subconscious. In The Explanation, Magritte gives us the key to Surrealism: take a thing, take another unrelated thing, and surprisingly combine them. Conceptually, this functions in the manner of a Boolean operation in modeling.

Photo-realists like Ralph Goings use the visual information of a photograph — not the objects in the photograph, but the light — as a subject. Note the lens refraction at the top of the salt shaker in his painting Quartet. That detail makes it clear this is an image of an image, not the trompe-l’œil illusion we see with Masaccio. When viewing a rendering of a 3D model, we often observe camera modeling techniques like lens flare, depth of field, and specular reflection that make the ambition of such an image photo-real.

Motives for realism

The digital artist’s relationship to realist, surrealist, or photo-realist traditions is largely based on motivation. In SOM’s architectural rendering of One World Trade Center, modeling and digital photomontage techniques generate a decidedly trompe-l’œil image to promote the virtues of the final design.

As for the motivations in CGI — well, it depends. The virtual set of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) impresses us with what we rationally know to be an elaborate 3D model, so we certainly aren’t sitting there thinking wow, they time-traveled and this is the real, actual Rome. Scott knowingly creates an illusion, and the audience knowingly suspends their disbelief. It’s realism, but not trompe-l’œil.

On the other hand, how many times has CGI slipped under your radar in a film depicting a more contemporary scene — at least one not involving superheroes? Martin Scorsese shot marina scenes in The Wolf of Wall Street on a sound stage, not on location, then composited scenes together for the illusion. If you didn’t notice it, your eye was successfully fooled! Conceptually, we often use the same strategy for realism in a 3D model rendering.

Abstract Art

When an artist abstracts a subject, they accentuate certain characteristics and de-emphasize or even eliminate others. The artistic expression is one of editorial selection.

These abstractions by Pablo Picasso engage in an ambiguous play of solid and void. Note how the guitar’s sound hole, ordinarily a receding element, projects outward. The subject is Picasso’s exploration of space and time, which only incidentally uses a recognizable thing. The object is not a guitar, but a physical expression of Picasso’s experience of the guitar as a spatial simultaneity: more than one point of view is seen at the same time.

Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings approach abstraction in their economical use of color, value, texture, and formal relationships. His works reconcile a traditional pictorial convention with the ambitions of Modernism, and his spare use of color and form has been hailed by some critics as a forerunner to Minimalism. As Morandi himself observed, “Nothing is more abstract than reality.”

George Segal, a sculptor whose work also toys with this edge between figurative and abstract visualization, recognized this in his sculptural tribute to Morandi. This is a peculiar example of an abstraction of an abstraction: Segal distills Morandi’s already-abstracted forms to his signature style — pure white plaster casts, emphasizing Morandi’s use of close-knit forms.

Characters and Caricaturas

We don’t often associate high-brow fine art with low-brow cartooning, but they share abstraction as a way of seeing. William Hogarth articulated a distinction between character (an archetype representing an emotion or quality) and caricature (exaggeration for comic or grotesque effect) in what was becoming an increasingly popular art form.

Hogarth’s agenda was to dissuade artists from indulging in caricature. But ironically, it inspired British artists to double down on satirical imagery. Here, James Gilray jabs British Prime Minister William Pitt and French Emperor Napoleon carving the Earth into spheres of influence — notice who is taking the larger slice!

At the dawn of the 21st century, Pixar’s 3D animated film The Incredibles (2004) delighted fans of animation with a caricature of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men. The models exaggerate features instantly recognizable to people who know “there’s no school like the old school.”

Animation and abstraction

No exploration of cartooning is complete without a nod to Disney, of course. Inspired by animation pioneer Windsor McCay, Walt and collaborator Ub Iwerks developed the first iteration of a trickster Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. This Mickey is now in the public domain, with later versions of a tamer Mickey still under copyright. It’s clear that any version of Mickey bears little actual resemblance to a mouse, but is rather highly abstracted and anthropomorphized as a figure.

Anthropomorphism as a means of abstraction assigns human attributes to non-human entities, creating a visual metaphor (a phenomenon we’ll explore in greater depth below). It has been an enduring staple of animation: six decades after Disney’s anthropomorphized mouse, John Lasseter employed it in the digitally modeled short Luxo Jr. In the film, the attributes of adult and child — right down to the proportionally larger head on Junior, echoing the same found in a human child — are masterfully abstracted and mapped onto a famous studio task lamp that ultimately became the logo for Pixar Animation Studios.

Non-Objective Art

Bauhaus master teacher Wassily Kandinsky, a contemporary of Van Doesburg and Mondrian, developed perhaps the most lucid theory describing the strategy of non-objective painting: to create “an exact replica of some inner emotion.” Though this expressionistic formulation strained his relationship with his more systematically oriented colleagues, his frenetically layered painting Composition VIII bears witness to the emotive power of Non-Objective artmaking.

Not long afterward, sculptor Alexander Calder began work on a kinetic Cirque Calder, a miniature laboratory for his mature, non-objective body of work: mobiles, motorized works, and percussive sound machines. This shot from the 2017 exhibition Calder: Hypermobility at the Whitney Museum percolates with Kandinsky’s formal energy, not in a 2D painting or a 3D sculpture, but in a 4D immersive experience.

Generative modeling

Though thought of now as strictly computational, generative design is any system of constrained formal variation. Thus defined, “generative” becomes a conceptual strategy to optimize form. Some posit that constraints described in Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius in the first century B.C.E. are among the first examples of generative design. In 1978, a floor-plan shape grammar for Palladian Villas was formulated by Stiny and Mitchell in a non-digital context.

In textiles, the Scottish tartan sett generating patterns in warp and weft is a device that gained popularity in the Victorian era. A century later, Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt declared the instructions for creating a wall drawing are the art, not the drawing itself.

Generative modeling has introduced a biomorphic visual language to non-objective art. It creates forms that take advantage of possibilities unique to digital fabrication. Bathsheba Grossman is a sculptor who blends mathematics with biomorphism for 3D printed objects; visit her on Shapeways. With the advent of artificial intelligence, artist Kevin Mack is now creating cyborgs that twist non-objectivity into something akin to an uncanny valley bending back to representation. Combine recent breakthroughs in bioprinting with Mack’s AI creature/machines, and what kind of dream — or nightmare — might result?

Form: Gestalt 3D

The concept of AI has been present in popular culture throughout my life. I began studying artificial and biological neural networks in the early 90s. As an artist, I’m interested in using AI for cultivating emergence in my creative process. Emergence refers to the appearance of new properties or behaviors that emerge from the interactions between the parts of a system in which the parts cannot account for the properties or behaviors that emerge. The whole is both greater than, and different from, the sum of its parts.

— Kevin Mack

Gestalt principles

Gestalt laws of grouping

Proximity

Similarity

Closure

Figure and ground | Mass and void

Content: visual metaphor

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery, and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

— Novalis

We’ve seen how Gestalt perception can transform a configuration of parts into a coherent form that can be understood as something other than the parts alone. Gestalt is a formal transformation.

There is another kind: visual metaphor, a way of transforming content in the manner described by the poet-philosopher Novalis. Like Gestalt, visual metaphor is a powerful tool. We can describe the goal of visual metaphor as the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky described the author Leo Tolstoy’s literary technique as one of defamiliarisation, or making the familiar seem strange:

Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects.

— Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique

This method of seeing things outside of their normal context extends to solving design problems. George M. Prince and William J. J. Gordon proposed a system of problem-solving Gordon dubbed Synectics. The Synectics theory is built on a strange premise: that success in problem-solving is increased by using non-rational thinking to lead to rational solutions.  This process famously involves making the strange familiar and the familiar strange and relies heavily on analogical and metaphorical thinking.

Digital modeling is deeply involved in both content generation and problem-solving activities informed by the use of visual metaphor as a tool. Let’s explore how this works.

Tenor, vehicle, ground

When we encounter a metaphor in written language, we understand it as a comparison of a kind, one in which a transference of meaning occurs. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, one of the most eloquent extended metaphors in literature is found in Romeo’s soliloquy outside of Juliet’s balcony, where he exclaims:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!

What is being compared, and how? When we dissect a metaphor, we find three essential organs: the tenor, the vehicle, and the ground. In Romeo’s declaration, Juliet is the tenor, the principal subject of the metaphor. The sun is the vehicle, a device that amplifies our understanding of the tenor. The ground is the basis for the tenor/vehicle equivalence:

• Like the sun, Juliet is the source of all light in Romeo’s life.
• Like the earth gravitationally locked in orbit around the sun, Romeo is bound to Juliet.
• Just as all life on earth depends on the energy of the sun for sustenance, so does Romeo depend on Juliet.

The ground is certainly NOT that Juliet is a massive thermonuclear ball of hot gas that would consume Romeo! Though to be fair (spoiler alert …!) they both die in the end.

Visual metaphor has the same dynamic. In the following, which can you identify as the tenor and vehicle, and what is the ground for comparison?

Visual metaphor can be used to develop the phenomenon of defamiliarization of which we spoke earlier.

Making the strange familiar…

The strange can be a puzzle unless we discover an overlap with something familiar. In the chaotic night sky, we find patterns we call constellations. We easily grasp the Big Dipper as a cup with a handle — though some constellations require clues, using a map for emphasis.

When the ground is no longer understood, the metaphor is lost. Many have no experience with, for example, a calculator. Thus, our apps have evolved toward flat design and eliminating visual metaphor: the design equivalent of non-objectivity.

Flat design comes at a price: pressing 3 is a less engaging user experience (UX). So some designers have introduced neumorphism, a hybrid strategy. Instead of “shiny plastic calculator button” as the visual metaphor, we invoke “button” as the condition of a raised surface for haptic feedback. In the neumorphic calculator, highlights and shadows invite us to “touch” the button. Neumophism is equivalent to abstraction in visual art.

…and the familiar strange

Another road to innovation leads in the opposite direction. Making the familiar strange was the strategy of Surrealists like Magritte, as we saw above. It allows us to see the world we know in an entirely new way, and it’s effective so long as manipulations of the familiar don’t stray beyond recognizability.

The cubic watermelons found in Japan are seemingly plucked straight out of a GMO nightmare, but they are simply grown inside a cube-shaped mold. Thus, they associate with traditions of training growth such as topiary or bonsai. We could imagine mapping a cube with a seamless texture to achieve the same effect in modeling.

Alexandre Duret-Lutz photographs wee planets like the Planet Paris seen here. If the familiar Eiffel Tower wasn’t evident, we might not recognize the environment. Duret-Lutz achieves this effect by taking equirectangular panoramas and remapping them into stereographic projections.

Digital modeling is a world where physics doesn’t exist. More precisely, we might say we must invent the laws of physics that exist in our models. There’s no denying M. C. Escher was a master at bending familiar physical properties. In Relativity, three gravitational directions correspond to X-Y-Z axes, mixed so that the denizens oriented to each axis use the environment according to their own laws, oblivious to the others. This Escher environment has been interpreted by many modelers, including Daniel Lara and Kike Oliva seen here, Troy Whitmer, and Gershon Elber, who created a physical model of Relativity.

Iconography

The strategies above depend on the recognition of objects referenced in an image or model. When working with this, artists often employ images that convey culturally particular meanings. The Eiffel Tower evokes Paris to anyone who knows the city. We can say the Eiffel Tower is an icon: a thing regarded as a representative symbol. If we include other well-known icons of Paris — the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre — we might regard such a group as an iconography.

An iconography is a specific range or system of images used by an artist or within a culture to transmit particular meanings. Iconography often embeds deeper, complex, or intangible conceptual meanings inside simple representations. It makes use of symbolism to generate narrative, which in turn develops a work’s meaning.

Because of their object-subject relationships, Objective Art and Abstract Art expressions easily employ iconographic systems as carriers of meaning. Non-Objective Art not so much — although it could be argued that the spare vocabulary of De Stijl had a meta-meaning, symbolizing a utopian vision of a new society rising from the rubble of WWI. After all, Van Doesburg and Mondrian had a falling out over the former’s use of diagonal versus orthogonal organization of geometry in composition! For Mondrian, the vertical and horizontal signified the “equivalence of opposites.” Thus can it truly be said that even Non-Objective Art is fully devoid of iconographic meaning?

Semiotics: sign, signifier, and signified

How do things like distorted skulls or even orthogonal lines come to have meaning? Semiotics is a study of how meaning is created through language. But language is not just words. Art is a visual language. According to semiotics, everything — words, images, sounds, and even their absence — is a sign: a meaning generator.

Humans are hard-wired to find order. Where order does not exist, we invent it. One way we do this is by assigning meaning to everything we see. Although we take the meaning of a thing for granted, meaning is not innate to a thing; instead, we assign meaning. Inside your brain is a sign-making machine that creates and/or processes the individual parts that make up a sign:

Sign-making is a human proclivity, so it is also culturally driven. All of the signs below are different because they are composed of different signifiers meaningful in different cultures, but they all mean the same signified thing: the action “stop” :

Iconic, symbolic, and indexical signs

The familiar “stop” is what most people think of when they think of a sign: a symbol, a representation of a concept. Symbols are, however, just one of three kinds of signs:

We know words are symbolic, so when processing them we intuitively understand the relationships sign, signifier, and signified.

But with art, semiotic relationships are harder to understand: everything appears as an iconic sign. An image of a tree seems to signify “tree.” Thus, we must overcome mimeticism. For the tree image to express something else — family relationships, a symbol for life, etc. — we need to employ increasingly abstract indexical and symbolic signification. Meaning cannot depend upon one kind of signification alone: an image can be a combination of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signification.

For example, when we print a computer file, we seek out a small image in a user interface. Is the image you are looking for iconic, indexical, symbolic, or some combination? It’s a tricky question because the image is not a photograph, but rather an abstracted icon of a printer. To further complicate matters, this signifies “Print” as an action, not “Printer” as an object.

So, how can an artist use various, possibly even overlapping kinds of signs in an artwork?

“Reading” visual signs

To answer this question, we should first understand how fast an audience can intuitively “read” something visual as being a sign. An audience can process a visual sign much faster than words. At the same time, we should also understand how much of that sign can be comprehended in its full richness. An audience processes this much more slowly than you think.

Thankfully, a sign does not have to be fully understandable right at first to introduce the next level of meaning, and the next. This gradual build-up of meaning, moving among iconic, symbolic, and indexical levels, is at the core of visual language, and is particularly acute with serial works like cinema or a graphic novel. The richer the sign, the more significant it becomes, and the deeper it gets into our brains.

Did you ever watch a film or see a painting more than once, and feel like you saw “something new” the second or third time? That phenomenon is a measure of the artist’s success in manipulating semiotic relationships. Like peeling an onion, semiotic richness is a layered experience that allows different audiences to approach the work to whatever level of depth they wish to peel it. The greatest works are the ones that can speak to many audiences at many levels of significance.

Motivated and constrained signs

How strong is the relationship between the signifier and the signified? Motivation and constraint are terms that describe the degree to which the signifier is demarcated by the signified. The more a signifier is constrained by the signified, the more motivated the sign.

Iconic signs are highly motivated, while symbolic signs are unmotivated. The less motivated the sign, the more learning of an agreed convention is required. The printer symbol communicates the signified action so long as you know what a printer is; this is not done to accommodate illiterate people, but rather because a visually iconic sign is more instantly recognizable than a word. One explanation for the popularity of representation in painting, photography, film, and graphic novels resides in the iconic nature of highly motivated signs. They are easy to read — even if the semiotic theory that explains them is not!

Paradigms and syntagms

Meaning is often amplified by creating relationships among signs. This act is itself a sign. In The Ambassadors above, we see measuring tools, a constellation globe, a lute, and an open book with formulae. Taken together, they signify the Quadrivium, the mathematical sciences defined by the new learning of the Renaissance: geometry, astronomy, music, and arithmetic. This act of signification through association functions as follows:

• A paradigm (pair-a-dime) is a classification: a group of signs which, while unique (dog, cat, hamster), are all members of some class (pet), and possibly even a larger class (mammal). Pet is a paradigm for dog. Pet could also be a paradigm for turtle, but mammal could not.
• A syntagm (sin-tam) is a chain of paradigms that are presented in a sequential relationship to one another.

Consider the following table and note that the paradigmatic (pair-a-dig-matic) axis is one of choice, while the syntagmatic (sin-tag-matic) axis is one of combination:

Some combinations are nonsense: “Every dog deleted nine Cyclops” might make an interesting line in a Surrealist poem, but other combinations are more meaningful. “No man hurts the Cyclops” is meaningful to readers of Homer’s Odyssey, while “This dog ate my homework” is a popular, if poor, excuse for turning in late work. This syntagmatic chain is a grammatical one: determiner-noun-verb-determiner-noun. Choosing paradigms that work within this syntagm is how meaning is achieved. In this example, you can create 5⁵ or 3,125 unique sentences, but only a handful of these generate meaning.

Classes and chains

Meaning can change in a chain through class choices, but even the smallest change in the chain itself can carry meaning. Consider the following:

OK, but why did this turn into an English class? Of what use is this to visual language? Well…

Visual elements are paradigmatic

In visual art, visual elements are paradigmatic. Visual elements are analogous to verbal classifications: things have a shape such as round (the sun, an orange, a wheel), or they carry properties such as a red color (an apple, a rose, a fire engine).

Visual principles are syntagmatic

While visual elements are paradigmatic, visual principles are syntagmatic, as are also Gestalt principles and laws. Principles are analogous to verbal grammar: planar shapes can share a 1:1 aspect ratio in proportion (a square, a circle, an octagon), or they can group through similarity (a bunch of grapes or rows of parked cars can each be seen as a whole, something other than a simple sum of their parts).

Shot design is syntagmatic

Sequential works (cinema, graphic novels, photo essays, etc.) add an element of time-ordering shots or frames. These are classified as long-shots (e.g., a panoramic vista), mid-shots (e.g., a figure from the waist up), and close-ups (e.g., focus on a face with no context in frame). These types of framing are choices, hence paradigmatic; how an artist sequences them is syntagmatic.

Apple’s popular iMovie software illustrates the syntagmatic use of these shot types in its Trailer user interface: Landscape is like a Panorama Shot, Wide is like a Long Shot, etc. Note how these are ordered and distributed through time (short or long duration). This is a syntagmatic blueprint for a movie trailer.

When watching TV, try a simple syntagmatic analysis of a segment of a show: count the number of Panoramas, Long Shots, Mid Shots, etc. What is the proportion between them? How are they distributed over time? Now, look for combinations or repeated patterns, and the director’s style can practically be charted. It is useful to analyze your own storyboard the same way because it gives you insight into your own style of storytelling.

Narrative: elements of storytelling

The cultural activity of storytelling communicates a narrative: any account of a series of related phenomena, experiences, events, or emotions. A story can be thought of as a syntagm of syntagms. Narrative is most often associated with the written or spoken word but can be conveyed equally well using still or moving visual images.

A consistent set of basic elements suffice to define a narrative as such, whether through verbal, performative, or visual means.

Themes and topics

Theme or topic? Many people mistake these two distinct terms as being identical or interchangeable. The quickest way to understand the difference is that the topic is usually more concrete and local to the story, whereas the theme reflects the salient, more abstract global idea the story explores. The topic of The Hunger Games, for example, is a girl’s coming of age in a dystopian world. The theme is liberty versus tyranny. That topic could have explored many different themes, and that theme could develop out of any number of different topics. In other words, a theme does not prescribe a topic, and vice versa.

Characters and motives

In a narrative, there is drama, and drama is borne of conflict and how it is resolved. We often think in terms of binaries — good and evil — when we think of this at all, but authors know there is much more going on than simple oppositions. For example, we know Loki from Norse mythology (and appropriated for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU) as a shape-shifting God of Mischief. Archetypeally, he’s a trickster: not exactly good, but not exactly evil either. The idea of the character as an archetype is related to the concept of tropes, which we’ll explore momentarily.

Character archetypes

Thus, it helps to understand that dualities are not binaries. We know night and day, but there are also the liminal states of dawn or dusk. Dualities come in nuanced flavors: contrary, complementary, and contradictory. Artists can create a web of these in a complex, nuanced story instead of a shallow white-hat-black-hat hero-villain affair.

We recognize the contrary state of a hero is a villain, but the contradictory state is a negation: the anti-hero, which is not the same thing as a villain. The complementary state to a hero is the negation of the villain: a not-villain, which is not the same thing as a hero.

But a good story has more than that. How do we get to more complex expansions from these duals in the diagram? The semiotic square is a field of relationships that we can expand to generate triads.

Places and props

You may have heard a film critic say something peculiar like, “The director treats the castle (or the sword, or whatever) like a character.”  This is because the same logic of archetypes can be assigned to things and places.

Other examples of place or prop treated as a character:

• From the world of fine art, Matthew Barney creates sculptural objects as an extension of the cinematic element of The Cremaster Cycle.
• The Infinity Stones from the MCU occupy an archetypal space much like the One Ring.
• The Death Star is an iconic “place” in the Star Wars canon.

Canons and plots

Canon comes from the Greek κανών (kanōn), a “measuring stick.” We say a work falls within a canon when it “measures up” to agreed-to criteria. Dutch scholar David Ruhnken defined an approved set of religious texts such as the Bible as canonical.

The term was first applied in a secular context to the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to distinguish them from pastiches by others. This usage of canon now generally applies to extended fictional universes, from Tolkien’s Middle Earth to Roddenberry’s Star Trek.

Tropes and genres

In Semiotics above, we placed the theory of signs into a visual art context, exploring the creation of meaning in its most metaphorical sense. But here we’ll discover there’s more to figurative meaning than metaphor. It is one among many kinds of trope.

A trope is a figure of speech. Figurative language is so second nature to us that we have a hard time spotting it through the mud (did you spot the trope?) of daily use. This is a fact that artists can exploit, knowing that a certain storytelling device already lives (was that a trope?) in spectators’ minds. The use of tropes carries with it the risk of falling into (trope alert) easy stereotype, as illustrated by the brilliant (did you catch [was that a trope?] the trope?) website Stereotropes. If an artist doesn’t use the tropes, the tropes will use the artist!

So an awareness of tropes and the means to deconstruct them can give the artist power, and lead to new and unconventional ways of looking at elements of a narrative. How does semiotic theory allow us to understand and use figurative meanings?

Making a metaphor: denotation and connotation

Different levels of meaning exist within signs. In semiotics, this is known as orders of signification. Semioticians make a distinction between denotation — what a signifier signifies — and connotation — a cultural, contextual shift in signification. A denotation of a signifier–signified pair is a first order of signification and leads to a “literal” sign. A cultural association through connotation can change the signifier–signified relationship, creating a second order of signification and generating a “figurative” sign. How so? Connotation uses the denotation pair as its signifier, and attaches a new signified to it. Hmm, confusing. This needs a diagram:

We do this by decoupling the new signified from its original signifier:

Let’s see this in action, using the figure of speech “lip of a cup“:

This leads to the most commonly understood form of trope: a metaphor. But there are others…

The master tropes

These tropes have a fourfold oppositional character that can be revealed using a semiotic square. Their relationships are shown to be not purely oppositional: just as a time that is not day is not also necessarily night, a trope that is not a metaphor is not necessarily a synecdoche, its presumed contrary partner.

A good way to avoid the stereotype or cliché trap we warned of earlier is to understand trope as an extension of archetype. The wiki TVTropes can help you understand how to do this, breaking down tropes by category including media, narrative, topic, and genre.

Genres

At a conceptual level, it can be said that all fiction, whether genre or general, is a presentation of alternative realities (as distinct, it should be made crystal clear, from alternative facts!), or virtual realities. In other words, all fiction relies on our suspension of disbelief to be effective. The artist is asking us to believe, if just for a moment, a lie. But art, as Pablo Picasso observed, is a lie that reveals the truth. 

But particular kinds of fiction, which we call genres, tend to bend the truth a bit more than others, and these genres in turn tend to be more attractive as narratives supported by digital media and modeling. We’ll place these genres under the general rubric of speculative fiction, which as a broad category or meta-genre contains many genres: science fiction (and its sub-genres such as steampunk or cyberpunk), fantasy fiction, historical fiction, and relative newcomers like hypertext fiction, which tends to be more formal. Critics have often regarded genre fiction as being shallow or having less artistic merit than conventional literary fiction. We will challenge this assumption, given the many authors who have successfully erased the boundary between literary and genre fiction in the last half-century.

We only have space to barely scratch the surface of this broad topic, but we do so to inspire your deeper research. Our goal will be to identify how we might use a genre or blend of genres to guide a story canonically. 

Genres of Speculative Fiction

Science Fiction

Masters of the genre historically include Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke as the so-called “Big Three,” but we see a lot of crossover with other genres with authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin. Being so incredibly broad, let’s simply cite two early practitioners who defined the genre.

• Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. A crossover with Gothic Horror genre-wise, this work recently celebrated its bicentennial and is considered by some to be the first science fiction novel and the first expression of the trope of the mad scientist. It was written when she was eighteen years old.
• H. G. Wells, author of War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and many other seminal works of the genre. He is credited with many tropes of the genre, including time travel, post-apocalyptic society, and alien invasion.

Sub-Genre: Steampunk

Steampunk exploits the narrative possibilities of technology by placing it in anachronistic contexts. The best steampunk doesn’t wear that on its sleeve, however. Some examples:

• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly deserves another mention for a precursor to steampunk in the little-known Last Man, a post-apocalyptic frame story about a 21st-century world devastated by a pandemic. Sound familiar? That should resonate in our COVID-laced present!
• Doctor Who’s TARDIS has received several steampunk-laced renovations since about Season 14.
• Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon contains an absurd robot duck and a Benjamin Franklin who invents sunglasses.

Sub-Genre: Cyberpunk

Often characterized as a realm of low-life denizens living with high-tech, cyberpunk relishes dystopia:

• A precursor to the cyberpunk ethos is the still-amazing silent film: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
• The novel that gave the genre its name: Neuromancer by William Gibson.
• The novel that satirized its excesses: Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson.
• Visually sumptuous movies like Blade Runner by Ridley Scott and The Matrix by the Wachowskis.
• Cyberpunk even leaked into music: Year Zero by NIN, and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation.

Fantasy Fiction

One can argue that stories in mythology are the precursors of this genre, and it can therefore historically be argued to be as old as storytelling itself, so its history is too long to negotiate, but here goes:

• The Epic of Gilgamesh is among the earliest surviving literary artifacts and informs subsequent literature from the Bible to Philip Roth.
• Plato used fantastical elements such as the Allegory of the Cave to illustrate his philosophical insights.
• One Thousand and One Nights is a frame story that uses fantasy devices in many of the folk tales compiled under the title.
• Arthurian legend is expressed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Once and Future King by T. H. White.
• Mythical whimsy and complex interconnecting sub-plots in William Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
• Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. On deeper reflection, these are not stories for children.
• Obvious modern high fantasy works include The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, and the Earthsea cycle by Ursula K. LeGuin.
• Scottish connections to the genre include Rudyard Kipling (the rector of the Unversity of Saint Andrews) and his Aerial Board of Control universe; Peter Pan by Scottish playwright J. M. Barrie; and the Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling.

Historical Fiction

Where science fiction mines the future, historical fiction mines the past. 

• William Shakespeare’s history plays are a staple of the genre, with one of the best known, Macbeth, having a strong Scottish connection — though history and the play are vastly different.
• Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities exploits the time of the French Revolution.
• Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon again, busting genre boundaries in a thoroughly post-modern treatment of the surveyors who drew the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland in pre-Revolutionary America. 
• Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a murder mystery disguised as a novel written by Dan Brown in a fictional universe where Dan Brown could write a literate, interesting, non-pandering novel.
• Many other Scottish connections to the form, including one of its pioneers in Sir Walter Scott, whose Waverley gave the Edinburgh train station its name; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a pirate-tinged history adventure; and of course that cinematic twist on William Wallace: Braveheart by Mel Gibson. But just ask any Scot what they think of that movie and they will tell you in no uncertain terms!

Sub-Genre: Alternate History

The ultimate “what-if” game is played out in these examples:

• P.’s Correspondence by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which the protagonist is considered mad because, in his alternate reality, long-dead persons are still alive.
• Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court mashes up an alternate history ethos with time travel and myth in a cautionary tale about so-called “progress.”
• Winston Churchill’s If Lee Had NOT Won the Battle of Gettysburg, an ironically alternate-alternate history written by a historian who lives in an alternate history wherein the Confederacy had won the Civil War …
• … possibly inspiring the many works that explore the topic of the Axis Powers winning World War II, with Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle being the best of the lot. The twist in Dick’s tale: a novel in that alternate world is written that speculates on what would have happened if the Allies had won, an alternate-alternate analog to Churchill’s scheme.
• Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America explores the rise of an American autocrat, with frighteningly prescient Trumpian overtones.
• Scottish connections to alternate history include If: A Jacobite Fantasy by Charles Petrie; and we shouldn’t forget Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, though we should note that the presence of her protagonist Claire fails to bring about the alternate result Petrie explores.

Hypertext fiction

OK: strictly speaking, this is not a genre so much as it is a format, but a hypertext narrative exploits the ability of the audience to interact with multiple optional narratives and affect the outcome, as choreographed by the author. Most gameplay functions like a hypertext narrative.

• The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges is a mind-bending exploration of “infinite” texts.
• The Future of the Novel by Beat author William Burroughs is not strictly speaking a story, but it is a seminal discussion about a process that has been credited as the first description of the phenomenon of the hyperlink.
• Net artist Mark Amerika created GRAMMATRON, a multi-media interactive.
• The Electronic Literature Organization has been publishing hypertext fiction since the mid-1990s.
• newMedia students in williamCromar’s studios have been creating interactive works for years in the Concrete Poetry Project. He has also personally created several multi-media “poems” in this vein, including d1ASp0RA and Weight of Water with TangenT ArT CollaboraTive, as well as the solo project memerememberme.