Flags happen A critical discussion on flags and design Laura Scofield Research Paper SVA MA Design Research, Writing, and Criticism Spring 2019
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Table of Contents
Groundless flag Perceptions in exile and creativity, or Foreword
03
From a breeze to a gale The weather conditions to fly a flag, or Introduction
04
Flag stories The visual lexicon of squares, circles and triangles
11
Flags happen How to negotiate squares, circles and triangles with the body
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From forms to rhythms Or how do flags relates to our bodies
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The infinite monad A flag is a soul folded in many ways
32
Restitutions How to render and return flags, or Conclusion
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Bibliography
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3 Groundless flag Perceptions in exile and creativity, or Foreword
The expelled has been torn out of his customary surroundings (or else he has done it himself). Habit is a blanket that covers up the facts of the case. In familiar surroundings, change is recognized, but not permanence. Whoever lives in a home finds change informative but considers permanence redundant. In exile, everything is unusual. Exile is an ocean of chaotic information. In it, the lack of redundancy does not allow the flood of information to be received as meaningful messages. Because it is unusual, exile is unlivable. One must transform the information whizzing around into meaningful messages, to make it livable. 1 Vilém Flusser in Exile and Creativity
I wish to convey to the reader—whether the reader is a designer or not—of the richness of design in the world that surrounds us. I will focus specifically on flags to show the relevance of graphic design in our society and our culture as a whole. I approached the writing of this thesis from three different angles: as a researcher, as a graphic designer, and as a foreign student experiencing a foreign culture in a foreign land. I have exiled myself (by choice) and inevitably, my exile provided me with the ideal scenario and circumstances with which to confront the topic of this research: the relationship between flags, design, and culture. What can we learn about ourselves by studying the design of flags? First, the city of exile: New York. Around every corner it lavishes flags, exciting my curiosity with their continual appearance in my daily life. If, as pointed out by Flusser, exile is an ocean of chaotic information that challenges creativity, New York seems the perfect sea to dive into. Second: the language. For the last few months, my mind has been bridging Portuguese with English, and vice versa. My profound hope is that the reader will not be tripped up by any pitfalls in my writing and get lost along the way. Nonetheless, this exercise has taught me that language helps us to think and to reinvent our own minds. Third: critical thinking in a foreign language. I would like to emphasize that design writing and criticism is a field still under development. This allows us, as design writers, to experiment with possibilities, techniques, and new formats of writing about our discipline. In discussing such a basic artifact as a flag, I invite the reader to explore a text replete with metaphors, aphorisms, philosophy, poetry, and design. By doing so, I hope to affect the way we 1
Vilém Flusser, Andreas Ströhl, Writings, trans. Erik Eisel, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 104.
4 all use, understand, design, study and live with flags. Hence I question: can we frame graphic design as an epistemological branch? This research paper is my promise for future studies and, like a seed, it is now planted. It is a promise to unfold the seed and future studies on design.
From a breeze to a gale The weather conditions to fly a flag, or Introduction Flags are so pervasive in our daily life that they have become trivial to human experience. They traverse time by existing and existing and existing, persisting as a mode by which to identify and communicate the human condition. Whitney Smith, the leading scholar of flag studies and widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on the history, design, use, and significance of flags wrote in his seminal book Flags Through the Ages and Across the World (1975), that flags play a pivotal role in political events—on streets, in sports, at sea, and even in outer space. Setting up social, political, and cultural relations, flags are actives “basic component in innumerable social settings.”2 Hence, they affect the world directly as they manipulate and are manipulated by certain agents. As they flutter, their shapes, design, and colors are meant to communicate messages and bring about reactions. Flags have certain inherent qualities that have made them among the oldest human symbols and, at the same time, the most modern. The design characteristics of flags—such as their conciseness, simple color schemes, forms, and arresting mobility—have made it possible for them to be of significance in ancient times, maritime exploration, battlefields, religious cults, and revolutionary democratic and egalitarian causes, such as gay pride and, most recently, the plight of refugees. Flags can mask the body, painted on the faces of sports fans or worn as garments. For Smith, flags can give us remarkable insights into wider aspects of human endeavor.3 The author claims that it is almost an impulse of any social group to adopt symbols to represent the group itself, to use symbols as artifacts that “condense” the elements of group identification. Smith also notes that, curiously, almost every culture in the world has adopted some sort of flag as its representation.4
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Whitney Smith, Flags Through the Ages and Across the World, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 8. Ibid. 4 Ibid, 32. 3
5 Whitney Smith was also responsible for coining vexillology, the term used to describe the study of the symbolism of flags. The word is a synthesis of the latin word vexillum (“flag”) and the Greek suffix –logia (“study”). It was formalized in 1961 in the U.S with the publication The Flag Bulletin written by the same author. For Smith vexillology is “the scientific study of the history, symbolism, and usage of flags, or by extension, any interest in flags in general.” 5 It is frequently involved with other traditional fields of study, such as history, sociology, political science, anthropology, and semiotics. Applying these distinctive lenses to analyze flags helps us understand our society more accurately. And, through a design criticism perspective, I investigate one of the basic principles of the sociocultural relevance of design: the representation of ourselves. Even nowadays—in an age of globalism, fluidity, and multilayered identities—people continue to identify with flags. Why are these artifacts able to traverse the changing times and circumstances of the human condition? My study is an exercise in observing flags by exploring the interrelation of design techniques and the mediality of flags in the sociocultural realm. How do flags communicate with the individual through their uses and design? By asking this question, I seek a broader comprehension of graphic design language and its central role in the culture as a whole. A flag gives a visible and tactile dimension to diverse symbolic concepts by recreating them with color schemes, symbols, and forms. However, every design project, when part of the sociocultural milieu, is put to the test of interpretation. These distinct ways of perceiving/using these designed artifacts influences how design creates them. Considering that, I believe a flag can also “speak” of the most diverse forms of knowledge and culture. To investigate these inquiries, this research paper is divided in four sections. In the first part flags are analyzed from the perspective of their graphic design construction and a historical overview supported by classical vexillology. In the second part I argument in favor of a new way to study flags. I invite the reader to observe flags through the lenses of an anthropology of images. By doing so, my narrative transcends the conventional semiotics approach and stablishes a new parameter to reveal how flags are related to image making and therefore our bodies. The strength of such an approach is to offer a refreshing notion of what flags are, how and why we design them. They are powerful mediums in which embodies images of culture which we experience through design. In the third part, I expand these mediality notions by combining them to the ways flags relates to our gaze and bodies. Lastly, I follow Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold and Didi5
Željko Heimer, Vexillology as Social Science, (Boston, National Flag Institute, 2017), 6.
6 Huberman’s notion of rendre to offer a speculation on how flag design process affects and entail our culture. Illustrated examples, pictures and diagrams are provided throughout this paper to help the reader understand the analysis of the object of this study and the theories I related to it. Can this new inquiry foster a new critical tool to analyze flags design? Currently, the sciences, such as anthropology, and art history have been reinventing their ways of questioning the world. I seek to promote a similar discourse within design criticism by discussing contemporary theories shaped by anthropology, art history, and media theories formulated in and through the important contributions of contemporary scholars such as Hans Belting, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Vilém Flusser. The works of these authors explore the multidimensional meanings of images and visual knowledge, and how they interrelate to question our culture. I follow their ideas to ground my critical argument that flags cannot only be assumed as symbols and interpreted with the tools of traditional semiotics. I claim that the way we design, interpret and use flags overleap the controlled field of signs and communication. However, even if flags deals with explicit communicational aspects, the ultimate reading of them cannot be considered stable and one directional. Conversely, I support that the flags always leave room for interpretation while dealing directly with cultural imaginaries. Following this argument, I seek to understand how the form in which design manipulates the symbolic of a flag is simultaneously conveying “images” to our imaginaries as well. Images both affect and reflect the course of human history. They leave, for example, no doubt about how changeable human nature is. Society discard images that they have invented themselves as soon as they no longer do their intended service. Instead of reinventing themselves, people reinvent the images they live with. Uncertain about themselves creates the desire to change the images of their self-representation. The alleged permanence of human nature is in fact soundly contradicted by the history of images.6
With this objective, I offer my design criticism exploring the notions of a new iconology proposed by German philosopher and art historian Hans Belting in his book An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. According to the author, iconology is the branch which studies picture theory and visual imagery. First published in Germany in 2001 with the title BildAnthropologie, the book promotes an anthropological perspective on “image,” a term used in the broadest definition across languages, for Bild means both “image” and “picture”7 in German. 6
Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap, (Princeton University Press, 2011), 10. 7 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 1.
7 Proposing an anthropological theory for the interpretation of picture making, Belting argues that images are linked to humans’ mental images and, therefore, their bodies. My proposition is deeply grounded in the first chapter of his book on the interrelation of image, medium, and body. This chapter was used by Belting and his research group at the School for News Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, where people from different disciplines—such as psychology, art history, and philosophy—met to study images in distinctive contexts. Belting states that images are not only a mediated product, such as a photograph, painting or video, but also a product of our bodies, like our dreams, imagination, and personal views of the world. “Images are neither on the wall (or on the screen) nor in the head alone. They do not exist by themselves, but they happen; they take place; they happen via transmission and perception.”8 For the image to acquire visibility, it needs an embodiment, a medium. The medium is responsible for giving images a place, a proper visibility, and the body is responsible for seeing them. In Belting’s view, images and their symbolical value are only accessible when read with “non-iconic determinants” — medium and body. In this paper, I claim that flags should be understood as mediums, as hosts in which images can take place. I offer Belting’s example to distinguish a medium from an image: A work of art—be it a picture, a sculpture, or a print—is a tangible object with a history, an object that can be classified, dated and exhibited. An image, on the other hand, defies such attempts of reification, even to the extent that it often straddles the boundary between physical and mental existence. It may live in a work of art, but the image does not necessarily coincide with the work of art. The English language distinction between “image” and “picture” is pertinent, but only in the sense that it clarifies the distinction between the “image” that is the subject of our quest and the “picture” in which the image may reside. 9
My investigative strategy is based on exploring a concept I coined, stemming from Belting’s notion of image: “Flags happen,” a symbolic procedure ruled by the animation of flags. Designed with the simplest, most basic forms of a universal design lexicon, flags trigger our memory while transmitting images through their infinite usages. Images do not speak by themselves—we need to put them in relation. This has been noted repeatedly by the French philosopher and historian of art, Georges Didi-Huberman, who has been, for more than 40 years, in a phenomenological search for images. For Didi-Huberman, images are fluid like the flight of a butterfly. I borrow his narrative technique to provide a similar exercise in design criticism.
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Hans Belting, Image, Medium and Body: a new approach to Iconology, (São Paulo: Revista de Comunicação, Cultura e Teoria da Mídia, 2006, n.8), 33. 9 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 2.
8 To note, there are three characters in this investigation: the flag (material, the object), the images (immaterial), and the individual. The notion that flags happen relies on the reflexivity of our engagement with flags: in the way they dominate space and memory to merge with our identity, but also vice versa, in the way we project and impose our own texts and subtexts upon them, affecting our ultimate reading of them. In methodological terms, this study utilizes and analyzes research provided by Flag Stories10, an ongoing infographic website about world flags. The site was created by Ferdio, an infographic studio based in Denmark that is focused on “transforming data and information into captivating visuals.”11 Faced with the infinite possibilities of flag analysis, I chose this website because it promotes a technical design discussion. Flag Stories is a data-driven, visual exploration into the details that create national flags. It is a simple, customized Tumblr website that presents infographics and is easily shared on various online platforms. It uses Wikipedia as the primary source for information and data collection, and includes only the flags of the UN member states.12 Ferdio’s designers acknowledge that dozens of publications, books, papers, and websites cover the many different aspects of vexillology, such as flag history, demography, geography, and culture, but only through textual discussions. On the contrary, Ferdio’s purpose was to explore and analyze only the graphic design of flags and compile their discoveries into visuals. Flag Stories went viral, reaching the front page of Reddit and all kinds of media. The site continually receives hundreds of emails and feedback from users, a testament to the public’s interest and strong feelings about flags.13 Flag Stories provides a fruitful case study that focuses on the symbolical construction and technical aspects of a flag design. As a researcher and design practitioner, I am pleased to give design criticism relevance by dialoguing with an ongoing design project accessible that is to the public. By observing this project, I maintain that design is not only a tool of communication and aesthetics, but a means of eliciting questions about the most diverse fields of knowledge and the nature of being. I seek to show the relevancy of the discipline by placing it in the middle of our sociocultural dimension—especially for those who cannot “see” the richness of design in their daily lives. Like flags, graphic design projects move so trivially throughout our day-to-day lives as to go unnoticed, being that we pay such superficial attention to the world.
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“Flag Stories”, accessed April 12, 2019, http://flagstories.co/?og=1. Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Sergiu Naslau, “Flag Stories, Exploring the Details of Our National Flags.”, Wabbaly, accessed April 10, 2019, http://www.wabbaly.com/flag-stories-exploring-the-details-of-our-national-flags. 11
9 Design is a field of vast possibilities in this complex world in which we live. It is a discipline that has its essence in projecting and constructing our interfaces—books, cars, clothes, brands. We design with the aim to create, shape, and reshape our environment, which consequently transforms the way we perceive the world. We live in an ontological design perspective: the way we use and perceive our projects triggers a reaction within us, which changes and “designs” both the object and ourselves. This perspective attempts to frame graphic design as a subject of knowledge production. It mediates our lives by creating artifacts and symbols that help overcome the daily obstacles we face. For Vilém Flusser, designers are deceivers and cunning plotters, responsible for crafting things we grasp to give meaning to our existence in this world. Flusser devoted much of his work to images and artifacts, and created a legitimate and contemporary philosophy of design and visual communication. Based on his assumption that our human condition is to be deceived by design, technique, and machination as a way of surviving in a meaningless world, the concept of the flag, used as one of the first graphic artifacts to represent groups and ideas, makes for a rich and exquisite empirical investigation. I observe the flag as a phenomenon, a designed entity that engages the forms we use to represent ourselves, and affects us through the use of those forms. To elucidate my understanding of flags as part of the human condition (by nature of their omnipresence) and as a part of our own self-representations (by nature of our reflexive engagement with them), I consider Flusser’s concept that humans need agents of mediation to craft their own identity; it is with the support of symbols and images that people give their world meaning. We are surrounded by such agents—we wear clothes, drive cars, get tattoos, buy brands, and consume art. Human communication is an artistic technique whose intention it is to make us forget the brutal meaninglessness of a life condemned to death. By “nature,” man is a solitary animal, because he knows that he will die and that his community will not matter in the hour of his death: everyone must die alone. Moreover, every hour is potentially the hour of death. Certainly, no one can live with the knowledge of this fundamental solitude and meaninglessness. Human communication spins a veil around us in the form of the codified world. This veil is made from science and art, philosophy and religion, and it is spun increasingly denser, so that we forget our solitude and death, including the deaths of others whom we love. In short, man communicates with others. He is a “political animal,” not because he is a social animal, but because he is a solitary animal who cannot live in solitude.14
Does this mean that a flag can metaphorically be understood (as Flusser allows us to render it) as a veil that shelters us from dealing with the irrepresentable, inexplicable, or
14
Vilém Flusser, Andreas Ströhl, Writings, 104.
10 unimaginable essence of life? Or do they isolate us by controlling our imaginaries by forcing us what to see? Exploring the concept of human communication exposed by Flusser, I note the connection between human communication and graphic design, as the discipline engaged in crafting codes with the support of symbols, technique, and design. It is worth noting that graphic design, from Flusser’s perspective, does not seek to explain communication between individuals. However, graphic design (in this study analyzed through the lens of flags), can be understood as a phenomenon that translates the human condition by creating visible experiences for what we cannot catch, embrace, or reach. I associate Flusser’s statements with Smith’s assumptions that flags were vastly used as tactile unifiers, to bond humans so they could belong to a group, express their cultural singularities and history. Flags can be seen as a way of asserting the bonds that link people despite differences in their wealth, social standing, age. Just as important is the function of the flag and its symbolism in interpreting the unknown forces of the universe, assuring people that their frailty is somehow compensated for by an eternal invisible realm from which they might draw strength. The flag is then an externalization of the fears and hopes, the myths, and the magic of those who carry it.15
Instead of becoming disillusioned with Flusser’s tragedy, let us then think of the indispensable presence of design as a discipline capable of creating all these mediums in which significant images of our culture can circulate in our society with responsibility. For this reason, if we are fully aware, why don’t we exploit our capability to the fullest? We can actually transform our surroundings, develop and stimulate our culture in positive way by means of design. Even a design as simple as that of a flag might has the power to inflict these changes. I am hopeful that my work will encourage further analysis into how graphic design operates and transforms our cultural environment and, at the same time, stimulates new areas of interest in design practice. To paraphrase Didi-Huberman, this research is an exercise in looking at flags and interrogating our present in the pursuit of both understanding the human condition and continually questioning it through the medium of graphic design. I cherish this opportunity to propose that the more we understand about design, its function, and its essence, the more we can enjoy its power to overcome the obstacles of our journey through an unfolding world.
15
Smith, Flags Through the Ages and Across the World, 37.
11 Flag stories The visual lexicon of squares, circles and triangles A flag is a matter of design. It is through a combination of shapes and colors—design’s most basic elements—that the most varied ideas can be represented. The purpose of a flag is to represent a person, place, or idea, generally on a rectangular piece of cloth that needs to be seen and recognized from a distance, flutter freely, and be easily reproduced. 16 The elements of a flag are widely used to express complex ideas in an extremely concise format. Whitney Smith defined flags in 1975 as a “graphic and plastic medium of social communication, usually but not necessarily political in nature. Although a generic term, a “flag” frequently refers specifically to the typical rectangular flag hoisted on buildings and ships as a symbol of national identification.”17 As a graphic designer myself, I agree with the assumption that geometric shapes are easy to understand, draw, design, reproduce, and manufacture. I follow Smith stating that “unlike more complicated symbols, stripes and bars and circles and similar designs have few stereotyped meanings. Limited only by imagination, people constantly develop new meanings and patterns for the symbols depicted on the arms and flags.”18 May I ask the reader to grab a pen and paper and draw your country’s flag. I estimate it will take less than one minute. The most commonly used flag colors are red, blue, green, black, yellow, and white.19 They can range from dark to light. Occasionally other colors are also used, such as purple, gray, and orange. Ted Kaye, the author of Good Flag, Bad Flag, a mass market guidebook to flag design, published in the U.S in 2013, suggests separating dark colors from light and vice versa to create a high color contrast, for example. Kaye has been involved in surveys of city and state flags, and has helped promote an awareness of flag design in the United States and beyond. For Kaye, a good flag design should also be reproducible in grayscale—that is, in shades of black and white. He also recommends not using more than four colors, for discernibility. Using more than four makes a flag unnecessarily complicated and more expensive to reproduce.
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Smith, Flags Through the Ages and Across the World, 15. Ibid. 18 Ibid, 144. 17
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12 Flags flap. Flags drape. Flags must be seen from a distance and from their opposite side. Under these circumstances, only simple designs make effective flags. Furthermore, complicated flags cost more to make, which often can limit how widely they are used.20
Almost all flags designed in the last 200 years are based on this simple design formula: a layout composed of colors and geometric shapes. I support that this simple recipe results in design similarities, such as the three horizontal bars and the same colors, as in the German and Belgian flags, or the vertical bars of the French and Dutch flags. Nonetheless, sometimes a flag’s symbols, colors, and shapes are intentionally designed to recall other flags, as a way to show heritage, connections, and solidarity.
“How old are national flags” by Flags Stories.21
20 21
Ted Kaye, Good Flag, Bad Flag, (Boston: North American Vexillological Association, 2013), 4. “Flag Stories”, accessed April 12, 2019, http://flagstories.co/?og=1.
13
“Similar Flags” by Flags Stories.22
However, the simplicity of a flag’s design needs to be tied to and constructed with symbolism. Stripes, bars, and circles do not represent anything on their own, as they are universal shapes in a common and accessible graphic design lexicon. The magic of a flag’s uniqueness is in the eye of the beholder: his own cultural perspective is what actually gives these shapes meaning. Such forms of representation are limited only by the limits of our imagination. 22
“Flag Stories”, accessed April 12, 2019, http://flagstories.co/?og=1.
14 How fascinating is it to see and grasp complex ideas through the most genuine and basic forms of design? If flags are a matter of design, what kind of knowledge can the study of flag design provide toward our broader understanding of culture?
15
16
“Most used flag elements� by Flags Stories.23
Flags offer a simple morphological inquiry, and because of that simplicity, their structure is capable of fulfilling countless uses and purposes. The essence of a flag’s design consists of a piece of free-flying fabric attached to a rigid vertical staff. Most modern flags are made from polyester, but in the past many other fabrics have been used, such as silk, cotton, and wool. Smith believes that two characteristics of flags that are now universal originated with the Chinese and their silk production: the transition from vexilloids to two-dimensional cloth flags, and the lateral attachment of flags to the staff.24 The Chinese introduced the possibility of scaling a flag, its lightweight, its resilience in inclement weather, and its capability of being dyed to produce 23 24
Ibid. Smith, Flags Through the Ages, 38.
17 color variations. Flag usage spread along the Silk Road. Smith states that the prophet Mohammed used both black and white flags, which later would identify Islamic dynasties, using these and other colors. Flag Stories provides us with an infographic of Flag Families that traces the development of flag design by relating it to cultural and territorial milestones.
“Flag Families” by Flags Stories.25
According to Smith, since the 17th century, a time of great maritime exploration for all the continents, most flags have been designed with rectangular proportions, the majority scaled 2:3.26 To this day, a rectangular, flat, or linear geometric figure is the standard form for flag design. A basic form designed by the union of human hand and technique: a frame, one which delimits spaces. Like the inside and the outside, like the door, the window, the screen and the canvas. Hence, the flexible dimensions allowed by rectangular arrangements explains the predominance of right angles in this artifact’s design: a quadrilateral flag that enclosures subjects, ideas, and ideals in a precise frame. Flag Stories offers an infographic that displays the most used aspect ratios. Among all the references to rectangles, Nepal is distinguished for being the only country that makes use of a non-quadrilateral shape in its flag.
25 26
“Flag Stories”, accessed April 12, 2019, http://flagstories.co/?og=1. Smith, Flags Through the Ages, 22.
18
“Flags proportions” by Flags Stories.27
Flags are divided into four quarters, or, in vexillology terms, cantons: two nearer the hoist and two nearer the fly (opposite part of the staff or its length). The upper canton of the hoist, which often contains an emblem or a badge, is known as simply as “the canton.” It is the higher, privileged, and valuable surface of a flag—a “sacred” canton. In Ted Kaye’s Good Flag, Bad Flag design guide “this corresponds to the part of the flag that is seen when it hangs limp from a flagpole. The center or left-of-center position is the most visible spot for a symbol when the flag is flying.”28 27 28
“Flag Stories”, accessed April 12, 2019, http://flagstories.co/?og=1. Kaye, Good Flag, Bad Flag, 14.
19 It is also a design tradition that comes from medieval times, during which elaborate designs were often painted or embroidered onto this particular spot for practical, symbolic, and financial purposes. The often exquisite and expensive designs placed on this canton, also often made by hand, are still commonly positioned there because it is the space most likely to be “protected� from the inclement weather by the nature of the flag’s anticipated movement inherent to its traditionally rectangular form.
Anatomy of a flag by Sylvie Bednar.29
In Europe during the Middle Ages, a complex system of heraldry was also designed. The knights, whose faces were usually covered by helmets and armor, needed a way to display their identity on the battlefield. Graphics and symbols were created and applied to helmets, banners, and shields. Eventually, this visual system acquired a social role and indicated class, land, and hereditary titles. Colors were used in the heraldry visual systems, but the use of symbols was stronger. Flags and coats of arms frequently included imagery in addition to symbols. Religious symbols also influenced flag design in Christian and Islamic societies. Flag Stories provides an example of these influences in the flag design by showcasing many European flags, such as those from Scandinavian countries, which all depict a cross. 29
Sylvie Bednar, Flags of the World, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009), 10.
20 The flags we design today are “modern” because they represent the nation as a collective citizenry, not a ruling monarchy. Flags needed to represent a people’s identity and a set of values could be invoked with a simple design, colors, and shapes. National flags were rallying points for national liberation movements in colonized or occupied countries such as South Africa and Mozambique. Today, the Palestinian flag (a variation on the 1916 Flag of the Arab Revolt, similar to the flags of many Arab nations such as Jordan, Sudan and Kuwait) is recognized throughout the world, even if Palestinian statehood is not yet “recognized.” All the facts exposed in this section, are fruitful for us to acknowledge how flags are a matter of design. Flag Stories provides a taxonomic demonstration about the work of graphic design to combines forms, colors and symbols and construct the symbolism of flags. But is that all? What can we further learn about ourselves by studying the design of flags? Why do these simple forms still get strong in people’s emotions? What happens when our gaze collides with the flag? What images do we see?
Flags happen How to negotiate squares, circles and triangles with the body
Beat the wings, fly. Beat the wings, vanish. Beat the wings, it reappears. It lands. And it's gone. In a flap, it has vanished into white space. [...] But I stay, contemplating it, fascinated by its appearance, fascinated by its disappearance. Henri Michaux, Life in the folds, 1949 30
30
Henri Michaux, Life in the Folds, (Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2016). [my translation]
21 Suddenly, something appears. It is a butterfly beating its wings, disturbing my attention and triggering my imagination. By looking at this flying being, I perceive its chaotic movements, which quickly transform into a complex figure in front of me. Georges Didi-Huberman in La Imagen Mariposa applied his phenomenology of images by relating it to the movement of moths and butterflies. For Didi-Huberman, these insects, with their irregular fluttering, are metaphors for the enigma hidden in images. They cannot have a fixed meaning. Images are fugitives that elude our gaze, perpetually appearing and disappearing. Like Didi-Huberman’s metaphor, I offer a similar exercise by treating butterflies as a metaphorical element for flags. Flags are the synthesis of ideas translated into the simplest forms by means of design. Just like butterflies, flags are constantly appearing to us as they flutter in the sky with their shapes, design, and colors. Simultaneously, butterflies and flags, with their forms and colors, appear to me as living organisms freed in the air. With their symmetries and proportions adjusted to their bodies, their flight unfolds complex and chaotic forms. Both are a matter of visual appearance and, at the same time, corporeal experience. 31 Graphically designed on a rectangular shape, the flag has a single face when static. It is flat and two-dimensional. When faced with a gust of wind, however, this unique surface is transformed into multiples: plans, perspectives, shapes. By whom are the flags seen? From what angles are they visible? This is a matter of folds. This is no longer a history of artefacts fixated in their cultural environment, but the analysis of visual forms that pulsate like organisms. They “flutter around� amongst images and across historical times. 32
31 32
Georges Didi-Huberman, La imagen mariposa, (Barcelona: mudito & co., 2007), 65. [my translation] Ibid. [my translation]
22
Monarch butterflies’ migration.33
Flags fluttering in Memorial Day at a Dominican neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.34
Do flags pulsate as living things? Do they breathe the breeze that unfolds them? Can this idea shift the way we think about flags? Constantly fluttering in the wind of our social landscape, flags are thinking aids made by and for us to communicate who we are to ourselves and to others. With the aid of flags, images make their appearances. But an image behaves like a butterfly: when you think you’ve seen it, perceived it, it is already gone. Like the butterfly, a flag is “an aura that dances.” 35 Its bodily form is barely graspable when fluttering. Forms have a continuity that can suggest other forms by metamorphosing and by imagining. Without a doubt, butterflies offer us the ideal paradigm of the image full of meaning by excellence, the symmetrical image. But they also show us that all symmetry is waiting for an event that will dislocate them suddenly. It is clear that the butterflies have a strict form of vertical symmetry, the role of the hinge fulfilling its own body. But its geometry in action is of a very different complexity. They flap their wings, and the architecture of their motives drives them mad; and the composition of the four wings together causes a kind of chaotic, imbricated symmetry; The mapa-mundi moth is not named because of the erratic tracing of its motifs, which evokes a map? 36
33
Sonia Altizer, “Animal Migration and Infectious Disease Risk”, Science Magazine, January 2011, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/331/6015/296.figures-only 34 Tony Carnes, “A Jorney Through NYC religions”, accessed in March 22, https://www.nycreligion.info/memorialday-dominican-neighborhood-williamsburg-brooklyn/ 35 Didi-Huberman, La imagen mariposa, 15. [my translation] 36 Ibid.
23 These transitional movements of the butterflies help us to metaphorically suggest that images transmitted by flags can be taken as enigmas, hidden in the flags’ forms. They are ephemeral and volatile, always an outcome of gaze and interpretation. As the opposite of fixed forms, these mobile, malleable objects are quite challenging to comprehend because of their indefinite forms and movements. The sumptuousness of the moth’s shape is caused by the contradictory appearances between images perceived (open wings) and images gone (closed wings). I believe that a flag fluttering in the wind provides us with a similar situation. It is at this point that I embrace Didi-Huberman’s idea that the image, in fact, is fundamentally vague (vagat), a vagabond, who comes and goes from here to there, disappearing for no apparent reason. “Mariposea, as they say.”37 It is at the convergence of Didi-Huberman’s fruitful metaphors of moths’ fluidity and the absolute power of the free association of images that I bring up the notion that flags happen. Like a butterfly, a flag conveys images and spurs our imaginations when it pulsates its forms. We live in this world and, as articulated by Flusser, Didi-Huberman, and Belting, we comprehend it and interpret it with images. To explore my investigation on flags and how they relate to the notions of “what is an image?”, the research bases on Belting explanation on how human start using physical images from the history of the cult of the dead. The author states that, back in history, images, as threedimensional ones such as statues, were engaged to replace the deadly bodies, who lost their “visible” presence along with their physical bodies. In this example, images occupy the place of the missing body and, at the same time, brings its absence back to the physical world as a iconic presence. An image could never exist by itself. It urges an embodiment, an agent or a medium to gain visibility. To conclude, Belting states that the mediality of images are rooted in a body metaphor: The triadic constellation in which body, medium, and image are interconnected appears here with utmost clarity. The image of the dead, in the place of the missing body, the artificial body of the image (the medium), and the looking body of the living interacted in creating iconic presence as against bodily presence.38
The triadic concept is a key theory to expose a new horizon on flags interpretation. I also make the use of Belting’s concept of “the presence of the absence”. Here, absence is not related to images bringing bodies back, returning them to life. However, images transform the absence into a new kind of presence: a so called visible absence. “Images live from the paradox that they 37 38
Ibid. Belting, Image, Medium and Body, 13.
24 perform the presence of an absence or vice versa […] This paradox in turn is rooted in our experience to relate presence to visibility. Bodies are present because they are visible.39 Connecting with Belting’s theory, I propose that flags persist on being overly used by humans though times because it is an artifact that allows, visually and tactilely, the presence of ideas —whether they may be — into the sensible world through a materiality. As proposed by Belting in the first chapter of An Anthropology of Images, our internal archives, memory, and imaginations are in a constant dialogue with these external, physical images in our socio-cultural realm. A flag is a reminder, a graphic anchor for our minds. The gaze turns the flag into images and, images into flags. With that in mind, the concept of flags happen arises directly from this triad. A flag is a support (medium) through which images embody (image) and become visible (body). In other words, it is the medium through which an image—of whatever it may be—makes its appearance. I support Belting’s argument that medium and image must be considered two sides of the same coin, 40 with the flag as the head and symbolism the tail. When we look at a flag, we can actually only see a flag: bars, circles, colors, cloth. We can actually see only its design, its materiality. Nonetheless, according to Belting, we are easily distracted by a medium and, without even noticing, our mind flips the coin and images appear and also take place in our bodiesmediums. Images have always relied on a given technique for their visualization. When we distinguish a canvas from the image it represents, we pay attention to either the one or the other, as if they were distinct, which they are not; they separate only when we are willing to separate them in our vision. 41
39
Ibid. Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 10. 41 Belting, Image, Medium and Body, 36. 40
25
Flags Happen process based on Belting’s notion of image, medium and body.
W.J.T. Mitchell, an American art historian who also wrote extensively on iconology, presented a diagram in his book, Iconology, that illuminates the myriad meanings of the term “image.” Mitchell differentiates between picture and image, treating the first as a thing or an object, and the second as an abstract entity. The diagram is divided between material pictures (i.e., photographs) and immaterial pictures (as a production of the body’s mind, like dreams and memories). The opposition “material/immaterial” is just a convenience to help us grasp the picture/image distinction. Both sides are ultimately “material” in the sense that the mental image, for instance, requires the mind-body of the beholder as a material support; and the most solid, material image —a bronze statue—conveys an image that can be copied in another medium, e.g., a photograph, a description, a memory. So, the image/picture distinction is not ultimately confined to one side of the family tree of images, but is distributed across them.42
I also reproduced his diagram43 to help the reader understand flags happen and my theoretical analysis. I speak of flags within graphic design (material) and, at the same time, beyond the boundaries of design (immaterial), as a similar exercise of picture/images provided by Mitchell and Belting. I utilize the interrelatedness of the design process, the subject involved, as a way to explain the intersubjectivity of language common to all those entities. In Mitchell’s view, images 42
Daniel Portugal, Rose de Melo Rocha, Como caçar (e ser caçado por) imagens: entrevista com W. J.T. Mitchell, (São Paulo: E-Compós), 12, https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.v12i1.376 43 W.J.T Mitchell, Iconology: image, text, ideology, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10.
26 are both material and immaterial, both embodied in things and places. They are always in transit across the boundaries of body and mediums.
“What is an image” reproduced diagram created by W.J.T. Mitchell.
With the help of his diagram we can understand that the perceptual image is on the border of material and immaterial locations. It is the interface between body and world, a “place” where both cross and connect. In other words, I speculate this to be the place in which a flag happens by allowing images to cross in multidirectional ways and in all of these boundaries. If images don’t have their own place, nor reside in any single location, bodies must animate the medium for the images to come alive. In that way, I adapt Belting’s language to argue that flags can be animated so images can happen. They need to happen in order to transmit, to process images with our minds. Images take place in flags just as mental images live in our bodies. For Belting, in this particular case, the body is also a medium, a living medium. Our minds create, perceive, and remember images, as they work as medium themselves. According to Belting, the body is the place where mental images happen. Its outward appearance makes it possible for the body to carry pictures in its own right. Masks and body decorations transform our body into a picture, too. I think of this when I frequently observe flags painted on the faces of fans at sporting events. The flag happens on our own body, and is there not to represent the body itself, but to use the body as a medium to carry the image. In this particular case, I recall the Palestinian flag as a further example of the notion that flags happen. The image below was captured on October 22 last year by Mustafa Hassouna, the
27 picture44 of a shirtless young protester in Gaza flying a Palestinian flag while protesting the Israeli blockade has drawn comparisons with the iconic French Revolution painting, Liberty Leading the People. The Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been protesting along the fence with Israel, demanding their right to return to the homes and land their families were expelled from 70 years ago. In the picture of the Palestinian protester, the shirtless young man is flying a flag and fighting for a territory (Palestine). I surmise that the flag is his aid to materialize his fight— the existence of his territory—as a “Palestine” graphic mediality or an iconic presence, in Belting’s words. I also believe that, by handling the flag, he is making use of his own body as a medium for carrying the flag.
Iconic’ Image of Palestinian Protester in Gaza Goes Viral.45
Through design techniques, flags become the means by which images are made visible. But the flag is also an object that unfolds beyond its visibility. We see a flag, we see colors, we see shapes, and through them we grasp notions of culture, a land, and ideas. How do we connect Flags Happen to our previous notions of flag design introduced by Flags Stories? Flag Stories’ infographics provides a contemporary grounding in the practice of graphic design. They illustrate how various design principles and techniques such as the combination of shapes with colors create flags that are simple, universal, and accessible. Offering this research as purely visual, the infographics provide crucial evidence that there is a common “graphical 44
Iconic’ Image of Palestinian Protester in Gaza Goes Viral, “Al Jazeera.”, accessed December 18, 2018, https://goo.gl/r1hT8N 45 Ibid.
28 lexicon” in flag’s design. We are restricted to using certain forms, colors, and shapes in designing a medium that must suit diverse cultural, historical, and social dimensions.
“How flags are combined” by Flags Stories.46
As we can observe in the “How flags are combined” infographic, flags are simple arrangements of figures. Their graphic language is, somehow, common. What it achieves even more is its universal potential. However, this simplistic “arrangement” must be crafted with a powerful narrative/symbolism by design itself. And that must also take into account the interpretations and the symbolic charges entangled by different cultures. The flag needs a body to see it through. For Belting, bodies react accordingly to their cultural perspective. Bodies are strongly shaped by their cultural history and thus never cease to be exposed to mediation via their visual environment. Bodies thus cannot be considered an 46
“Flag Stories”, accessed April 12, 2019, http://flagstories.co/?og=1.
29 invariant and do not resist the impact of changing ideas in the experiencing of them. But they are more than merely passive recipients of the visual media that shaped them. Their activity is needed in order to practice visual media in the first place. 47
Applying Belting’s theory, the Refugee nation flag makes a good example. It was simply designed with a bright orange rectangle crossed by a black stripe. This specific arrangement of colors and shapes, evokes a powerful and latent image: the life jackets which refugees have worn on their journeys for safer places.
The Refugee Flag by Ogilvy.48
Images take root in our bodies. Looking at something will always be a dialectical experience. Even when we don’t seem to pay attention, our gaze is always flipping the medium so we can experience images alive.
47 48
Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 16. “The Refugee Nation”, accessed April 13, http://www.therefugeenation.com/
30
From forms to rhythms or how do flags relates to our bodies
So, here we indeed have something that, as they say, is common sense: in order to completely describe the cranial box, is it not enough to simply turn around it in order to exhaust the totality of its “aspects,” as Richer so perfectly states? But what is often considered to be “common sense,” also leads one to encounter little subjective moments of forgetting, of repression or denial of a primary disturbance or concern whose descriptive or objective attention merely provides a convenient guardrail. Confronted with his cranial box, Paul Ricœur simply forgot the question that every magic box, that every case for a precious item, or every concave organ, or vital place poses: the question of the interior, the question of folds. 49
In this section, I explore the boundaries of flags’ mediality while observing the ways they happen and relates to the ways our bodies animate them. How do we use these mediums? What can we understand of our culture by the ways we interact with flags? Furthermore, the way they flutter in the wind, is also an aesthetic experience. How so? I believe that at its most intimate, a flag must be able to fly through the air unpretentiously, like a butterfly. I admire its very nature; I admire that the wind is the raison d’être of flags. The lightness of its fabrics becomes an aesthetic experience. It poeticizes the capacity of a flag to be and move freely without weight, without burden, a human condition that reveals to us daily that we are, by gravity’s force, inseparable from the ground. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 as part of his theory of general relativity.50 Matter and energy are two expressions of a single material; we can grasp “space-time” as a fabric, too. According to Einstein, the presence of large amounts of mass or energy distorts space-time, causing its fabric to “warp,” and we observe this warpage as gravity. Conveniently, contrary to free-falling artifacts, the free-flying flag remains untouched by such inertia. It happens, and will always be subject to the atmosphere’s moods. This is enviable: How many times have we ever dreamed of unsticking our feet from the ground?
49
Georges Didi-Huberman, Being a Skull: Site, Contact, Thought, Sculpture, trans. Drew S. Burk, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 19. 50 LIGO “MIT”, accessed March 1, 2019, https://space.mit.edu/LIGO/more.html.
31 We dream. Imagination helps us to define the world, to read it. In Greek mythology, Aeolus, the god of the winds, was the absolute lord of all atmospheric forces 51. Aeolus reflects on the order within the uncontrollable force of the air, and prevents wind’s anarchy by taming it and making it beneficial to humanity. His story parallels humans’ need to engage in dialogue with untamable nature, to evolve and survive despite it and beside it and to triumph over it. Indeed, we learned how to sail and explore the world. We designed. We created an artifact capable of communicating with the aid of the wind. For practical and symbolic purposes, there is a significant distinction between perceiving a flag’s design (its actual drawing, form, and colors) and a flag in motion (blowing in the wind). It is the repetition and motion, the same and yet different, that makes flags such fascinating objects to study. Flags are not only signs of representation, but they are effective dramatic additions to a scene and to our observation. They are poignant actors that impart complex emotions, from wild to passive, as revealed in countless examples from the arts and photography. For example, the French artist Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People, or the photographer Robert Frank who is known by his fascination on the presence of flags in the American cultural scene. Frank’s flag picture, taken in 1955 during a parade in Hoboken, New Jersey, captures the frantic fluttering of an American flag, with the result offering a rupture in the way we see: the union of a never-resting flag with the photographer’s never-resting gaze.
Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955 by Robert Frank.52
And what is a flag without a staff? The staff gives the flag its wide span, its distance, its scale. It enables the flag to show itself absolute from above, near to the sky, embracing, in its 51
William Hansen, Aeolus (Greek Aiolos), World Mythology: Handbook of Classical Mythology, ABC-CLIO, 2004. Robert Frank, “Parade”, Phaidon, accessed in April 12, https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2015/july/03/when-robert-frank-shot-the-americanflag/ 52
32 shadow, our world down here. The flag has, from this perspective, a lofty, privileged status, one that “sees” everything from above. Isn’t it intriguing how we are capable of recognizing it from afar? With a perpetual, cinematic movement, the flag is up there, fluttering. With a majestic height, it delimits our space. It animates my perception: this object is so gigantic up close, and it is made to be seen from afar. How distinctive it is, even from here, at a great distance up there. I follow Didi-Huberman and comprehend that seeing from above is being on top.53 This maxim curiously reminds me of the church and its profound contemplation of heaven, of that which is above us. I think of the architecture of churches and their symbolism and icons, which are constantly shifting our gaze upwards. Flags offer us a similar experience. Like sacred images, flags fluttering in the wind are frequently accompanied by the heavens, the sky above us—a symbol of transcendence and infinity. Smith also offers a historical background on the vexilloid —a spear with an emblem at the top—which very early on acquired a religious significance that it retains.54 Smith studies supports that vexilloids were considered sacred objects to be worshipped, and people who carried them believed they derived their powers from it. Thousands of years before the creation of the modern national flags, societies from ancient Persia, Babylonia, and Egypt carried vexilloids, too. Roman armies carried spears with metal eagles mounted on top. This influence on the modern versions of flags can be still be recognized in the design of many flagpoles, which also display eagles, lions, stars, or other symbols.55 As the flag aloft invites our gaze, the staff also extends an invitation to our hand. Bodies can grip the flag, its pole, and feel its weight. And with an upward gesture, the closed fist synchronizes the movement of the body with the movement of the flag. They wave together. It is the body that possesses the flag, in this instance, by determining its acceleration, its happening.
53
Georges Didi-Huberman, Pensar Debruçado, YMAGO, Kindle. Smith, Flags Through the Ages, 37. 55 Ibid. 54
33
Liberty Leading the People, 1830, by Eugène Delacroix.56
It is a design trick to create body extensions or prostheses, tools with the purpose of accommodating our needs. Design is the mediator between our body and the world that surrounds us. The German sociologist Georges Simmel in A Asa do Recipiente 57 supports the idea that the handle of a mug is the element of the artifact that puts itself into contact with the world. It is a part made for us humans to be latched onto, to be manipulated by, and to manipulate with. The design aspect of the handle is the artifact’s access point to both the body and the world. Tracing a parallel to Simmel’s recipient handle, I believe a flag staff also demarcates the boundary of two worlds and presents itself functionally: reaching for and handling the flag, it functions as a mediating object between the flag and the body, and also between the body and the world. Like the handle, the staff is the flag’s formal invitation to us, to belong and intertwine with the other. For Simmel, it is “as if it was the arm that a world extends —it can be the real or the ideal one—to catch another and to include to oneself, and to be caught by another and include to itself.”58 This adhesion, the connection of staff and hand, is a tactile relationship occurring by way of contact.59 The hand becomes both manager and managed.
56
Liberty Leading the People, Louvre Museum, accessed December 9, 2018, https://goo.gl/bYiv4S George Simmel. Coletânea de Textos de Estética. Kindle. [my translation] 58 Ibid. 59 Didi-Huberman, Being a Skull, 70. 57
34
The infinite monad, a flag is a soul folded in many ways The multiple is not only what has many parts but what is folded in many ways. Gilles Deleuze60
Before presenting the next steps of this study, I will refresh the reader’s memory and restate my research purposes: to interrogate the kind of representational thinking that both leads to flag design and is fostered by flag design. How is their symbolism imprinted in the mind and perceived by the individual? How do we design them? First, I explained that flags are a matter of design. Flag Stories provides a taxonomic demonstration about how we rely on universal forms to construct and assemble culture through forms. Second, I delineated the broader meanings of images to support the notion that flags happen in light of Belting’s iconology. For images to be experienced, they need a medium to give them visibility and materiality, and, consequently, we need a body to perceive the images. Flags happen is the collision between the gaze and the medium. Third, I further dived on flags happen by relating them to our bodies and gaze. The ways we animate the medium and perceive them can expand our notions of how this powerful artifact transforms our surroundings. In this third part, I provide an speculative association between my discussions and the notion of fold by Gilles Deleuze in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, in which he makes philosophical and aesthetic analyses about baroque architecture and its relation to Leibniz’s mathematics theories. In the intersection of the concepts of flags happen and the fold, I draw a connection between a postmodern thought of philosophy with flags, noting that both are essentially driven by the complexity of the engagement of a subject. The fold makes us speculate on a world that is a complex structure that draws the infinite from the finite. The Deleuzian fold is an important theoretical tool to think about subjective experience and its decoding of the universe. The fold concept expresses both a subjective space and the process of creating that space—that is, it expresses the interdependent character of the inside and outside of thought. I find in this concept a particularly powerful tool to explore flags from an anthropological kind of analysis.
60
Gilles Deleuze, A Dobra: Leibniz e o Barroco, (São Paulo: Papirus, 2012), 14. [my translation]
35 In Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze states that “the baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity. The world is a baroque trait, a body of endless folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space.”61 Our bodies are also formed by folds: never-ending folds that bend our thoughts and souls. Deleuze introduces Leibniz’s concept of soul: the monad, a single entity or point that envelops the multiplicity, the infinity in itself. Leibniz describes the soul as an endless series of folds that are constantly in transformation, reinventing themselves. Deleuze discuss Leibniz’s works as he was the first philosopher and mathematician to discuss the pleats, curves, and twisting of surfaces. He believed there was a correspondence between the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul, like a metaphor for the topology of our thought: “an ‘inside’ space is topologically in contact with the ‘outside’ space, and brings the two into confrontation at the limit of the living present.”62 In other words, what is inside is outside, and what is outside can also be inside. Deleuze sets up an infinite nesting of structure: the fold divides ceaselessly, “and in every fold, there are endless other folds: it is always in motion, unfolding, not segregating”. 63 It is the smallest unit of matter and the inanimate. It is everywhere. It expresses complexity, infinity, movement, and dynamism of thought, images, and things. In other words, we are flexible and fluid bodies, folding and unfolding in different ways. This spatial model of thought connects to Belting’s entwining of mind-body and world. Like Belting, Deleuze also offers an analogy of how the outside world is connected with our internal world, or our soul. One is constantly folding on the other. This could be another way to connect the interrelation between image, medium, and body. Images are constantly traveling across the outside and inside — material and immaterial. I mentioned Deleuze’s theories on the baroque not to explore them as a mere historical and aesthetic issue, but rather as a speculation of a new perspective on being, creating, and communicating in the world. The baroque provokes our emotions with its intensively folding gestures, by creating volumes and enhancing perceptions with an emphasis on spatial forms. While conventionally understood as graphic in nature, flags are in effect a spatial form too. There is an important exchange between what is embedded in materiality, in forms, such as symbolism, and what can be seen by a singular individual. Our accumulated past experiences and, most importantly, our culture give shape to and color our perception, and define how images will take root in our minds. 61
Ibid, 13. Ibid, 16. 63 Ibid, 18. 62
36 Flags are constantly placed in social spaces as sensory aids that stir up memories. When we consider how people are surrounded by information and artifacts throughout their lives, we get a sense of the multiple ways in which identity and its graphic representation are intricately interacting and shaping our view of the world. Memory binds us to objects and forms that together create uncontrollable and subjective connections, which consequently influence one’s identity. Flags are powerful artifacts that makes us think, as humans and designers, about the forms we use to represent and express ourselves graphically in the world. The continual use of flags makes the case that graphic design mediality has a fundamental role in shaping the culture. We animate our medium and fold them as a way of producing and experiencing our own images. And that is also crucial for design practice: we are always folding, unfolding, and reinventing the media by which our images and representations can take place. By creating those supports, we are simultaneously creating spaces for our culture and visual memory in which to reside. The idea of folding in Deleuze can be understood in the broadest sense of the term, like a metaphor for our constant capacity to change perspectives, interpret the world around us, reinvent ourselves, and unfold our thinking. It is a line that folds and goes in another direction, the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly, and even in our attitude towards the world around us. Like the flag, we humans are malleable; we fold and reinvent ourselves in new forms of representation achieved through design techniques and the infinite possibilities of our imagination.
37
Gilles Deleuze spoke of the fold and the flight of the butterfly as the fundamental transformations of the space. According to Didi-Huberman, Deleuze has drawn the path of a butterfly as a flight of monads forming a world, and the path of the “virtual” and the “possible” — the bifurcation between the realizations and reality.64
64
Gilles Deleuze, “Diagramas filosóficos” in Georges Didi-Huberman, La imagen mariposa, (Barcelona: mudito & co., 2007), 70.
38 Restitutions How to render and return flags, or Conclusion In formulating my conclusions, I refer to Didi-Huberman’s notion of Render [rendre]. Besides asking what is an image and how it is given, we still need to ask, who owns it? DidiHuberman questions: When do you take a picture? Who do you take it from? Who do you take? Would it not be necessary to give it back to those who have their right? My question is, how to do this? How can we translate concepts of historicity and culture into a flag design that are capable of crossing the boundaries of images (material and immaterial)? Is it possible to create a methodology to apply “flags happen”? To “render” images, he argues, is the way we manipulate images and transform them into something new. And this is a way of “returning” them to those who have their right. By gathering data and delivering them through infographics, Flag Stories demonstrates how flag design is based on combining a common visual lexicon—shapes, colors, and symbols. For Didi-Huberman, “it is evident that images become truly explosive when rendered: from their form of rendering [rendre], a verb that is said at the same time of the transformation of an object and its return to the other.”65 It is in the way we manipulate these universal forms that we give them a new output. Flags are the “render” of cultural singularities by means of forms, design, and their mediality. Design gives the culture back (through design itself) to whom it rightfully belongs. And when these universal shapes are placed in a context, in a determined sociocultural space, these stars, triangles, squares, circles, and bars make us see something that is far beyond. According to Belting, culture shapes the way our bodies read images. We, distracted by these forms, flip the coin and meet the other side. We still fight, kill, and die for these figures. Images of the world permeate our bodies. Design gives back those images through forms. Flags are human desire through the lens of graphic design: they give culture a shape, incorporate the memory, and return it to whom it may concern.
65
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Devolver uma Imagem,” in Pensar a imagem, org. by Emmanuel Alloa, (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2015), 205.
39
BIBLIOGRAPHY Belting, Hans, and Thomas Dunlap. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Belting, Hans. Imagem, Mídia e Corpo: uma nova abordagem à Iconologia. São Paulo: Revista de Comunicação, Cultura e Teoria da Mídia, 2006, n.8. Carnes, Tony. “A Jorney Through NYC religions”, accessed in March 22, https://www.nycreligion.info/memorial-day-dominican-neighborhood-williamsburg-brooklyn/ Bednar, Sylvie. Flags of the World, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009. Books, Applewood. The American Flag: A Handbook of History & Etiquette. Carlisle, Mass.: Applewood Books, 2013. Cache, Bernard, and Cynthia Davidson. Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. MIT Press, 1995. Crampton, W. G., Karl Shone, and Martin Plomer. Flag / Written by William Crampton., 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. A Dobra: Leibniz e o Barroco. São Paulo: Papirus, 2012. Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Devolver uma Imagem,” in Pensar a imagem, org. by Emmanuel Alloa, 205-225. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2015. Didi-Huberman, Georges, and Shane B. Lillis. Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. 1 edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Didi-Huberman, Georges. La imagen mariposa. Barcelona: mudito & co., 2007. Didi-Huberman. Pensar debruçado. YMAGO, 2015. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Quando as Imagens Tocam o Real. Belo Horizonte, 2012. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ser Crânio: Lugar, Contato, Pensamento, Escultura. São Paulo: C/ ARTE, 2016. Flag Stories. Accessed April 12, 2019. http://flagstories.co/?og=1. Flusser, Vilém. O mundo codificado. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007. Flusser, Vilém, and Anthony Mathews. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion, 1999. Flusser, V., A. Ströhl, and E. Eisel. Writings. University of Minnesota Press, 2002. “Iconic’ Image of Palestinian Protester in Gaza Goes Viral; News; Al Jazeera.” Accessed December 18, 2018. https://goo.gl/r1hT8N Gumbrecht, Hans. Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012. Heimer, Željko. Vexillology as Social Science. Boston: National Flag Institute, 2017.
40 Kaye, Ted. Good Flag, Bad Flag. Boston, Massachusetts: North American Vexillological Association, 2013. Laliberté, Norman, and Sterling McIlhany. Banners and Hangings: Design and Construction. 1966. Liberty Leading the People (July 28, 1830) | Louvre Museum | Paris. Accessed December 9, 2018. https://goo.gl/bYiv4S Marshall, Tim. A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols; 2017. Melo Rocha, Rose, Portugal, Daniel. Como caçar (e ser caçado por) imagens: entrevista com W. J. T. Mitchell. E-Compós, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.v12i1.376 Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Mondzain, Marie-José. Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Stanford University Press, 2005. Michaux, Henri. Life in the Folds. Translated by Darren Jackson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wakefield Press, 2016. Naslau, Sergiu. Flag Stories, Exploring the Details of Our National Flags. Wabbaly (blog), May 28, 2016. http://www.wabbaly.com/flag-stories-exploring-the-details-of-our-national-flags/. Simmel, George. Coletânea de Textos de Estética. [Ebook] Smith, Whitney. Flags Through the Ages and Across the World; Designed by Emil Bührer. “The Refugee Nation”, accessed April 13, http://www.therefugeenation.com/ UN Programme on Space Applications. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://goo.gl/GHxNC2