Kapitaal words without pictures
An interesting reflection on how visually noisy our environments have become comes in this short film “Kapitaal” at Studio Smack. (To see Kapitaal, scroll down the list of films to the left of the main screen – Kapitaal is represented by a white-on-black clockface.)
Essentially, they’ve taken footage of life in a fictional Dutch town, then removed every visual element except type. Personally, it feels like they’ve underestimated the amount we receive each day – whether that’s artistic licence or a cultural difference in the Netherlands, I’m not sure. (Or purely subjective on my part, of course.)
Given that they’ve dramatically reduced the amount of visual information available, and it still feels like a lot, how much of this are we now conditioned to filter out? So how much of (for instance) the advertising actually gets through? And how much of the important information (road signs, etc) do we miss as a consequence?
The thing that intrigues me is how it would look if we did a similar exercise inside the organisation. Better or worse? And which gets filtered out first?
