Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Scott McCloud's Unifying Quadrants

I got pretty excited when I saw the following quadrants in Scott McCloud's TED talk on Understanding Comics because it ties together a lot of big ideas.

The first slide of quadrants showed four categories of comics, which he cleverly labelled classicist, animist, formalist, and iconoclast:
FliA9

But then he pointed out how they correspond to Jung's four subdivisions of human thought: sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling.
SNAG-0003

The upper and lower halves correspond to tradition vs. revolution:
SNAG-0000

The left and right halves to art vs. life:
a

One diagonal contrasts form and content:
SNAG-0001

The other contrasts beauty and truth:
SNAG-0002

Playing around with this, it's interesting to deduce that:
  • Tradition = Sensation + Intuition
  • Revolution = Thinking + Feeling
  • Art = Sensation + Thinking
  • Life = Intuition + Feeling
  • Revolution + Art = Form
  • Tradition + Life = Content
  • Art + Tradition = Beauty
  • Life + Revolution = Truth

Putting it all together:
FliB7

Music:
FliAA

Movies:
FliAB

Fine Art:
FliB8

2 Comments:

  • Great summary. I've been looking for more stuff on McClouds theories. Do you recognize the pictures in his grids?

    By Blogger Vernon, at 1/19/2011 8:40 p.m.  

  • Thanks Vernon. Yes, I do recognize some of the pictures in McCloud's grids, but not all.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/21/2011 7:52 p.m.  

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