The construction of space and its visual variants in nick sousanis’ unflattening

Abstract

The present article studies the production of meaning and visual variants in Nick Sousanis’ “Unflattening: A Visual-Verbal Inquiry into Learning in Many Dimensions”. The aim of this study is to understand the compositional role of space embedded in both text and image in “Unflattening”, by means of reflecting on images and narrative development. To illustrate the aforementioned compositional space feature, this article’s foundation consists in two main conceptual paradigmatic approximations: the first one is smoothing and striation of space an aesthetic model presented by Deleuze & Guattari (2012), examined to apprehend the values and the potentialities of the subject of the study in both hybridization and rhizome spheres; the second paradigm is Vilém Flusser’s concept of line and surface (2007, 2008, 2010), explored to recognize Unflattening’s verbal and visual values, thus formulating a reasoning correspondence to Unflattening reading. It also becomes correlated with concepts of language and temporality as the images rise to a signifier level or a protagonist in the story’s development. As a hypothesis, Unflattening is as an apparatus which connects and transcends sequential art as a physical support and reaches simultaneous aspects of consciousness, hence developing the aesthetics of happening in which its visually is changeable, accordingly to the gradation or inertia of space and pace.