According to this vision visual pollution is considered as noise or visual interference.
It could exist visual interference when lots of messages are placed on top, messages that we could not understand because of an excess on information or design’s problems.

Now, if visual pollution exists, does visual purity exist?


What is vision and what is look?

Memory plays a fundamental role on human vision. In many cases, mind completes what vision cannot capture. This means that we see what we “know” and recognise.
But is necessary to make a distinction between see and look:
Vision:
It is sight’s function.
It depends on an organ.
It has physiological limits.
Look:
It’s related to reflectioning, thinking, associating.
There are frames to focus and to clip from the whole.
It has cultural limits.

Synthetically, the look is the clipping, the frame is the vision.
This clipping is made by our training, our interests and influences. We all have our own frame. Referring to urban graphic, we usually look at what it is entire as a communicational piece.
What it is too broken, impoverished, placed, leaves all its attributes as a communicational object. We don´t look at it. It’s a background noise. With a brighter attitude we can bring to front what it is out of our look.
So, culture can operate as look’s constraint or as a motivating factor to its expansion. This is where the importance of exercising the perceptive attention becomes,
for instance, the exercises to rescue urban graphic.


How is designer’s look?

It’s common that designers set themselves as judges of non-professional urban graphic’s criteria. However, this is appropiated to culture and environmental communication’s codes.

The transformation of the approach that we propose, could allow us to develop a reflexive attitude instead of judging cultural expressions.

How is the relation between center/periphery?

In this globalized world, cosmopolitans urban centres tend to homogenization and similarity. Geographic, economic, cultural and political peripheries are the ones that highly preserves and for its own situation the original distinguishing features.
This is why periphery is the suitable environment to rescue actions.

We go on periphery’s rescue and it finally save us from homogenization.

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EICU
Urban Communication's Investigation Team