Bionote
Theo van Leeuwen was appointed Honorary Professor in the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Sydney, in 2016.
He is Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Arts at the University of Technology Sydney; Professor of Multimodal Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense; and Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University and the University of Lancaster, as well as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Professor van Leeuwen is a founding figure of social semiotic approaches to media and communication, and a founding editor of the international journal, Visual Communication.
His many books include Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design (with Gunther Kress; Routledge 2006); The Language of Colour (Routledge 2011); Speech, Music, Sound (MacMillan, 1999); Introducing Social Semiotics (Routledge, 2005); Global Media Discourse (with David Machin; Routledge 2007); and Multimodal Discourse: the Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (with Gunther Kress; Arnold, 2001).
His current work encompasses the intersection of multimodal studies with organization theory, the affordances of online shopping, and the visuality of family planning materials across cultures.
Plenary Talk Abstract
Interpreting Silence
Salience makes some elements of multimodal compositions more eye-catching or ear-catching than others, in order to express their significance for understanding the message (Van Leeuwen, 2005). In visual compositions salience is created by the absence or presence of movement and by differences in size, amount of detail and texture shown, tonal contrast, colour contrast, and placement in the visual field (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021). Until now there has been no account of how these formal differences create different meanings. This paper will present a framework for a more detailed semiotic analysis of visual salience, as well as showing how different kinds of salience can be combined to create subtle effects.
However, salience is not only an objective feature of visual design. What catches the viewer’s eyes may also stem from what is subjectively salient to them, on the basis of cultural or personal factors. A small detail may be objectively insignificant, yet highly significant to particular viewers or kinds of viewers. This can make salience an excellent educational tool for learning the difference between what an image is intended to mean and what it might mean to specific viewers, and hence for understanding the role of both cultural conventions and subjective factors in the interpretation of still and moving images.