Bouillon cube
To introducing context and explore its abilities to shape our opinion of an image, I would like to give another example. On the one hand it also deals with cultural background and its ability to shape our perception, but on the other it can illustrate how adding a context can minimize these cultural differences.
What we see here is Chinese soup, mixture you should soak in water for 10 minutes and get a cup of delicious healthy bullion. We can see poly gonatum, Chinese yam, dried fox nuts, lotus seeds, longan, pearl barely and lily bulb. Yes, that makes Chinese soup! I guess even text explanation wouldn’t help most of us to relate it to a soup. But if we place it in a context, adding a soup bowl, it becomes more clear that we are looking at the soup ingredients. Even knowing nothing about these goods we are able to assume that if you combine these, add water you’ll get that.
But let’s get closer to our everyday life and have a look at the next example and see if this one will be clear to read. It is difficult to say whether we would recognize a bullion cube in it, if we wouldn’t have talked about soup before, but it doesn't really matter. We would see what it is but, not what it consists of. We know this object as a semantic unit.
We know what to do with it and how to use it. It is determined by cultural surrounding we live in. In the same way the Chinese version of the soup is preset and determined by cultural surrounding. Just to bate one's curiosity here what it consists of: salt, cottonseed oils, monosodium glutamate, yeast extract, dehydrated vegetables (onion, cabbage, carrots, parsley, garlic), sugar, corn starch, spices, caramel for the color, disodium inosinate, citric acid. I became curious about these ingredients and the effect it can have if I would deconstruct this object on its components. Would it make any difference in our interpretation of this object and if it’ll make it more clear what exactly we are looking at.
I would assume that this picture rather confuses than clarifies, and in this example enlarging the context takes us further from starting point. It doesn’t contribute to our comprehension but what it does is it opens up new questions which might be intentionally produced by this action of deconstruction. More than half of the ingredients are unrecognizable. However, the form and look of bouillon cube, which doesn’t have any resemblance with any ingredient, presented in familiar shape has a certain credibility. And it seems to have it even more than in unfolded appearance. Meeting the unknown makes us doubt, which causes insecurity and disability to form an opinion about what we see. Recognizing a bouillon cube as something we know makes us feel comfortable, even when we accept the fact that we actually don’t know what it is made of, can pinpoint attention upon food industry. Due to our illiteracy and the possibility of false assumptions, we can fall into a trap and not notice danger that can be hidden inside an image. And on its own one image doesn’t give the opportunity to transfer the meaning it gives only a fragment, a top of an iceberg which a contains bigger sense below.