Tebogo Matshana

Key Research Areas

During my undergraduate degree and my studies towards a Bachelor of Fine Art through Rhodes University, my interests were primarily concerned with combining creative writing with illustration, working with visual poetry through moving images and using motion graphics towards digital story-telling directives. My honours thesis titled The Poetic Nature of Change, Animation and Cartography, focused primarily on the implementation of the mediums of Digital Art and Animation as key tools in breathing a life-likeness into still images and representing change. The subject matter underlying this thesis sought to demonstrate how 2D Animation is one of the most suitable vessels in illustrating the transience and fluidity of cartography throughout Southern African border posts from the early 19th century to the present.

My MA in Information Design through the University of Pretoria ( February 2020- June 2023) considered the literature and scholarship of Veronica Kelly in ascertaining the value of resonance in design practice; the scholarship of Anneli Bowie, Susan Crawley and Debra Hawee and Sonia K. Foss in unpacking the history of visual rhetoric. In contemplating the idiosyncratic nature of animated poetry as a hybrid medium, the study primarily consulted the scholarship of Susan Hanna, Diederick Grobler and Kevin Stein. The observations of Merve Ersan Senoymak and Barbara Philips were consulted in determining how visual rhetoric has historically been used within the context of animations. The study’s findings around the impact and affects of visual metaphor have been supported by the scholarship of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

The study looked at how the TED-Ed animated poetry series There’s a poem for that, makes use of visual metaphor as a visual rhetorical device in designing digital representations of information sets. The study advocates that the use of visual metaphor assists in conveying meaning and creating resonant engagements with visual information. Moreover, the appeal to pathos cultivates room for connection with visual information sets. This study has paired the theory of visual rhetoric with the visual analysis of all twelve animated poems in the series to arrive at an understanding of the best practices involved when creating a meaningful animated poem of my own. The key findings have been employed when considering the best practices involved when digitising and visualising and animating poetry.