Mood Board and Moodboarding
Generally, mood boards are image constellations that serve a communicative purpose. They are an arrangement of images, materials and fragments of text that typically function as a tool to illustrate a concept, an idea, or a project. The mood board, as a tool, is generally used in fashion, product and graphic design, as well as in the fields of marketing and branding. Functionality is the main point of distinction between the general definition of a mood board and the one I will explore.
I will be thinking of a mood board as a surface of diverse formats that supports two or more images that relate to each other by similarity, opposition, or comparison. It is a holistic approach to the layout that visually arranges images. It requires from the maker a visual sensibility that is used to investigate ways of styling images together through one’s own subjective lens. I will be thinking of the mood board as more than a tool, as something that happens and is happening.
The diverse images that compose a mood board are selected and related to each other by someone. This person, the mood board maker, is the only agent in this process. They are guided through imagination. An imagination that, through the lens of Bachelard, is a dynamic, ever-changing, creative force, capable of generating new concepts by changing images that already exist.[1] Imagination deforms what we perceive, freeing us from immediate imagery.
Moodboarding is essentially the realization of the mental processing of images through which a person makes sense of a singular image by assimilating it to the rest of their body of images, a visual constellation. This can be a collection of printed photos or magazine pages pinned to a corkboard. It can be as basic as a Pinterest board, and as complex as the body of diffused images one somehow accumulates throughout their visual experience. Certain images are then selected and shoved together, each one changing the other.
In Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, as well as in The Poetics of Space, Bachelard develops an important distinction between poetic knowledge and rational knowledge.[2] One of the key differences between the two, the one that interests me most, is the primacy of the image. Poetic understanding begins with the appearance of the image as an instant event, a sudden emergence, rather than a result of past causes. It is not a mental picture stored in memory. It is an event rather than a thing. On the other hand, rational knowledge appears after this event, asking the image itself how it appeared, operating through conceptualization, causality and classification.
Immediacy is an important quality of Poetic Knowledge when considering the visual sensibility required for the making of mood boards. It is exactly like ripping out pages from a book or a magazine, cutting them up and organizing them on a table, a surface. Some images will be naturally taken to the right corner, some to the left. This process is instant. It is not conceptual or methodical, unless the maker intended it to be. The sensibility that allows for this loose visual categorization is an imaginative one. The event of perception of an image leads to an impulse. Eventually, it leads to a thought, to a creative linguistic moment, or to a part of another image, creating a mood board.
In the online mood board, accompanying this text, there are loosely connected images. These images are consequential to each other, deriving from either a linguistic association (image 15 and 24), a visual one (image 20 and 30), or, in some cases, from explicit supporting examples discussed in this text (image 55). Sometimes images develop into sub-constellations, sometimes they are placed in relation to one another strategically, sometimes not. This image archive generates unexpected significations, aiming for an assemblage that can contaminate the original image with new pathways of existence. The mood board exists, of course, in relation to the theoretical material that has been assembled. The theory discussed throughout this text can guide the interpretation of the images, just as the images can lead toward the theoretical material.
It is an image space and atlas that could go on forever, as one image always leads to another. The images sashay past the text, unstiffening the division between textual and visual material. I resort to the mood board to think throughout the writing, and hopefully, the reader can resort to it to create new images throughout the reading.
[1] Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, Gaston Bachelard, Dallas Institute Publications, 1988, 1
[2] Ibid., 166 and The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958, xvi and xvii