Cultures of Vision

Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the Imaginary

Notes for debate

Generally, images are studied as if they are texts.
There are many problems with this conversion of media which use visuals and sound into text . One of the great difficulties which results is that we tend to approach the interpretation of media images as if they can in a literal sense be read. But we don't read images as we might read words on a page. (See pages 120-126 of Cultures of Vision )
John Unsworth deals with this problem from the perspective of computers and hypermedia and comes to the above questions from another angle in his article Networked Academic Publishing and the Rhetorics of Its Reception.
What happens to textuality when the entire process is converted into a screen based experience?
How are words on a screen read?
The creation and then display of images presupposes a context which can be described as performative. We don't generally think of images as vehicles of performance, but films are shown in theatres, paintings are displayed in museums as part of a show or an exhibition, plays are staged, even books are often accompanied by their authors. In a society devoted to and often dominated by spectacle (see the writing of Guy Debord) it follows that images are almost always cast into a performative context.
The many links between performance and projection are at the centre of the concerns of Cultures of Vision. If we don't read images, do we watch them?
How do we see images? How do we watch television, for example? These are not questions which can be answered by simple reference to the eyes of the seer or by simply examining that which has been seen. The act of engaging with images is as much a bodily function as it is a cultural one. "What we define as the visible (in the form of an image or the act of seeing) never fully contains within it the range of experiences we need to maintain a genuine feeling of control." (Cultures of Vision, 127)
Sometimes, the very terminology used contributes to the confusion. What are the differences between looking and watching? Do we view images in the same way and with the same intellectual tools as just looking out a window, for example? The act of looking carries with it the desire to possess what we have looked at. "The attempt at mastery is always confronted by a sliding away, a movement from the seen to the unseen and from recognition to confusion." (Cultures of Vision, 127)
One way of rethinking the relationship we have with images is to think of dialogue(s) - perhaps what we are engaged in is more related to the activities of speaking than just viewing. This would suggest that the rather ephemeral nature of image-based experiences may be based on an interactive process which cannot be divided into image/viewer. "Possession reveals itself to be ephemeral, and the only place within which some order can be brought into this set of experiences is through argumentation and discussion. The dialogic nature of this process can be internal or external. It can take the form of a vague series of thoughts (an imagining of the seen) or efforts at articulation between two individuals or among many." (Cultures of Vision, 128)
One of the mistakes which we may be making is to confuse the frame of the screen, or the picture with the framing of vision. The notion of the window as a boundary has been a sustained part of all work on images from the earliest days of painting onwards. The limits of the frame are somehow made equivalent to the limits of perception and understanding. (See pages 4-6 in Cultures of Vision.)
The frame is only one of many possible "places" where various forms of dialogue can take place. And even the spatial metaphor which I am using can act to constrain the movements of meaning which characterize the entire process.

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