The Image
Single-channel video | 12min | 2014
The relationship between texts and images is always full of tension. In Vilem Flusser’s essay Towards a Philosophy of Photography, he talks about how images represent the world and how texts abstract images which takes human beings one step further back from the world. Texts are a metacode of images. In this video, I put every word(s) (from part of Flusser’s essay) into Google image search and choose an image substitutes that word(s). The process is an inverse process of what Flusser described, using images to explain texts rather that using texts to explain images. But while the reader is reading the texts and images keep showing in screen, we will create temporal relationship between images and between images and texts. Is the texts explaining the images or the images explaining texts?
图像与文本之间的关系一直充满张力。在威廉姆·弗卢瑟的论文《摄影的哲学思考》中，他谈到图像是如何再现世界的，而文本又是如何将图像再次抽象，从而使人在阅读文本时对世界进行了二次抽象。文本是图像的元代码。在这个录像中，我将弗卢瑟论文中探讨图像与文本关系的章节中的每一个单词放进谷歌图片搜索，然后从搜索结果中选取一张图片代替这个单词。这是对弗卢瑟在论文中描述的过程的逆转，使用图像解读文本，而非使用文本解读图像。当图像随着朗读者的声音出现在屏幕上时，我们会在图像与文本之间建立短暂的联系。但是，在观看的过程中，这种建立的联系逐渐变得模糊，图像与文本到底谁成为了谁的注解？