This participatory study, conducted in an introductory psychology class, recounts self-reflections of 22 undergraduate students and their instructor engaging in an GenAI-mediated storyboard generation process. It relies on Gordon Pask’s conversation theory, structuring out the nature of interactions between students, instructor, and GenAI, and then uses a qualitative narrative to describe these conversational feedback loops constituting the creation of draft and final storyboards. Results suggest students engaged in cyclical feedback driven processes to master their creations, used elements of photography related (...) to the relationships between objects in frame, image processing, and cultural objects/themes to generate narratives. Issues were faced with generating text on images, and the consistency and style of generated frames as they interacted with GenAI tools. This study provides guidelines to university teaching professionals to design effective activities mediated by text-to-image GenAI. (shrink)

By reconstructing the connections between different artistic forms, such as Art Sociologique, cybernetic, media and digital art, the paper addresses of how the concept of interactivity has evolved in relation to the development of aesthetic paradigms. Firstly, the paper problematizes the concept of interactive art, by discussing connections and differences with media and digital art. Secondly, the paper shows how Flussers’ concept of participatory media, influenced by the artistic work of Fred Forest, together with the theoretical perspective developed by members (...) of the “Group for an Aesthetics of Communication”, contributed to the development of new perspectives in interactive art. Thirdly, the paper shows how theoretical perspectives such as “Relational aesthetics” and the “Aesthetics of Communication” constituted the basis for the successive reflection on the potentialities of virtuality and immateriality from an artistic perspective. By drawing on such premises, the paper addresses the issue of the meta-operational processes involved in the use of Text-to-Image technologies (TTI), discussing the level of interactivity and the creative processes involved in its use. Finally, the paper problematizes the features of interactivity that characterize emerging forms of art made possible by virtual devices. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the sacred foundations of Western institutional order, moving from an epistemological, historical and legal–aesthetic perspective. Firstly, it identifies an epistemological theory of complexity which, pursuing Hayek’s theory of complexity, Robilant’s notion of informative–normative systems, Popper’s theory of the Worlds, and Dupuy’s theory of endogenous fixed point, will conclusively lead to presenting the hypothesis of World 0 as the World of the foundation of legal thinking, the home of the sacred and the aesthetic. Secondly, it identifies the axiological (...) character of the legal aesthetic as a discipline, a topic that will be taken up in relation to the work of the French historian of canonical law and psychoanalyst Legendre, starting from the analysis of a legal/historiographical context (Corpus Iuris Civilis, Corpus Iuris Canonici, Hobbesian Leviathan, Kelsenian Grundnorm). Thirdly, following Ellul’s thought on secularization, the idea that we now live in a secularized, lay society, lacking in the sacred is revealed as a sort of illusion, the creation of a myth of modernity, only apparently rational. Finally the paper proposes as the task of legal theory the identification of the system of “nomograms” in which the normative message is organized, according to a nonreductionistic approach that forces legal theory to recognize the plurality of the iconic forms of the normative message. The “nomograms” respond to the need of extending the field of legal science to phenomena that the positivist theory of law does not consider important, but which the process of evolution of contemporary society imposes. (shrink)

One of the iconographic trends that became especially articulated in the XII century is the strengthening of the role of typological logic in the selection and organization of subjects within the iconographic program of monuments of decorative and applied art, book illumination and stained glass. Interest in this kind of visual exegesis, based on the symbolic parallelism of the Old and New Testaments, generates experiments in the field of iconographic programs, which leads to the appearance in the late XII – (...) early XIII centuries a number of monuments in which detailed typological cycles are used (the Klosterneuburg altar, typological stained glass windows of French and English cathedrals). The subject of the research in this article is the connection of the described iconographic trend with texts of a theological, theosophical and liturgical nature. Despite the fact that some of the mentioned texts have already been involved by researchers of Christian iconography for the interpretation of pictorial programs, a special study of the sources of "typological iconography" in the XII century has not been implemented yet. Based on the analysis of a number of texts and iconographic analysis of fine art monuments, an attempt is made to identify a group of sources that could be familiar to the compilers of iconographic programs. Among the monuments of fine art, works created in the Rheno-mosan region (as well as derivatives of this tradition) are of particular interest in the XII century. In this group of works of art (including processional and altar crosses, phylacteries, portable altars, works of stained glass and book illumination), searches in the field of typological iconography are consistently realized. (shrink)

Long before Siri and ChatGPT uttered their first automated words, there was only one way to program synthetic speech: with paint and brush. During the transformative years between 1930 and 1960, artists, linguists, and engineers mixed sound and image in a way that combined artistic production with new technologies. What was known as “synthesis-by-art” grew into the rules that power computer speech today. This article concentrates on the emergence of rule-based speech synthesis at Haskins Laboratories in mid-twentieth-century America. An (...) unexpected outgrowth of their work with disabled Second World War veterans, members of the Haskins group had developed a new machine that converted visual patterns into sound: the Pattern Playback. Like holes in a player-piano roll, painted shapes were mechanically translated into distinct sounds. Early experiments at the laboratory promised “a new art form.” Researchers painted pictures of music and listened to geometric shapes. This work eventually grew into a psycholinguistic program committed to painting the shapes of speech. But these early aesthetic experiments had helped researchers cultivate a familiarity with paint, brush, and subjective bodily knowledge. This allowed them to intuitively develop a recipe for painting synthetic speech. In other words, their painting hands enacted knowledge long before they could articulate the complex rules that govern how phonemes interact. By the late 1950s, lab member Frances Ingemann successfully converted this “embodied knowing” into a machine-legible code that rigorously detailed how to paint synthetic speech. She had hoped that her rules might result in a reading machine for blind users that would automatically convert text into speech. Instead, her work was coopted by J. C. R. Licklider, who described Ingemann’s rulebook as “a digital code, suitable for use by computing machines.” While Licklider would use the work of Haskins Laboratories to spearhead his novel concept of man-computer symbiosis, he obscured the extent to which this digital code grew from the anomalous bodies of wounded war veterans and the subjective knowing of painting hands. Indeed, the forgotten history of early text-to-speech shows the indivisibility of interactive computing and digital codes from the material practices and embodied cognition from which they grew. (shrink)

In this paper, as an example, describes the dynamic Chinese philosophical texts and images intertwined with language movement. First proposed interpretation of the text should follow the sequence of "internal context", "coherence agreement" "minimal changes" and "Maximum read the" principle of reciprocity, and attention to text features of Chinese philosophy, focusing on "metaphor" and "narrative" to express "image - View of Concept "and the contemplative, artistic, moral and historical experience all undivided. Text in the pragmatics of (...) the dynamic development process, In order to express the dynamic context of what I call doctrine, and to show images and narrative, the establishment of Chinese philosophy based on "image - View of Concept" thinking, the two are integrated in the language can be described using kinetic into . This article paragraph by paragraph analysis text and in the cause of the "image - View of Concept" or images, in order to release such I view the Chinese philosophy of hermeneutics. This paper takes Qiwulun, the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, to illustrate the pragmatic movement of text and image-ideas in Chinese Philosophy. I sustain a dynamic contextualism in the reading of Chinese philosophical texts and develop a set of general rules for interpreting them, to be followed one after another: principle of intratextuality, principle of coherence, principle of minimum amendment and principle of maximal reading. Also, there is a particular rule for respecting the special characteristic of Chinese philosophy that emphasizes the use of metaphor more than concept, narrative more than argumentation, in order to express its image-ideas rather than pure ideas. The pragmatic development of a philosophical text like Qiwulun depends on the dynamic structuration of writing and reading based on these principles of dynamic contextualism, and the movement of metaphorical images and their narrative unfolding into stories or parables is based on what I call the philosophy of image-ideas, and these two are integrated into a dynamic pragmatics. This paper will analyze section by section the Qiwulun to illustrate my hermeneutics of Chinese Philosophy. (shrink)

Literary scholars have recently become increasingly interested in the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in reading, and have incorporated scientific research in this area into their critical approaches to texts. This article argues that such an approach is particularly appropriate when authors explicitly engage with the way in which their texts are visually taken in and processed. This is the case with Guillaume Apollinaire, whose calligrammes are informed by a theory of visual-verbal simultaneity stipulating that the reader should be simultaneously (...) aware of both textual and pictorial aspects of the poem. Experimental research in the psychology of reading and picture perception is used to assess this theory of simultaneity, and specifically to challenge Michel Foucault's claim that reading and viewing are mutually exclusive processes. The article concludes by considering further applications of psychological research to word and image studies. (shrink)

Roland Barthes remains one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text is his most widely taught work. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text. As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to (...) undergraduate readers. This book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes ideas in cultural studies and literary theory. (shrink)

Relating visual images to textual messages may have great potential in facilitating students’ reading comprehension. The inevitable and important presence of visuals in textbooks obliges language teachers to exploit all semiotic resources to deepen students’ understanding. However, analysis of how images interact with text in textbooks has been rare, and among the efforts it has generally been found that visuals and text often fail to achieve coherence. This study investigates whether and how text and image complement (...) each other ideationally by six sense relations and interpersonally by the Mood system in ninth-grade English as a Foreign Language textbooks to reach intersemiotic complementarity. The results revealed that ideational rather than interpersonal IC is more frequent, where many more Participants than Processes in the texts find their visual complements. Ideational IC is particularly high in Information Reports while Recounts generally mark higher percentages of interpersonal IC. To accomplish ideational IC, repetition is most frequent, followed by hyponymy and collocation. Distinct IC patterns also characterize the different editions of textbooks investigated, which may suggest their different potentials in catering to students of varying proficiencies. (shrink)

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art). Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated (...) images. Furthermore, this contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning. Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images. (shrink)

This study takes a systemic functional multimodal social semiotic approach to the analysis and discussion of image and text relations in two sets of data. First, patterns of contextualisation of images and text in the online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah produced by the Islamic extremist organisation which refers to itself as Islamic State are examined. The second data set consists of a sample of texts from Western online news and blog sites which include recontextualisations of images found (...) in the first data set. A sample of examples of the use and re-use of images is discussed in order to identify patterns of similarity and difference when images and text are recontextualised. It is argued that the ISIS material tends to foreground the interpersonal metafunction in combination with the textual metafunction, while the other data set tends to foreground the ideational metafunction. These inferences indicate that further exploration of a larger data set is worth pursuing. Such studies would provide deeper insights helping to distinguish between online material which supports terrorism and that which opposes it, as well as facilitating the further development of multimodal social semiotic approaches to image and text relations. (shrink)

The overall aim of this paper is to enquire about the performative qualities of Optatian’s visual poems and contextualize these experimental texts within the late-antique culture of transformation and change. Adopting a performative approach, the author sheds new light on the metatexts embedded in the majority of Optatian’s carmina as well as the metadiscursive significance of several individual pieces of his collection (Carm. 3 and 25, in particular). The performative features traceable in the corpus include: a) notions of multi-mediality and (...) spectacularity together with the physical materiality and dynamics of language, all constantly advertised by the poet; b) the expected active role of readers as co-performers of these intricate texts; and c) the inherent performative power of particular intextual images. (shrink)

The present contribution intends to outline diagrams in the process of their becoming and as the result of live-action gestures between people. It aims to demonstrate that diagrams are images produced in form of “texts”, that is in form of any interweaving of relations. After a re- reading of the notions of “image” and “text”, our article highlights the continuities of Peirce's views on the diagram, as a not only verbal function, into Deleuze and Guattari's theory, and provides (...) a closer look at Wittgenstein's idea that diagrams are indissociable from their use. A semiotic analysis of Maria Lai's work of art Legarsi alla montagna will show this recurrent dimension of performativity in diagrams, revealing the extent to which they create not general relations, but social and intersubjective ones. (shrink)

A ideia de beleza - e sua consequente fruição estética - variou conforme as transformações das sociedades humanas, no tempo. Durante a Idade Média, coexistiram diversas concepções de qual era o papel do corpo na hierarquia dos valores estéticos, tanto na Filosofia quanto na Arte. Nossa proposta é apresentar a estética do corpo medieval que alguns filósofos desenvolveram em seus tratados (particularmente Isidoro de Sevilha, Hildegarda de Bingen, João de Salisbury, Bernardo de Claraval e Tomás de Aquino), além de algumas (...) representações corporais nas imagens medievais (iluminuras e esculturas), e assim analisar o tema em três vertentes: a) o corpo como cárcere da alma, b) o corpo como instrumento, e c) o corpo como desregramento. The concept of beauty, and its consequent aesthetic enjoyment, has varied according the transformations of human societies over time. During the Middle Ages there were different conceptions, in both philosophy and art, of what the role of the body is in the hierarchy of aesthetic values. Our purpose is to present the aesthetic of the body that some medieval philosophers developed in their treatises (especially Isidore of Seville, Hildegard of Bingen, John of Salisbury, Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas), as well as some bodily representations of medieval images (illuminations and sculptures). We thus examine the issue in three ways: a) the body as a prison of the soul, b) the body as an instrument, and c) the body as degradation. (shrink)

The paper explores the relationships and distinctions between pictorial and linguistic symbolic systems. It addresses the issue of the interplay between these media and symbolic systems. The paper explains why we cannot speak of any “pure” approaches and why it is necessary to be familiar with these mixed strategies. The central hypothesis is based on the idea of mutual "lending" of strategies and influences, leading to the emergence of a "new homogeneity," or a new semanticity and conceptualization. The main question (...) posed is: How does the linguistic symbolic system influence images, and how does the image symbolic system, in turn, influence language under contextual pressures? The first objective is to identify and analyze suitable examples of these pressures and “borrowings” to determine the domains of language and imagery. The analysis seeks to understand when these symbolic systems are most effective in their functions, when they exchange strategies, and what new meanings arise from this exchange. The second objective, derived from the first, is to defend the irreplaceability of the unique “message of the samples” (images) and how they symbolically create their version of the world in an irreplaceable way through words. Additionally, the paper aims to define a functional and irreplaceable space for words within the realm of visual art. (shrink)

In contrast to symbol-manipulation approaches, Cognitive Linguistics offers a modal rather than an amodal account of meaning in language. From this perspective, the meanings attached to linguistic expressions, in the form of conceptualisations, have various properties in common with visual forms of representation. This makes Cognitive Linguistics a potentially useful framework for identifying and analysing language-image relations in multimodal texts. In this paper, we investigate language-image relations with a specific focus on intersemiotic convergence. Analogous with research on gesture, (...) we extend the notion of co-text images and argue that images and language usages which are proximal to one another in a multimodal text can be expected to exhibit the same or consistent construals of the target scene. We outline some of the dimensions of conceptualisation along which intersemiotic convergence may be enacted in texts, including event-structure, viewpoint, distribution of attention and metaphor. We take as illustrative data photographs and their captions in online news texts covering a range of topics including immigration, political protests, and inter-state conflict. Our analysis suggests the utility of Cognitive Linguistics in allowing new potential sites of intersemiotic convergence to be identified and in proffering an account of language-image relations that is based in language cognition. (shrink)

The word “samurai” firmly rooted in the modern Russian language, along with Fujiyama, geisha and sakura. Though obviously this was not always the case. This article traces the initial process of perceiving the concept of samurai in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union: from the 1890s, from the first military victories of rapidly modernizing Japan, to the RussoJapanese War and further to the beginning of the Second World War. Initially endowed with features of “childishness” or “femininity,” gentleness and grace, the (...) image of Japan is gradually becoming “masculine” and is increasingly associated with the concept of “samurai.” At first, this concept is related to such qualities as belligerence and cruelty but also loyalty to lord and “knightly” honor. Often, following Nitobe Inazo, the best qualities of the Japanese are generally traced back to the samurai tradition. Later, the Japanese appear in an increasingly caricature form, as greedy but powerless aggressors. At first, this image is not associated with the concept of “samurai” but by the 1930s fused with it. At the same time, Soviet authors criticize the “feminine” perception of Japan – they describe both the ruling exploiter and the exploited worker with “masculine” traits. The article examines the early Japanese borrowings in Russian dictionaries of foreign words, the images of the Japanese in the writings of Russian and Soviet writers, the characteristics of the country and its inhabitants in popular editions devoted to Japan as well as in propaganda texts and pictures. (shrink)

"[Mitchell] undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language.... The most lucid exposition of the subject I have ever read."—Rudolf Arnheim, _Times Literary Supplement_.

Botanical illustration combines scientific knowledge and artistic technique. However, whereas illustrated botanical images record static visual qualities, such as form and color, written botanical narratives supply crucial sensory, ecological, historical, and cultural contexts that complement visual representation. Understanding the text-image interface—where images and words intersect—contributes to humanities-based analyses of botanical illustration and illustrators. More specifically, a process philosophy perspective reveals the extent to which botanical representations engage the temporality, cyclicality, and contextuality of the living plants being illustrated. This (...) article takes up these themes through a comparative theoretical study of three female Western Australian botanical illustrators, Georgiana Leake, Emily Pelloe, and Philippa Nikulinsky, whose lives together span the 183 year history of the Swan River Colony and the state of Western Australia. I apply a processist framework to examine the text-image interface of their works. All three illustrators use some form of textuality: marginalia, annotations, written accompaniments, introductory statements, and other narrative materials. In examining their written commentaries and traces, I identify the emergence of a process mode of botanical illustration that represents plants as ecological, historical, cultural, and temporal organisms. (shrink)

Ancient Greek visual representations of the recovery of Helen by Menelaos are generally thought to depend closely on two distinct poetic sources. This paper argues that this belief is untenable. The principal theoretical assumption underlying it, that there will always be a close fit between ancient Greek poetic and artistic representations of a given story, is not the only conceivable relationship between poetry and art in Archaic and Early Classical Greece. The empirical evidence advanced to support the belief, the occurrence (...) of similar motifs in both the poetic sources and the visual representations, is strained: scholars have read into the pictures motifs or intentions, including nudity and seduction, that are known from literature but have not been given unambiguous visual form in the pictures. This paper argues that the relationship between the artistic and literary representations of the recovery of Helen is much more distant and less direct than most scholars have thought. The same general story underlies all the pictorial representations of the subject in the Archaic and Early Classical periods, but no specific poetic source was necessarily behind the story circulating among the artists. This study draws attention, in particular, to methods of storytelling that are unique to the visual arts. It addresses in detail one of the most striking and problematic aspects of the iconography of the recovery of Helen, the variety of physical settings of the event, and argues that the pictorial elements of setting provide important narrative information that verbal narratives would convey in a different way. (shrink)

What follows is but the attempt to draw the lessons from the mystical and visionary text of Teresa of Ávila in order to consider today issues that concern us, questions that are asked of Aesthetics, and not only as theoretical discipline that theorises on the arts and considers the beautiful, but as a reflection on aísthesis, of sensitivity, of the sensitive edge exposed by a constituent relationship which installs the human in a world. Consideration, then, of the happening, of (...) entering the world, creative experience. This essay seeks to consider the relationship between the image and the body via the visionary discourse of the mystics, because their writings question and lend shape to a large number of formulae of thought that can help us better understand the questions facing us today. Let us imagine that the mystics made of their body a frontier or a support where what by definition has no place could take place. Place: part of space occupied by a body, the boundary of a containing object. This then is what is addressed here, a question of boundaries. (shrink)

How does a picture teach a viewer to look at it, understand it, and make meaning?. “Cross-mediality and narrative textual form: A semiotic snalysis of the lexical and visual signs and codes of the picture bnook.” Semiotica, 118 : 1–70 and Peter Pericles Trifonas.. “Texts and images.” In International handbook of semiotics, Vols. 1&2, edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas. The Netherlands: Springer. Pp. 1139–1154.) The suggestion for a pictorial grammar has been derived from the fact that pictures have no unique (...) visual metalanguage and therefore require recourse to language as an instrument for pictorial analysis. The lexical-visual relationship in a text is more complex than is suggested in the question. Proponents for the semiotic autonomy of pictures have objected that the commentaries of crossmedial contexts have not asserted the semiotic priority of the lexical over the visual message. ‘Is an autonomous semiotics of visual perception possible, or does the semiotic analysis of pictorial text always require recourse to the model of language?’. (shrink)

This text was delivered as the laudatory speech on the occasion of Didi-Huberman’s receipt of the Adorno prize in 2015. The influence of Adorno’s work on Didi-Huberman’s methodology is clarified, especially Adorno’s reflections on montage, the essayistic style and the anachronism of time. Didi-Huberman thematizes and analyses anachronism as a specific time structure of images. His works stress the similarity of images with the literary montage technique to develop a comprehensive theory of the readability of images – a practice (...) in which we approach images, based on the combination of voir and savoir, of looking and knowing. Two books, dealing with images and the Holocaust, are specifically exemplary of this approach: Images in Spite of All and Bark. Images in Spite of All calls a halt to one of the crudest erroneous readings of Adorno’s work, since the theorem of the Unspeakable or Unrepresentable always referred to Theodor W. Adorno ; and it is remarkably resistant to nuanced philological–philosophical studies of Adorno’s writings. By attentively considering the conditions in which the four photographs taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau were produced, Didi-Huberman dares to imagine the unimaginable. In this and in his more personal work of Bark, he successfully avoids an impossible reconstruction but instead asks what happened in that other place, in the cultural and our personal and memory. This is the work of ‘readability’ in the Benjaminian sense. (shrink)

In this text, Jacques Rancière critically discusses the work of Georges Didi-Huberman on images. He disagrees with various claims seemingly made by Didi-Huberman about images, such as that they can “take position” or that they are “active.” Rancière argues that Didi-Huberman adds another form of dialectics to the simpler form of dialectics adopted by Bertolt Brecht and Harun Farocki in their works, namely one that also involves a layering of different temporalities. However, both in Brecht’s War Primer and in (...) Didi-Huberman’s analysis of it, all the potencies credited to images as such are actually potencies of the words that accompany the images. Rancière comes to the conclusion that to “put images in motion,” as Didi-Huberman wants to do, or to regard them as being “active,” he has to put words, his own poetic and extensive writings, in motion. (shrink)

This paper examines the inter-relationship between image, text and object in the Codex Kentmanus, which is one of the earliest records of the plants in the botanical garden at Padua, studied by Johannes Kentmann . The manuscript shows that “observation” for Kentmann involved a gradual process of assimilating knowledge from other physicians, apothecaries, and books in order to make the plants which were originally encountered at a specific time and place into a more generalised object of study for (...) learned physicians. (shrink)

This section provides the first full edited transcription—from Latin and Italian vernacular language—of the Opera geometrica. Further, as above said, facsimile texts are added, including our critical comments as footnotes to this chapter.

This book investigates the turning point that occurred in the middle of nineteenth-century France when utopia shifted from its literary ambitions to a social-scientific concept aimed at laying the grounds for a better, fairer society. By using passions as the central focus, the author's aim is to circumscribe what he calls the utopian "afterlife" that characterizes fin de siècle France and evolved as dystopia later on in the twentieth century. Indeed, the scope of the book runs through a corpus representing (...) the nineteenth century from Romanticism to fin de siècle literature. The introduction exposes very thoroughly the contextual emergence of utopias in nineteenth-century France and seeks to position them within... (shrink)

Until the beginning of the twentieth century Christianity, in order to proclaim its message, was based above all upon the word, the substance of prayer and preaching; certainly manuscripts, with the Scriptures and other fundamental texts, long secured the foundations of the faith, but before the advent of printing their diffusion and reception remained the prerogative of lettered elites, most often clerics such as the Benedictines (remember Umberto Eco's famous novel published in 1980, The Name of the Rose). Moreover, the (...) Catholic Church made extensive use of the image in the Middle Ages, above all in the gothic period, and created remarkable visual splendour in its holy places. Stained glass windows and paintings and sculptures with subjects from the Old and New Testaments reinforced the devotion and faith of the illiterate. It was only after 1450, with Gutenberg's invention of printing - which, moreover, immediately disseminated bibles, missals and prayer-books - that the text became a major means of transmitting the Christian message. From the sixteenth century onwards Protestant Calvinists (but not Lutherans or Anglicans) rejected religious imagery - even the crucifix - as a means of devotion, for they were considered idolatrous; on the other hand, the reformers, more than the Catholic Church, laid stress on the reading of biblical texts by the faithful, especially the Old Testament, henceforth much more widely distributed, thanks expressly to printing. Admittedly the word did not lose its rights; like Catholicism in its churches and cathedrals, the Reformation preached the Good Word in its temples. Yet paradoxically, the present return of the religious image - this time televisual - was to be first of all a Protestant occurrence, principally in the United States. (shrink)

Flaubert is a major writer, as popular in England as he is in France, and of an enduring fascination. This book examines his responses to pictorial art, from classical to popular, Eastern to Western, traditional to modern. Rival and foil, pictorial art emerges as one of the most powerful driving forces behind his own work.

Images permeate and propel archaic thinking in diverse ways. How do philosophic texts from the Greek archaic period (ca. eighth through early-fifth centu­ries BCE) conceive of images and what do images accomplish in archaic philosophies? In what ways can attention to images in philosophic texts open perspectives onto the relations of myth, poetry, and philosophy in the archaic Greek period? With these questions guiding the inquiry, this paper explores texts from various traditions jointly related within the archaic Aegean cultural matrix. (...) Texts from what might be termed philosophy’s prehistory, such as the ancient Egyptian Leiden Hymns and Odysseia, pro­vide important context for understanding the continuity and development of images. (shrink)

In the rabbinic literature from the land of Israel the poor are depicted not as passive recipients of gifts and support, but as independent agents who are responsible for their own behaviour. Communal care for the needy was expected to go beyond their basic needs for food, clothing and shelter; the physical safety of the poor and the value of their time as well as their dignity and self-worth were also included in the scope of charity. In this monograph, Yael (...) Wilfand offers a comprehensive and contextual analysis of major rabbinic texts on poverty and charity composed during the first five centuries of the Common Era in the land of Israel, principally the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Palestinian Talmud and midrashim. She shows that, for the rabbis, the poor were not necessarily considered outsiders; indeed, some students and rabbis in Palestine may have personally experienced poverty. Wilfand claims that such socio-economic diversity contributed to the thinking of these rabbis, who rarely saw poverty as a result of transgression (in contrast to the Babylonian Talmud). This book presents a number of contrasting viewpoints held by Palestinian rabbis over such questions as: Must communal administrators ensure applicants' eligibility for alms? Should the newly indigent from wealthy families receive exceptional levels of support? Might neighbouring gentiles qualify for economic assistance from Jewish communal sources? By examining Palestinian rabbinic sources within the contexts both of the hegemonic Greco-Roman (later, Christian) milieu and of the biblical heritage, this volume offers an absorbing account of some ancient approaches to timeless social challenges. (shrink)

We are used to classifying different thinkers according to their general orientation: progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic of the past, materialist or idealist. Walter Benjamin does not fit into these categories. He is a revolutionary critic of the ideologies of progress, a materialist theologian, and his nostalgia for the past is at the service of his Marxist dreams for the future. It is therefore not surprising that so many different and conflicting readings of his work have developed since his (...) death, some trying to bring him back into the usual frames of thinking, others trying to recruit him for the newest philosophical fads, and many simply damning him as ridden with contradictions and therefore an intellectual failure. But there are also some happy exceptions: those who try to take into account the irreducible singularity of his intellectual and political endeavours. These three books, quite different in object and method ‐ a collection of documents from his archives, a biography, and a ‘Benjamin Handbook’ ‐ belong to these exceptions. (shrink)

After briefly discussing ekphrasis’s historical significance and function in the arts and its continued relevance as an effective artistic practice, this essay explores the concept of digital ekphrasis in the age of artificial intelligence and digital image generation. The discussion focuses on popular AI models readily available online, such as Midjourney, Dall-e, Stable Diffusion, and Firefly. By examining prominent examples of AI art or so-called popular “prompt art” – including Refik Anadol’s award-winning and mesmerizing AI project “Unsupervised” (MoMA, New (...) York, 2023) and the viral Midjourney prompt “The Pope wearing a Balencia-ga puffer jacket” (Spring 2023) – the author questions whether we can also speak of a computational ekphrasis in the age of artificial intelligence and AI models as our new co-creative collaborators. Therefore, the essay considers a praxeology of digital ekphrasis, exploring how efficient text instructions for AI models are now used to create compelling images in a new digital aesthetic that affects their global audience. (shrink)

Women's Power To Be Loud: The Authority of the Discourse and Authority of the Text in Mary Dorcey's Irish Lesbian Poetic Manifesto "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" The following article aims to examine Mary Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear," included in the 1991 volume Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers. Apart from being a well-known and critically acclaimed Irish poet and fiction writer, the author of the poem has been, from its (...) beginnings, actively involved in lesbian rights movement. Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" is to be construed from a perspective of lesbian and feminist discourse, as well as a cultural, sociological and political context in which it was created. While analyzing the poem, the emphasis is being paid to the intertwining of various ideological and subversive assumptions, their competing for importance and asserting authority over one another, in line with, and sometimes, against the grain of the textual framework. In other words, Dorcey's poem introduces a multilayered framework that draws heavily on various sources: the popular culture idiom, religious discourse, the text even employs, in some parts, crime and legal jargon, but, above all, it relies upon sensuous lesbian experience where desire and respect for the other woman opens the emancipating space allowing for redefining of one's personal and textual location. As a result of such a multifarious interaction, unrepresented and unacknowledged Irish women's standpoints may come to the surface and become articulated, disrupting their enforced muteness that the controlling heteronormative discourse has attempted to ensure. In Dorcey's poem, the operating metaphor of women's silence, conceived of, at first, as the need to conceal one's sexual identity in fear of social ostracism and contempt of the "neighbours," is further equated with the noiseless, solitary and violent death of the anonymous woman, the finding of whose body was reported on the news. In both cases, the unwanted Irish women's voices of either agony, during the unregistered by anybody misogynist bloodshed that took place inside the flat, or the forbidden sounds of lesbian sexual excitement, need to be censored and stifled, not to disrupt an idealized image of the well-established family and heteronormative patterns. In the light of the aforementioned parallel, empowered by the shared bodily and emotional closeness with her female lover, and already bitterly aware that silence in discourse is synonymous with textual, or even, actual death, the speaker in "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" comes to claim her own agency and makes her voice heard by others and taken into account. (shrink)

In this paper, a novel approach for word extraction and character segmentation from the handwritten Bangla document images is reported. At first, a modified Run Length Smoothing Algorithm, called Spiral Run Length Smearing Algorithm, is applied for the extraction of words from the text lines of unconstrained handwritten Bangla document images. This technique has helped to overcome some of the drawbacks of standard horizontal and vertical RLSA techniques. SRLSA technique has been applied on the Bangla handwritten document image (...) database CMATERdb1.1.1 and the success rate of the word extraction is found to be 86.01%. In the second part of the work, we have presented a useful solution to the problem on how best word images of handwritten Bangla script can be segmented into constituent characters. Moreover, the technique can segment the words having discontinuity in Matra, a prominent feature of Bangla script. It also optimizes the trade-off between under/over segmentation as Matra region and segmentation points are estimated more precisely. As a result, better word segmentation accuracy is achieved with minimal data loss. Here, a success rate of 92.48% is observed on a dataset of 750 handwritten Bangla words which is 3.35% higher than that of our earlier techniques. (shrink)

This dissertation explains Audre Lorde's theoretical work as a pedagogical model, and particularly as foundational for an exploration of photomontage or image/text. Lorde's poetry enacts her theory; she uses her fascination with difference formally, structurally, and rhetorically. My conjecture is that Lorde's practice posits an epistemology based on her thoroughgoing investigation of difference on many levels. She is fascinated by difference, contradiction, dialectic. Her method significantly involves constant comparison and juxtaposition or repositioning of images; processes which tend to (...) be associated with allegorical procedures and montage practice. ;Lorde's work helps illuminate the following questions central to the pedagogy, of image/text or photomontage, toward which I speculate. How can we find forms that move us from our emotions and or something that is internal, powerfully and meaningfully out among others and back and how can we use forms or representation to intervene in our communities and society toward more complex understandings and just practices? ;How can we move students from production to analysis; from developing their own idea, even as a collective, to broader analysis. How do we ask the questions that move us forward and that keep us productive and critical, as part of a dialogue or dialectical practice allowing us to see differently? How do we resist "closure" without committing to aimless relativism? How do we open improvisational space where things can happen, but where we also make meaning of and judgments about what happens or what doesn't; and about where we need to move and why? ;The work here is toward a pedagogy which holds images in conversation, realizing that images and conversations move so we need to make a practice of scrutiny. The pedagogy toward which I speculate examines how our culture/society works in us through images, too often unexamined. My conjecture is that there are methods of dialogue which produce questions out of difference, comparison, and contradiction; and by way of production of imagery, and forms. Specifically, production of visual imagery can be used powerfully in this process. (shrink)

Illustrated by critically examining a range of architectural journalism, from an article by artist Paul Nash in 'The Architectural Review', 1940, to an early project by contemporary French architects Lacaton et Vassal published in the journal '2G' in 2001, to recent photography by Hisao Suzuki published in the journal 'El Croquis', this book brings a radical and detailed analysis of the architectural media. It addresses issues of architectural criticism, architectural photography and the role of journal editors, and argues that the (...) architectural media is a site of contestation and ambiguity regarding the role of critical and speculative thinking. The book highlights moments where a different type of critical voice emerges within the architectural media, indicating the possibility of a more progressive engagement with the media as a platform for critical thinking about architecture. 0The study is underpinned by theory about utopian thinking/discourse, primarily from the work of the French semiotician and art theorist Louis Marin and the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. Through this, it builds a fresh theoretical approach to the architectural media and begins to reveal a hitherto unexplored dimension of ‘latent’ or ‘unconscious’ discourse within the media portrait of architecture. Following Jameson’s charting of the role of the utopian imagination in the modern and post-modern periods, the book suggests that genuine utopian thinking has undergone comprehensive suppression in our current times and that the task of theory is to now to detect its presence and explore its meaning within new forms and sites of cultural production. (shrink)

At present, most of the research in the field of medical-assisted diagnosis is carried out based on image or electronic medical records. Although there is some research foundation, they lack the comprehensive consideration of comprehensive image and text modes. Based on this situation, this article proposes a fusion classification auxiliary diagnosis model based on GoogleNet model and Bi-LSTM model, uses GoogleNet to process brain computed tomographic images of ischemic stroke patients and extract CT image features, uses (...) Bi-LSTM model to extract the electronic medical record text, integrates the two features using the full connection layer network and Softmax classifier, and obtains a method that can assist the diagnosis from two modes. Experiments show that the proposed scheme on average improves 3.05% in accuracy compared to individual image or text modes, and the best performing GoogleNet + Bi-LSTM model achieves 96.61% accuracy; although slightly less in recall, it performs better on F1 values, and has provided feasible new ideas and new methods for research in the field of multi-model medical-assisted diagnosis. (shrink)

In this text, Jacques Rancière critically discusses the work of Georges Didi-Huberman on images. He disagrees with various claims seemingly made by Didi-Huberman about images, such as that they can “take position” or that they are “active.” Rancière argues that Didi-Huberman adds another form of dialectics to the simpler form of dialectics adopted by Bertolt Brecht and Harun Farocki in their works, namely one that also involves a layering of different temporalities. However, both in Brecht’s War Primer and in (...) Didi-Huberman’s analysis of it, all the potencies credited to images as such are actually potencies of the words that accompany the images. Rancière comes to the conclusion that to “put images in motion,” as Didi-Huberman wants to do, or to regard them as being “active,” he has to put words, his own poetic and extensive writings, in motion. (shrink)

This article compares the poetics of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire du cinéma in order to realign our understanding of metaphor, metonymy and montage with the inter-formal dialogues that new media artworks increasingly demand of audiences. An analysis of Godard's ‘quotation’ of Proust's words and ideas from Le Temps retrouvé sets out an explicit rivalry between text and image. However, drawing on formalist and structuralist approaches to both literature and cinema, including (...) Roman Jakobson and Gérard Genette, as well as more recent discussions developed by Gilles Deleuze and Lev Manovich, I will argue that the nature of the image manifested in both artworks corresponds to a shared aesthetic that exceeds distinctions between word and image, literature and video. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reveal with an overall approach, how the psycho-social background, starting from woman image in first periods and reach modern day, is embraced by outstanding theorists of modern psychology, and also how these collected works are reflected in their definitions of woman. If it is considered that woman has been discussed with reflections against and not from primary sources throughout history, it can be seen that the most essential roots of woman narrations can (...) be found in oral culture and the parts of written texts are made over symbol, metaphor, proposition and story. However myths (stories) that take place in oral and partly written culture about primitive man, are sacred tales, they will also present data regarding human image. Therefore with a limited effort of human being to understand the infinite, it can be understood what human being think, feel and how they interpret rather than gods/goddesses ontology. From this point of view, this article that consists of two parts, first of all will mention especially about perception of Goddess in those reflected to image of God, maintaining its efficiency in conscious or unconscious as a system of symbols intrinsic to human nature and cultural code background and then the woman image will be roughly discussed with a descriptive style over the world of mythology, psychology and faith. In the second part, it will be examined in detail how all the written and oral information about understanding woman by modern anthropologists are interpreted with the perspective of modern psychology specific to theorists such as Freud, Jung and Fromm. Eventually, it will be emphasized that past and future are integrated with information, experience and feelings with an active relationship; perception and approach of woman have stayed up to date in time continually; mythology, psychology and religion are important factors within this matter.Summary: Human being has also used historical, temporal and spatial attributions for God. Infinite human being has expressed their thoughts about the finite God by analogy. Despite the dominance of male gender in the images of God in these analogies which are the products of human experience, female Gods that is to say Goddesses are not few. The matter of how the image of goddess come to the fore in a distinctly male-dominant society is a noteworthy matter. The narration of Earth Mother over female symbol in myths in which the harmony is constantly secured within the inner and exterior world and mention about living in harmony with the universe is an important data in order to understand female characteristics attributed to God. Human being has also used historical, temporal and spatial attributions for God. Infinite human being has expressed their thoughts about the finite God by analogy.The woman subject is influenced by transferred life experience within the historical process, and it is an undeniable fact that ancient “woman perception” has reflections to the present day. Within the history of humanity, striking definitions about woman can be seen in sacred statements in symbol language. Therefore, it is proper to examine primarily the image of sacred and then examine female meaning that is charged on that image. The aim of this study can be summed up with two themes: a) try to understand the general framework of reflections of the present image of woman, style of narration and comprehension in psychological, sociological, and religious terms by getting help from myths which mention about ancient image of God, although there is centuries old difference between those stories and us, b) reveal the image of woman in Freud, Jung, and Fromm’s approach which establishes a bond between mythology that is a system of symbols special to human nature and human psychology and discuss this subject by using psychology of religion.When reviewed ancient Far East and Middle East myths and also Ancient Greek mythology, it can be seen that gods are not cloistered supernatural beings who do not have abstract personalities and also do not lead a wholly metaphysic life. The crucial issue here is; the reality that Gods and Goddesses are shown as a model to both man and woman. Psychologists who examine religion in terms of psychology state that first outcomes about the image of God come up not with behavior but with emotion. The attributions of gender, related to the emotion in question are cited during the transfer of those emotions as well. Therefore; philosophers, culture and religion historians, theologians, anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, and sociologists have contributed to this transfer when they discuss the cult of God or Goddess throughout the history. It is interesting that the usage of the term of God maintains while the usage of the term of Goddess decreases. Civilization historians claim that the appearance of divine religions particularly quickens the course of transition from goddess to god. According to them, during this period in which there is a transfer from polytheist image of God to monotheist image of God, the quantitative change in the perception of God comes with a qualitative change. According to Fromm, during this power gathering period, there has been a transfer from mother and feminine (woman) centered religion to father and masculine (man) centered religious experience/ God image. According to him, in the second stage of humanity development, “the children of Earth Mother turn into the children of divine father”, there is a transition from unconditional love of mother to authoritarian sympathy of father, from an image of supplemental and surrounding Goddess to authoritarian image of God who makes requests by his nature, lays down principles and laws, and supports the power and search for a successor to deliver the power.The perception of women who led to Prophet Adam deviated from the truth and expelled from heaven is spread around especially the regions of one-God religions. This has strengthened the idea that divine religions have a negative view towards women. Including Islam, the reason of all divine religions’ encountering with claims that they have a negative approach against woman stem from applying to that religions’ human resources rather than essential religious sources which are existing or lost earliest forms.Oedipus complex is an important thesis of Freud which explains the development of religion and morals; establish the base of his psychology, and in fact, important in terms of his making connection with difference of kinds and flow or non-flow of request and needs while explaining human behaviors. According to Freud who points to sexuality and aggression which are the most powerful two instinct in the biology of male or female; the first three or five years of a newly born human- this is the period in which the basic part of personality is formed- the definition of self is extremely influenced by his/her gender (in both biological and sociocultural terms). Freud who put forward father-son conflict in the struggle to survive between Zeus and his sons in Moses and Monotheism (1998c) and Totem and Taboo (1998a), makes an explanation about the origin of religion and humanity over two male characters. Jung pays attention to goddess image as much as the image of god and do not approach this situation only as a polytheism or sociocultural explanation or childish appearances of a primitive mind. He accepts goddesses as a reflection of archetypes in human. Male has a feminine side, female has a masculine side, and a unity occurs when both complete each other. According to Fromm, a taxonomy referring to woman and man is primarily a sociology-based approach rather than a biology-based one. Fromm (1995) thinks that the whole depiction shows individuals’ own desire and needs, that is to say, their psychology rather than a theology. Transition from mother (woman) centered religion to father (man) centered religious experience and God image is essentially one of the most important breaking/inversion points of human being, not humanity. As a result, it can be said that it is an important point to clearly understand the story of mankind to examine that intense freshness at hand and centeredness of quantitative and qualitative changes of divine or God image of ancient societies come down after psychological, sociological, religious, economic, political, and cultural changes. (shrink)