: Textualization of Territories In the beginning of the academic year (2015), several Master students of Cultural Studies were given a task to visit one of the neighbourhoods of the city of Leuven, to take some pictures that we thought where signs of the cultural or artistic development of the city. The area was unfamiliar to me and since the other group members where already equipped with detailed city map, I figured that there could be other approaches to terra incognita. I’ve created a Map of Perception, as an alternative technique helping to navigate in the unknown territories of the city. The map itself is not destined to replace the actual city map, but to propose an unconventional way to see new streets, observe buildings, walk down the road and maybe even to interact with passers-by. The pre-made text was handed to other group members (image 1) and actually functioned as a filter on camera lens, helping to perceive new territories, areas, spaces, but in more concrete light – the light of the pre-given words. The text map works like a triggering agent – one has to find and identify oneself with text written on the list, choose preferences and relate it to the inner experience of the new location. Ideally this playful activity results in interactions, observations, modifications of the map itself. Text, as such, might seem to be simple linguistic object, but is a powerful tool for opening and widening the horizons of human perception and senses. It might be seen as pure language, but as Ludwig Wittgenstein mentioned, language games can create the appearances of new meanings in the usage of language. I think the same might be said about aesthetics.
Textualization might influence the way we perceive film, photograph, and another text. It might influence our appreciation of things, objects or events. And what is interesting to observe in the tree given examples that were mentioned, is that analysing effects produced by the textualization of the image, we see that we deal with progressive aesthetic experience. The more aesthetic challenges we accept, the more advance in the terms of the development of the taste. Once we, as spectators or creators, are familiar with technical details and understand the way in which the image was remade, de-constructed, recreated, we, in a certain sense, add the expansion to original image, its meaning, transcend authors primarily intentions.. Then the text is born from the information image gives about itself, and then, layer by layer appears on the top of it (like flower bud, develops new petals before opening itself up completely), it’s not as is the image was destroyed or vandalized, but given another aesthetic shade, nuance. What is interesting in applying textualization techniques is that in the long run, in case of images Nicole Dextras our eyes adapt to see de-constructed or reconstructed images, and we start finding them less aesthetically aggressive, we can place them into given a narrative and start considering them as artworks, created using digital medium, different from traditional, let’s say a brush and an oil paint. Technical knowledge allows us to be liberated form “fear of unknown” in a sense, that the procedure of “remaking” becomes familiar. These experiments, when explained, protect artists of the digital age from being called iconoclasts, image vandals or rebellious spectators.
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“Our bodyis not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument, and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic since it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions.” Categories
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