|
June 16, 2007
A question addressed to W.J.T. Mitchell. ' How would you define picture? Is it a sign?' Mitchell's answer:
I would rather explain the relation between the image and the picture. If you think of the sign as constitutive in de Saussure`s model by the convention then the image might be even non-sign. The image violates the law of the sign. My thinking of the image is that it could be situated at the border of linguistics. The question I would rather want to answer is the relation between the image and the picture. You can hang the picture on the wall but you can not hang an image on the wall. An image is what comes off the picture.
Okay, so this is equivalent to the picture on the wall.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Remarkable Rocks, 2007
What is the image? What is it that comes off the picture? The effect of the picture on me?
Is it a mental phenomenon? Mitchell responds:
It is a percept with the illusion. It is what appears in the picture. I think it is very helpful for lots of thinking about the strange relation between images and their materiality to make this fundamental section. The picture is an image in a medium, or an image that is mixed into some picture of an object. Even if the object is shaped as an image or the object has reflected on an image. I think this is an extremely useful distinction.
Sadly, I don't get it.
Wikipedia says that a percept is a philosophical term which roughly means an individual's observation/perception of something external to one's self; more specifically, the resultant of perceiving. It is the representation of an external event that affected the senses and which - by perceptual processing - caused the activation of a certain category in the mind, i.e., the percept.
And the illusion bit? Well one picture can create two entirely separate and distinct percepts.
|
http://youtube.com/watch?v=amWoC8DlCJU