Footnotes to the Footnote

Below are three shorts I made for my 782 class with Lane Hall, "Visual Narratives." This project asked us to, "Create a text that uses forms appropriate to conceptual strategies culled from our investigation of experimental literature."

In Lane's class as well as my 709 class with Anne Wysocki, "Visual and Digital Rhetorics," I've been interested in the slippage between image and text, especially in terms of digital production. With that in mind, the three shorts explore the calligram, which is a work that uses text to construct an image; or, as Foucault calls it, "A figure in the shape of writing" (This is Not a Pipe, 23). One of Foucault's points about calligrams that interests me is that, " The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates" (24). I think this is a particularly important relationship to explore in the context of new media.

Also, I have incorporated Peirce's three kinds of signs: icon, index and symbol. Gillian Rose, in her book, Visual Methodologies, describes the three: "In iconic signs, the signifier represents the signified by apparently having alikeness to it...In indexical signs, there is an inherent relationship between the signified and signifier...[and] symbolic signs have a conventionalized but clearly arbitrary relation between signifier and signified" (83). I feel that adding these elements expands the notion of the calligram beyond the one-off text-as-image in favor of a more in depth relationship between text and image.

Finally, in his discussion of calligrams, Foucault uses the examples of "a bird, a flower, or rain" (24). These seemed as good a place to start as any. Enjoy.