Writing Visual Relations
Short description
Writing Visual Relations: The Possibilities of Transdisciplinary Ekphrasis investigates into possibilities of writing about visual art. In the project ekphrasis – writing about image/writing as image – serves as both subject matter and method. The research investigates the potentialities of writing the visual, while examining connections, differences and indebtedness between image and text.
The purpose of the research is to investigate possibilities of writing visual relations. Through the literary mode of ekphrastic writing—describing a visual work in words—the research inquires into writing in relation to the still, non-photographic, image: the potentialities of writing the visual, while examining the connections, differences and indebtedness between image and text. The aim is to, through new materialist approaches, generate new knowledge regarding the writing of the visual and the relations between textuality and visuality. The research serves to inform and further the ongoing debates regarding writing about visual art. A main objective is to provide with a research outcome that will be of aid in higher education, both in the visual and the literary fields, as well as the field of artistic research itself.
While there is a long tradition within the history of visual art, as well as of literature, to critically engage with image and text alongside, through, and even as one another, the area remains fraught with issues. With the growing field of artistic research, and the continued formalization of art education, making writing a larger part of both the education and the field at large, questions regarding text and writing in relation to visual works of art are gaining both dimension and ubiquity.
With the research project Writing Visual Relations, the aim is to generate knowledge regarding the writing of the visual and the relations between textuality and visuality, for both the visual and the literary field, as well as the field of artistic research itself. Through a new materialist—diffractive and performative—ideational approach to language as inseparable from image (as well as any other aspect of the world) a main issue of engaging with these different though mutually bound expressions regards how to write about while writing within. The ekphrasis, as distinct from other ways of engaging with the relations between the visual and the textual, seeks to through verbal language perform/portray the image. In this way, it is a textual attempt to capture the stasis of the image, to transform into visuality, while insistently remaining text. The ekphrasis thereby situates itself within the nexus of complexities that Writing Visual Relations investigates: How to write about visual relations, while also writing them; how to write about the visual within a transdisciplinary field of textual-visual entanglements. Throughout the research the issues outlined above is addressed through the following questions:
- What possibilities are there to write about the image, from within a transdisciplinary position?
- How can the author acknowledge and situate the own ways of looking—the I—while keeping eye on the textual and visual work?
- How does turning to performative (rather than representationalist) ideas about visuality and language affect the writing of ekphrasis? In which ways are text and image indebted to each other?
- In which way is the image different from the text that seeks to describe it? In which ways are they connected? What do the differences do? What do the connections do?