ABSTRACT
The particular nature of visual language certainly rests in its proximity to the empirical mechanisms of human perception. While this proximity fuels the conventional association of a picture with “in front of the camera” reality, the dialectic mode of seeing also can be artifi cially stimulated through a picture’s manufacture. From this perspective, creating and arranging a grid of visual variables by photographic techniques is analogous to an act of producing language, at least as long as enough of a basis is established for a receiver to conceptualize signifi cance. In so far as the picture is indeed intended to relate signifi cance to a receiver, it profi ts from an element of double articulation that is part of the cognitive capacity of humans and can thus be manipulated for purposes of communication. But if the communicative structure of pictures contains elements similar to those at the root of verbal and written language, the question is how visual signs compare with these linguistic units. On the one hand, visual signs share with written signs a deferral in time between the moment of their production and that of their presentation. On the other hand, modern broadcast techniques allow for “live” broadcasting, which reduces such deferral to the realm of seconds, thus approximating the immediacy of speech with its transmitterreceiver context. Furthermore, the ability of the clip to structure the time frame of visual syntax resembles more the pacing of words in speech than the independently determined following of lines of a text. Yet despite sharing some elements with verbal communication, the production of pictures always excludes the transmitter from the spatial context, which exclusion ultimately also requires a temporal break, however minimal.
