Wordless: Imagery Replacing Text in Online Communication

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With what began as a text-based enterprise, online media is more rapidly than ever doing away with text in preference of pure imagery. Newspapers with online publications, for example, now have added slideshow galleries and video content that turns towards visual rather than verbal information to tell a story. With online communication rapidly becoming quicker and more condensed, in a sense a turn towards visual information may also be more natural. Text is after all just a symbol for something unrepresented, or a slower way to pass information through a middleman. Visual cues empower the viewer to interpret media themselves, because text and language pass along narrative rather than simply re-presenting events.

Stream: Arts Theory and Practice

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I am an artist working in video and other media, teaching Digital Arts at Stetson University in central Florida. I'm interested in the space where narrative video meets glitch and the possibilities of thinking about video and online media in terms of aura or presence. I'm trying to address digitized aura and sculptural space in video and online signifiers by closing them in culturally dependent, feedback-loops. Most art objects have presence, so I'm using this in the infinitely reproducible media of video. The case for digital aura is best supported by the following question: “Is it as hard to delete files from your hard drive as it once was to let go of nostalgic objects?” Signs and media, once fetishized as artifacts from an event, are now created and displayed on screens at 72dpi. Media exists almost exclusively as signifiers to events without physical connection to the events themselves. What was once the accumulation of things from an event (flyers, posters, tickets, vinyl) are now digital and saved. As emotions and experiences become increasingly connected to virtual signifiers, will our emotional intentions be better known? Or, is the speed at which media is delivered making it that much more fleeting?