Text as Image

The use of textual language in the visual arts has long been derided by puritanical artists and art educators, who are adamant that a "true" work of art must be able to communicate the artist’s message to the art viewer, without the need to rely on textual language, therefore relying entirely on the visual product, as a vehicle of communication.

Viewing text, from a purely visual perspective, by “guillotining” it from its semiotic associations within the art viewer’s linguistic sphere, has intrigued me ever since my multimedia lecturer, Mr Lincoln, chided a classmate for using lyrics in her image, to explicitly communicate her message.

It fascinates me, how when dismembered from its semantic and cognitive associations, text presents itself in an entirely unfamiliar, semantically unadulterated and truly enigmatic form to the viewer.

ETA220 DEVELOPING THINKING SKILLS & CREATIVITY IN VISUAL ART allowed me to explore the world’s myriad of languages and their written forms — both living and extinct, in an attempt to get students to use text as an image.

The world’s foremost authoritative and comprehensive database of world languages, (Ethnologue, Grimes 1996), maintained by the Summer Institute of linguistics, lists a staggering 6802 living languages and over a thousand extinct languages. There also exist written languages, which have been discovered, but have yet to be deciphered.


Top 10 Most Widely Spoken Languages
Language....................Number of speakers
1. Chinese (Mandarin) ...1,075,000,000
2. English ...................514,000,000
3. Hindi......................496,000,000
4. Spanish....................425,000,000
5. Russian....................275,000,000
6. Arabic.....................256,000,000
7. Bengali....................215,000,000
8. Portuguese...............194,000,000
9. Malay-Indonesian.......176,000,000
10. French..................129,000,000

Source: Ethnologue, 13th Edition

In the course of my research, written languages familiar to the target audience (lower secondary Singaporean students), such as Chinese, English, Tamil and Malay languages, have been excluded, as comprehensible text will cease to become an image, once the viewer is able to decode its meaning. The research was therefore narrowed down to unfamiliar and extinct languages, and complex mathematical and physical symbols or operators, which present themselves to the viewer, entirely through their aesthetic form.