European Journal of American Culture - Volume 32, Issue 2, 2013

This article explores theories of light in the American Romantic period as a way of addressing image–text relations in the dynamic early decades of photography. It addresses the gothic nature of the daguerreotype’s ambiguous negative/positive picture and its temporal and spatial implications in relation to Melville’s aesthetic of light in his Romantic epic Moby-Dick. Upon the daguerreotype’s arrival in 1839, it was greeted by Americans with both fascination and suspicion: not only were the chemical exchanges viewed as wizardry and the picture deemed to take possession of the sitter’s spirit, but when tilted under light, the daguerreotype’s ghostly negative image is revealed. For Romantic artists, Daguerre’s process, ‘the art of writing with light’, held equally complex implications for the conception of Nature. Newton’s theory of light had already exposed its intricate character, but Goethe’s nineteenth-century Colour Theory, with its descriptions of the individual nature of seeing, showed that the Romantic notion of Nature as ‘light Divine’ was deeply problematic. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael conflates meanings of whiteness, colour and light for more congruous poetic interpretations that mirror the daguerreotype’s uncanny paradigm of light.

In 1941 photographer Edward Weston travelled around the United States photographing images for a luxury reprint edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to be published by the Limited Editions Club under the direction of George Macy. A case study in the fundamental challenges of combining photographs and poetry, this article discusses Weston and Macy’s disagreements over the issue of ‘illustration’ and the shortcomings of an illustrative approach to photography, and discusses one of the more successful combinations of images and texts in the final published volumes. Although these final volumes occupy an uncertain place within the American photo-book genre of the 1930s and 1940s due to the lack of consistently close or dynamic interactions of texts and images, as a project by one of America’s acclaimed modernist photographers for a canonical American text, the Limited Editions Club’s Leaves of Grass is an important book in the history of the American photo book or image-text that represents some of the essential challenges in combining photography and poetry.

Using previously neglected archival materials from the Donald Barthelme Literary Papers at the University of Houston Libraries, my article identifies the sources of Donald Barthelme’s collages and their allusive meanings. In doing so, the author’s under-appreciated relationship with artistic collage techniques is further elucidated, revealing how indebted his work is to the innovations of surrealist collage production. Principal amongst these influences is Max Ernst’s ‘historical’ collage aesthetic. Using the theories of Marshall McLuhan, I argue that Barthelme’s technique of pictorial collage is an attempt to rival contemporary systems of representation (like television and radio), while recognizing the significance of mass media on his work. Capturing the evolving landscape of contemporary mass culture, I examine the relationship between text and image in Barthelme’s short stories.

For most users of digital technology, code is the hidden engine of their experience: silent, disguised, unknown and possibly unknowable. It is this experience of code that will be the subject of this article. Code, which is often perceived as textual, runs software, which is predominantly received as graphical. As with printing and handwritten script, all text is technically graphical, but this observation refers specifically to the increasing use of graphic icons, and visual media, to form the language of digital communications – the egg-timer, the pointer, Twitter and Facebook ‘buttons’, video CVs and avatars.

This article will consider how the user encounter with code, as image, can perhaps be brought to our attention through visual narratives that attempt to represent digital communication and programming. The article will begin with a consideration of code itself as a problematic imagetext: that is, code as a semantic, or linguistic, material that is not readable in a human context, that persists as a sign until the instance of its being run – an instance of potential performativity. It will do so through a discussion of critical interventions in the field of code studies by scholars such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alexander Galloway and Adrian Mackenzie. Having established this reading, the article will move on to consider how code might resist representation in narrative form, particularly in film. It will do so through a discussion of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s term ‘medial ideology’, a construct that references fictional representations of code and coding that wilfully obscure the actual mechanical process. The main section of the article will be given over to tracing Kirschenbaum’s term through two recent films that creatively interpret the difficulties of depicting computing and communication on screen, The Social Network (Fincher, 2010), and Catfish (Joost and Schulman, 2010).

An interactive generative system is a computational system for creating artworks that produces new versions or sequences of a text, image or sound each time it is activated. It interrogates ideas of authorship and the stable, monolithic, text. This article argues that interactive generative media can result in a new approach to imagetext as algorithmic imagetext. In algorithmic imagetext, text and image are not necessarily juxtaposed but share the same or similar algorithms. The essay focuses on interactive generative media and algorithmic imagetext in the work of ‘post-black’ African American multimedia artist and writer D. Fox Harrell. It explicates his programming of algorithmic processes to generate both verbal and visual texts through the interactive generative GRIOT system, and suggests how programming relates to the semiotics of text and image. The essay examines Harrell’s adaptation of the GRIOT system to generate the polypoem ‘The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs’ and then, in collaboration with Kenny Chow, to create the generative visual renku – a transformation of the traditional verbal Japanese renku into interactive image tiles. In addition, it looks briefly at the way Harrell combines the verbal and visual in multimedia work. The article also analyses how Harrell attempts to employ algorithmic imagetext to overturn stereotypes of racial and gender identity, and to problematize the tensions and interactions that occur through globalization.

Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin (2012) Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 278 pp.; 38 colour plates, 84 monochromes, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62646-8, Paperback, £22.50