Reading, writing, speaking
Statement by Jolanta Lapiak
Screenshot from 1.39 min video, 720x480px
My video work Reading investigates the meaning and concept of reading and looking when perceiving a work. The dichotomy between looking and reading appears to correlate by distinguishing image from word, and art from literature.
Let's look at a study for a moment. Neurological studies reveal that there are classical activities in the left cerebral hemisphere in native signers like those found in hearing speakers when listening or reading. This suggests that the left cerebral hemisphere, which is assumed to be responsible for language, is not solely ruled by speech or phonetic writing.
This piece of work oddly presents a double level of reading – one is reading the language Ameslan in black figure (space) and the other is reading the lines (time). However, as language becomes unintelligible with the tiny scale of my body, it creates an experience of reading without reading. In a simialr vein, one experiences reading without reading the invisible lines. Now back to the neurological study, how would a native Ameslan's cerebral activity be like when "reading" this video? It would be interesting to see the result.
Another thing what this video illustrates is that the act of speaking (manually), writing (in the form of print), acting or performing, and reading are simultaneous. It is not unqiue as it can apply to television shows, movies and a number of other videos, but people have not thought of that when they separate image from word in dichotomy. This video Reading attempts to undermine that mentality.
James Elkins points that "everyday reading and everyday looking... are not pure acts... Any act of reading relies on a finite number of customs and strategies, and they are often at work in looking. The converse is also true: We look at images in various ways... those ways of looking often come into play when we read... so there is 'reading' in every image and 'looking' in every text."