The Fiend of Hypertext or The Visualization of Inert Knowledge:

Cult of the Word

Cultural importance lies in the medium through which we communicate concepts of any consequence: language. Written, spoken, recorded, reproduced - we rely on our tongues to inform. As we learn language, we encode the world around us in words and word-concepts: hard, red fruit becoming "apple", the breast we suckled from "mother"(Parsons 1987;Ong, 1982). Language dominates, and is expected to do so, to the point that art as a language becomes comprehensible only with difficulty and sustained effort.

In museums, I’ve witnessed the masses throng towards the tiny printed labels paired with gigantic paintings, searching for some lingual clue to the image. Even the discovery of a cryptic “Untitled” illicits a satisfied sigh, which seems to signal the creation of a lingual peg to mentally hang the image from. How many dark, unexplored galleries of such images lurk in our collective skulls, never incorporated into larger matrixes of knowledge? If the web can be called a form of inert knowledge - an alienated mass of disconnected elements - then I believe it must pale in comparison to the wealth of isolated images floating in the back of a single mind.

EKPHRASIS

Ekphrasis is defined by the OED, as "...a practical description of the visual ways that the reader approaches the verbaltext..." and serves as ". . . a practical description of the visual ways that the reader approaches the verbal text." (Ibid:p.4) a fear that the bastardization of language as it incorporates visual elements is just around the virtual corner.