Jan Peeters

Research co-ordinator, Visual Arts Department, Department Sint-Lucas Beeldende Kunst, Gent, Belgium

A Reading Film. An artistic practice that merges text, text image and moving image

The doctoral research project ‘A Reading Film’ is situated in the domain of the so-called magetext or iconotext: the merging of word and image in a visual-textual unity of content, that cannot be narrowed down to either pure image or pure text. The research project has a double aim.

Firstly, in the artistic practice, a number of experimental works will be made in which words (and more precisely, reading texts that are set typographically) and moving images (in the first place filmic images) form one whole. The combinations of text, text image and moving image, should originate and grow as one texture, and afterwards also manifest themselves as originally triune works.

The second aim is to gain deepening insights in this combined use of moving image, text image and text, and in the properties of this form of iconotext. Several subject matters are possible here: spatial placing and editing of text, embedding text images typographically in moving images, grammatical or iconotextual connections between text and image, combining simultaneously (in word and image) different time dimensions or space dimensions, etc.