Daniela Dröscher
E-Mail: droescher [at] grako-schrift.fu-berlin.de
Ph.D. Project
"Notational Iconicity as Faciality"
Draft
The study in media arts accentuates the immanent aisthetic dimension of the discrete structure of writing.
The project integrates alphabetical, non-alphabetical and abstract writing practices which demonstrate and exaggerate the aspects of notational iconicity and spatiality in a way, that writing is no longer primarily read, but perceived as a texture of spatial relations: a texture initiating a physiognomic perception.
The specific physiognomy of writing reveals a kind of visage: an ephemeral phenomenon emanating from a line of negations. For its perception does neither follow the logic of the line, nor the logic of the picture, nor the logic of the pattern, nor the logic of the score, its study of the visage thus requires a negative media theory. The visage acts in an in-between sphere, which my study first of all attempts to define.
What is important for the perception of the visage is its chiastic structure: one sees and is at the same time being looked at by a glance coming from the writing’s iconicity – a glance, which locates the visage between visibility and invisibility.
Furthermore, there is the nexus of face und voice, which is important to the visage. In a physiognomic perception, the implicit musical dimension (rhythm, sound, melody) immanent to writing evokes a type of voice that cannot be identified as a phonological recoding, but is to be searched between language, music, silence and sound.
The perspective of faciality emphasizes a synaesthetic dimension in the field of notational iconicity and foregrounds the dimension of perceptibility of aesthetic writing processes.
