Search

Rebuses—visual riddles that replace words or syllables by images—were highly popular in early modern Europe. Many broadsheets containing rebus poems were printed in France and Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although multiple theories on the intended audience and use of these rebuses have been formulated by historians, very little is known about their actual reception, since the extant broadsheets rarely contain any traces of their use by contemporary owners. However, several German rebus riddles have recently come to light that do contain evidence of how they were read and interpreted in early modern times. The broadsheets in question are political in nature: they pertain to the Thirty Years' War, ridiculing the opponent by means of visual satire. The solutions to these rebus puzzles have been added in early modern hands. These rare traces of the contemporary reception of rebus broadsheets make it possible to follow the thought process of their readers step by step, demonstrating how they tackled the visual riddles and which type of image was most difficult to decipher. In one case, multiple individuals even worked on the solution at different stages, showing how these visual games could be played over and over again. These sources give us a unique insight into early modern visual literacy at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the implications of multimodal artificial intelligence (AI), including image generators such as DALL·E, for the traditional concept of ekphrasis. Using ekphrasis as an example of 'thinking with AI', it takes up the suggestion that in the digital realm ekphrastic relationships should be understood as performative rather than representational. Since with the introduction of modern AI the digital realm needs to be divided into a sequential part (classic algorithms) and a connectionist part (artificial neural networks), the article shows how the latter part ultimately tends toward a collapse of the text/image distinction in the technical system. Artificial neural networks both encode images and text as the same type of information, and they do so differently from the sequential model. Only in the context of multimodal AI, unlike in analogue or sequential paradigms, ekphrasis goes beyond the separation of or transition between text and image, but rather transcends this difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of the British poet Christopher Logue is characterized by variation, collaboration, and intermedia projects. His output includes poetry set to jazz, printed poster-poems, public poetry performances, film scripts, collaborations with artists, and translations from Portuguese, German and, most significantly, ancient Greek. War Music, an 'account of Homer's Iliad' according to its subtitle, became Logue's life's work, eclipsing many of his earlier projects. But collisions of word, image, and sound—the intermedia formats that characterize his early work—endure in Logue's Homeric translations in the form of radical typographic experiments and textual images, such as inch-high capital letters marking the arrival of the god Apollo, and graphic shapes formed by variation in line lengths. This article demonstrates that War Music is a key text in the intersection of translation and visual poetry, which can be best understood in dialogue with other forms such as concrete poetry and the text-inspired art of Cy Twombly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adaptation of texts by contemporary British-Somali poet Warsan Shire for Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade, released in 2016, raises several questions about poetic representation in the twenty-first-century mediascape. Shire's poems, which have been composed for a variety of media, ranging from print distribution to audio recordings to online circulation, serve as transitions between the musical tracks in Lemonade, thus accompanying the overarching narrative of black female empowerment. Frictions between image and text present the starting point for an enquiry into the changes that contemporary lyric poetry undergoes when it "becomes pop." Shaped by processes of circulation and reappropriation, Shire's poems emerge as "memetic media." Does this "meme-ification" of poetry, the digital mobilization and de-contextualization of poetic form, in turn affect the dynamics of poetic representation? A close reading of the texts as they are integrated into the visual album shows how Shire's poems enter into a dialogue with Lemonade's imagery, while remaining impervious to the narrative of positive transformation. In becoming "meme," these poems retain their refractory qualities, thus presenting a design of lyric poetry for the contemporary mediascape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the interests of famous British sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay (IHF) in emblems. IHF's interest in emblems grew out of his writing of concrete poetry by adding other elements, specifically images, to the wordage. Traditionally, the emblem is a combination of title, image, and text. Another artist Harry Gionis has suggested, too, that the multiple format of an emblem "initially enabled Finlay to bypass the difficulties with syntax which had led him to abandon, for a time, conventional verse. IHF has annexed the emblem in the same way, though with a strong inclination towards discovering a new poetry in well-established concepts and themes. His composition of emblems on the printed page has been transferred to his garden-making, where the words join with the visual effects of both the object upon which they are inscribed and their immediate surroundings to initiate into fresh perceptions.