Hard Drive: An Experiment in Intervisuality

Instead of intertextuality, can one perhaps speak of an intervisuality? As a way of understanding how the meaning of images are shaped by other images related to or existing around them? As for intervisuality, I’m drawing on notions of intertextuality as introduced by Julia Kristeva[1]. Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis connecting the specific text to others existing around it. What unites these two axes are, according to Kristeva, shared codes. She suggested that every text and reading depends on prior codes, “every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it” [2]. Kristeva introduced the idea of “structuration”: Instead of limiting our attention to the structure of a text, we should study how this structure came into being. This is its “structuration,” which involved siting the text “within the totality of previous or synchronic texts” of which it was a “transformation.”[3]