‘What we used to call watching seems increasingly like what we once called reading. Then they were different things, with a clear hierarchy. Reading was absorbing con- tent, watching was ‘receiving an impression of something.’ The first was a conceptual activity that was valued higher than the second, a more passive, sensory affair. The fact that you do both with your eyes was less important than the thought that reading conjures up a non-existent picture and watching processes existing pictures. Only for trained viewers – art historians and design critics such as myself – the two were alike. Our looking is also reading; for us, a picture is also a visual text. What I’ve noticed is that since the irresistible increase of the visual media, non- professional viewers have also become more and more readers. Concurrently, the idea that the only thing you can read is text is losing ground. We, the homini visuali, do not only read and write words but also images. The form in which things appear to us has thus become just as much text as text has become image.’
Bruinsma, M, Watching, Formerly Reading, I Read Where I Am: Exploring New Information Cultures, Graphic Design Museum (now Museum of the Image), Valiz with Graphic Design Museum (2011)
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