Poetic Alienation: The Graphics Between

The image/text synthesis has long existed in various art forms, from Medieval illustrated Bibles to modern billboards. For a long time, the two have served each other "faithfully":texts anchor meaning for images while images lend physicality to texts. People have been accustomed to assuming that whenever text and image appear together, they point to the same thing. However, with the changing of time, both images and texts have been relieved of, to a certain extent, their burden to represent the world. Their own formal values are re-assessed and the coherent link between them has gradually dissolved. Many artists have explored the potential "ultraspace" between the two through disorienting the traditional image/text synthesis.The thesis explores the "ultraspace" created through deliberately upsetting image/text coherence. The first chapter discusses the semiotics of image and text respectively and the forming of the notion of image/text coherence. The second chapter discusses the disarming of that notion with the development of modern semiotics and aesthetics studies. With the aid of Shklovsky's defamiliarization theory, and recent taxonomical studies of image/text rela-tionships, it discusses the realizability of image/text detachment. The third chapter raises examples of image/text detachment in various art practices and attempts to contextualize the logic and tension behind such practices.