#TICAW (The Images Concepts And Words) --- SynTalk

Published: Dec. 20, 2014, 9:23 p.m.

SynTalk thinks about the deep historical and ongoing interrelationships between (the all pervasive & incessantly productive) images, and concepts & words. We make the widely sweeping journey from ancient rock art to the Coca-Cola logo to images on monitors in hospitals, to possible futures (say) a 1000 years out. The concepts are derived off / from \u2018Lingo Dev\u2019, Aristotle, Hippodamus of Miletus, Freud, Saussure, Peirce, Derrida, Foucault, Le Corbusier, McLuhan, Debord, & Baudrillard, among others. Can concepts or conceptual entities come to be without language? What are the links between rock art, and speech, script, words, entoptic phenomena, induced phosphene images, catenary curves, \u2018scene of experience\u2019, & language? Do 100,000+ years old rock arts provide a promising clue to how meaning gradually emerged from the pre-conceptual pre-representational \u2018cauldron\u2019? Are letters and pictures interchangeable, and have they always been so? How images come from very ancient times and how they thrust forward from without and from within? Do we dream in images? Is there any logo which is non iconic? How the core pursuit of advertising is to give form to an abstraction. How does advertising tackle different media, & how an advertisement in the print necessarily needs to be \u2018processed in the mind\u2019? How do you create the concept of \u2018Friday dressing\u2019? How Jarawas (from Andamans) have come to use words from English or Hindi. Does extinction of languages lead to death of concepts, & the attendant phenomena of amnesia and aphasia? We discuss Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Phoenician, Greek, & Chinese scripts. How icons (& further images, diagrams & metaphors), index & symbols are different from each other? How is a notion different from a concept? Is there conflict and cooperation always at play between images (of say, Batman, Hanuman, Manga, or Anime), & are images conquering the world? Where do specters and ghosts come from? Is there an incessant mass-ification of images (via \u2018procession of the simulacra\u2019) ongoing and ahead of us, & are images the long term future of language? Are images & meanings going to be increasingly crowd sourced in the future? Is a technology-driven \u2018master narrative\u2019 taking over the visual arts, cities, & forests, and is the \u2018visual landscape\u2019 shrinking? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. K. K. Chakravarty (art, public administration, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi), Santosh Desai (advertising, strategy, Futurebrands, ex-McCann-Erickson, Delhi), & Prof. Franson D. Manjali (semiotics, interdisciplinary, JNU, Delhi).