Telemetry is a Curse (word)

Telemetry- the technology of remote sensing and data transmission

"Because we have these weapons, we can [use them] to take the easy way out rather than put guys on the ground with eyes and ears who can see the real situation."
- Ivan Oelrich, strategic weapons analyst

I recently heard Dr. Phil bluntly admonish a mother for dropping the ‘F’ bomb all over her house in front of her children. Not being one to dwell excessively long on the moral dimensions of anything I encounter on daytime TV, I was soon carried off by his metaphor, entertaining myself with visions of words dropping from mouths from great heights guided remotely to their targets and transmitting back fuzzy, phosphor green images like the precision munitions that became so familiar to us after the first gulf war. I saw descending waves of nouns and adjectives indiscriminately carpet bombing the visual landscape, leveling the lush jungles of sensory experience into arid plains of small talk. I saw art critics deploying their pointy, honed critiques like bunker busters to seek out and excavate meaning wherever it may be hiding deep below the surface of perception.

As fanciful as my imaginings may have been, they highlight the telemetric aspect of language that permits us to compress our visual experiences of the world into the relatively narrow bandwidth of words. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in typical text/image relationships it takes only one or perhaps a handful of words to completely alter, spin, or inhibit our perception of an image. In fact, it is much more likely that the worth of a particular image is directly related to the ability of its caption to reign in its multiplicity of signification and wealth of visual information. The same kinds of telemetric impulses that persuade a pilot to reduce an entire town into a target or that permit a doctor to simplify the intricacies of a beating heart into something as stripped-down as a simple pulse encourage us to reduce the profound ambiguity, polysemia and richness of the visual world into its linguistically encoded surrogate- its meaning- thereby demoting visual experiences to the status of illustrations or visual aids.

There are ways to construct text/image relationships that attempt to minimize the telemetric effects of language, particularly the degree to which texts inhibit the full exercise of our visual perception by over-determining the ways in which we assign significance and meaning to images. In paintings such as Flaying Rasputin I have played with text/image relationships in which language is no longer privileged over the visual, words becoming simply another signifier among many in a process of meaning creation based on visual logic rather than linguistic signification. By using strategies such as re-embedding the text within the image, emphasizing the visually associative aspects of text forms, and purposely thwarting the text’s linguistically denotative functions, artists can in some small measure restore the primacy of (relatively) direct sensual experience over the removed, highly mediated, and restricted telemetric translation of visual phenomena into language.