The disturbance of images

This study explores the appropriation of images, their fracture and unmaking in relation to the practice of collage. It attempts to identify a means of articulating the relationship of trauma occurring within an image, a trauma that results from the ‘collage act’, and concurrently its relation to forms of dramatic change via a corporeal reading of the image and intervention. ‘Images are animated beings with desires, appetites. Demands and drives of their own’, W.T.J. Mitchell asserts, adding that an image is internally operative, a totality demanding our attention, an assembly of persistence, a representation or record containing sense data that is animated within memory beyond the purely visual. Vilëm Flusser, the philosopher, interprets the photographic image as signifying ‘something “out there” in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions’. We identify images in this way by acknowledging signification. In advertising for instance, meaning is established a priori, emphatically directed to establish communication as quickly as possible. Of course semiotics offers a long established form of reading an image. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) defines it as follows ‘A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable. It would be part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology. I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeion “sign”). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them’