hypertext and metapictures and self-reflexivity: oh my!

                Take a moment, think about how you interpret an image: do you read it as a text or use textuality to construe what the picture is saying? In “Metapictures,” Mitchell discusses, “…pictures about pictures–that is, pictures that refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is” (35). In order to derive meaning from an image, it is imperative for it to be self-reflexive, like a hypertext. Throughout Mitchell’s essay, he mentions that visual theory is only made viable through self-reflexivity. Self-reflexive images focus on how it came to be. Similar to Landow’s theory of hypertext, Mitchell offers a sort of consciousness to an image.

                “Metapictures are pictures that show themselves in order to know themselves; they stage the “self-knowledge” of pictures” (Mitchell 48). Through discourse, images are able to display what they know and what is. “They don’t just illustrate theories of picturing and vision; they show us what vision is, and picture theory” (57). Rather than pictures, Landow uses self-reflexive narrators to derive meaning. Hypertext connects many links therefore serving as a type of language. This language communicates between the text and reader, just as an image communicates to a viewer or itself. According to Landow, “One experiences hypertext as an infinitely decenterable and recenterable system, in part because hypertext transforms any document that has more than one link into a transient center, a directory document that on can employ to orient oneself ad to decide where to go next” (37). Both metapictures and hypertext provide a “second-order discourse” that is founded upon their capacity to offer a reflection. In other words, they are abstract-thinking images and text.

                Images and hypertext are utilized to convey a message to an observer. “That is why the use of metapictures as instruments in the understanding of the observer. This destabilizing of identity is to some extent a phenomenological issue, a transaction between pictures and observers activated by the internal structural effect of multistability: the shifting of figure and ground, the switching of aspects, the display of pictorial paradox and forms of nonsense” (Mitchell 57). What is being view allows for a particular discourse. The self-reflexivity within images and hypertext is comprised of the objects/writing, the thinking, and the viewing; once these three aspects are met, the image and hypertext will develop a kind of consciousness.