Language is frequently presented visually on the monitor, as image. Katherine Hayles has coined the influential notion of the “flickering signifier” in her study "How we became Posthuman." Text is treated graphically on screen, she argues, and morphs into a flickering image, an instable visual display, and it is no longer a material object.
Beiguelman too emphasises the imagetic condition of the screen text, and at the same time the essentially textual condition of the web: on the screen, images perform texts, and behind the screen, texts generate these images. This thesis is explored both visually and textually in her work “the book after the book” (1997), where the idea of the flickering signifiers, of the dissolution of the boundaries between text and image and the graphic treatment of text on the screen are explored. The internet, Beiguelman writes, “is no more than a big text. On the front, at the screen, text reveals itself as image.”
Beiguelman too emphasises the imagetic condition of the screen text, and at the same time the essentially textual condition of the web: on the screen, images perform texts, and behind the screen, texts generate these images. This thesis is explored both visually and textually in her work “the book after the book” (1997), where the idea of the flickering signifiers, of the dissolution of the boundaries between text and image and the graphic treatment of text on the screen are explored. The internet, Beiguelman writes, “is no more than a big text. On the front, at the screen, text reveals itself as image.”
