The identification, extraction and efficacy of Universal Visual Archetypes (pre-discursive referents) in Images and Film sequences

摘要

Pictorial representations of memory began long before writing, and images, unlike speech though, represent a tangible, retinal-representation of memory, iconic memory. However with the spread and development of Languages, images too became encoded with the localized cultural aspirations and perspectives (Foucault calls this power/knowledge fixing) that inherently served the interests of particular groups. As a result of this there are, therefore many Visual Languages. I suggest that in some Images this fixing occurred prior to the spread of verbal and visual languages, so that, whilst there are many cultures and of course Visual Languages, they might be underpinned by core primordial visual archetypes, (pre-discursive referents). I propose the research and development of a methodology that will detect echoes of primordial Universal Visual Archetypes (pre-discursive referents) in Image and Image Sequence databases (Film). For this to succeed and in order to identify pre-discursive referents and Universal Visual Archetypes that might be in current use, it will be necessary to start by reviewing and analyzing Images from a period in human evolution marked largely by the absence of languages and cultures, a period from where man first presented retinal representations of memory in pictorial form, namely in Paleolithic Rock Art. The technical methods used by them for this process, (which proved to be more stable than those used for representing speech), have created visible records of memory that go back to the dawn of Mankind.