The remediation of visual archives towards new iconographies: the case of Lev Manovich’s “Media Visualization”

Abstract

This article has two objectives: the first is to describe the different types of re-mediation created through “Media Visualization” as practiced by Lev Manovich and the “Cultural Analytics Lab”. We will analyze two ways in which vast collections of archived images (Big Visual Data) are visualized – as montages and diagrams –, posing the hypothesis that these visualizations function as an analysis of the visual archive through specifically visual and topological means. The issue of visual metalanguage will be broached. The second objective is to understand whether and how this genre of analytical visualizations, which uses “distant reading” techniques, can work in conjunction with a semiotic analysis of the image (a “close reading”).