The translation from surface into line implies a radical change of meaning. The eye that deciphers an image scans the surface, and it thus establishes reversible relations between the elements of the image. It may go back and forth while deciphering the image. This reversibility of relation that prevails within the image characterises the world for those who use images for the understanding of the world, who “imagine” it. For them, all the things in the world are related to each other in such a reversible way, and their world is structured by “eternal return.”1

    This reversibility that is conjured through writing is one of the significant elements that differentiates writing from drawing. Through viewing drawing we can see the image directly, it is there, it has been created, yet when reading writing we must instead create the image ourselves in order to conceive it. Reading requires “imagining”, it requires the creation and invention of an image. Writing therefore, in the reverse, should involve the obliteration of the image, destroying what can be seen and instead invoke an unknown. Flusser argues otherwise, he states that writing does not destroy the image but instead explains the image. He observes that “by unrolling the surface of the image into lines, by unwinding the tissue of the image into the threads of a text” writing actually renders “explicit what was implicit within the image”. Consequently, according to Flusser, in order to understand and see what an image implies we need to transcode the image through the act of writing. It could therefore seem, that through this act, we are only needlessly obscuring the image’s implicit meaning with a further symbolic abstraction manifested in the textual form of an alternative sequence of images, were it not for one essential concept that the act of writing introduces - time.   

1 Flusser, “The future of writing”, Writings p64

When one imagines the act of writing, they think of the written word, the alphabet, the sentence. Writing is understood as a separate form of expression than drawing despite both involving the same rudimentary process - the marking of a surface. The word “write” actually originates from the German “reissen”; to sketch. It could be argued that the primary difference between writing and drawing is that one involves a recognisable and consistent system of symbols and the other does not. However this is not necessarily true; the accurate illustration of a tree is no less ambiguous than the word “tree”. In fact, the illustration of a tree more closely correlates with the signified object than the word itself, which is a learned abstraction. It can therefore be said that the illustration would be the more recognisable symbol of the two. The word “tree” alternatively is a much more consistent composition of marks on surface than the countless variations of line that the drawing could have for the very same concept. The object that the word symbolises, however, is not consistent. In effect, by writing the word “tree” rather than drawing a tree we are compressing the concept to the most base idea of the signified object while also obfuscating the specifically unique elements of that said tree. Both the word and the illustration are symbols. The word “tree” is simply a more ambiguous symbol than the illustration of the tree, just as the letter “e” is a more ambiguous symbol than the word. Essentially, presenting a solitary, isolated word is not actually writing but image making, for to undertake the act of writing requires the sequencing of these symbols. These symbols can be words and illustrations, paintings or photographs, as all are images, and they need only be systematically placed in a sequence, like beads on a string, in order to exist as writing as opposed to image, line as opposed to surface.  

Writing may involve the transformation of what is seen and sensed into symbolic forms, although as discussed, so does drawing. This pillaging of the real image - the life image - into the simulated image is not particular to writing. What is fundamental to the essence of writing is its sequencing of these images. The linear structure intrinsic to writing, of putting an image before and after an image, elicits a perception of time that propagates an imagining of a past and future. This imagining hence enables the recognition of a temporal existence where things are not static as implicated in the surface of a sole image, but are instead transient and ongoing.

“Identity must be seen as contingent and forever incomplete, continually changing as it generates and regenerates itself. Thus to write an autobiography means, in essence, to write one’s own identity.”1 

The act of writing the self in art is commonly perceived as just an exploratory act that seeks to construct and communicate one’s identity. This perception of writing the self, however, conflicts with my understanding and practice of writing self-portraits.  This essay therefore is not about video art and an exploration of the quaint and/or traumatic “My Life so Far” sagas, nor is it about performance art and some brash, identity defining “This is Who I Am” episode. It is about my own understanding of and the motivation for my self-portrait pieces. It is not about history and it is not about nostalgia. It is not about culture and it is not about heritage.My temporal self-portraits are not memoirs, nor are they confessions. They are not flamboyant identities I assume for the stage, nor are they personal homebodies I quietly adhere to. They are constructions and creations, but I do not consider them constructions and creations of my identity.

My self-portraits that are dancing madly on the screen are nought but ghosts. They are my bastard children that, once molested and manipulated, have been expelled into the vast void of the virtual realm, doomed to exist in a noisy feedback of “eternal return”2. They could be considered amputated extensions of myself but they never wholly belonged to me. They were always, while at the same time representing me, representing something else; they were representing the actual act of writing. Despite representing writing, my self-portraits are far from entertaining life stories, not because they lack any cohesive narrative structure, but because there is barely anything in them to be told. There are no struggles in which I must overcome nor are there any lessons I could learn from. My self-portraits are fundamentally amoral and egotistical inanities involving frivolous forays into the virtual realm of signs and signifiers where I stutter and shake in a frantic effort to simulate a conceived self that is already dismembered from whatever real self I might have once imagined.

This essay approaches the reasoning and consequences of writing the self. It begins with a chapter that thoroughly explores the very nature of writing, because as Marshall McLuhan declared, “the medium is the message”3, and it is henceforth essential to understand the process of writing in order to gauge how it affects the writing of the self.  This chapter proposes that writing is not confined to a systematic set of codes such as the English alphabet, but can instead involve the sequencing of any symbols, symbols that are fundamentally images that signify something. Writing is represented as an essentially temporal exercise that is dependent on the sequencing of these symbols and the ordering of them into positions.  The chapter also explores the consequences of writing. It explores how the ambiguity that is inherent within symbols leads to the necessary creation of a virtual space that allows the symbols to be glued together into a sequence. This creation of a virtual space, or void, demands that the reader fill it by imagining the images that the symbols represent. To do so, the reader draws on an archive of image memories, thus impregnating the symbols with temporal depth. The chapter concludes by discussing how writing connects man and the world and how it invents, rather than discovers, meaning by articulating the void and creating something that was never there before.

The second chapter, ‘Writing to Be or Not to Be’, focuses on what motivates the individual to write the self. It explores the realms of writing to exist and writing to cease to exist. The self exists through writing because it is recognised by the other; conversely the self ceases to exist through writing because a void, a virtual realm, is created that is filled by the imaginings and interpretations of the other, thus negating the self. The act of writing is approached as a performance, proposing that when we write the self we exist but when we stop writing we cease to exist. The effect of this performative act is temporal, as is the entity of the self.

My final chapter shows how my video works reflect and are fuelled by these concepts of the nature of writing and the motivation to write the self, and discusses the techniques used to achieve these ends. It explores how I treat all aspects of my self – words, body, voice and memories – as symbols to be sequenced and ordered into positions and how I write the self to cease to exist, to create a void, a vacant space that can be filled by endless imaginings of my self by the other.

It is revealed throughout these three chapters that writing the self does not necessarily involve the writing of an identity into the self but rather the writing of a void into the self. For writing one’s identity into the self would be a futile act as the self and its identity are “continually changing”.4 Writing a void, however, creates a space that can accommodate this forever transient and intangible self. It can therefore be seen that it is the actual nature of writing to create a void, and that this creation and extension of empty space fulfils the two fundamental purposes of writing the self. It diffuses the self across such a vast plain that the self ceases to exist as an individual whole, while at the same time creating a space that can hold the other’s various imaginings of the self, and by doing so reasserting the self’s existence.

1 Barbara Steiner and Jiun Yang, ‘Writing identity: on autobiography in art’, Autobiography, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004, p162

2 Vilém Flusser, “The future of writing”, Writings, ed. A Strohl, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002, p643

3 M. McLuhan, Understanding media, Signet Books, New York, 1964

4 Barbara Steiner and Jiun Yang, ‘Writing identity: on autobiography in art’,  Autobiography p16