What Is Visual Media?

What Is Visual Media?

A moving image is always confined ─ spatially enclosed by a frame.
Whether it appears on a television screen, the silver screen of a theater, or within the projected bounds of a hologram, the image lives within borders.

Even the device on which you are now reading this has its own frame.
What lies beyond that frame on your side is something I cannot see.
Yet, if you are there, and if you are reading this, then you know that I am here.
A curious thing, indeed.

Not
“I think, therefore I am,”
but perhaps,
“You are, therefore I am.”

The world in which the subject resides, and the world of the observer ─ these are not the same.
Neither can see beyond the boundaries of the other.
And yet, it is precisely because those boundaries exist that the two may be faintly connected.

Just as every living being carries within it a world of its own, so too do films and moving images give rise to many such worlds.
Might we not say that for every film ever made on this Earth, there exists a parallel world ─ intangible, unreachable, and yet deeply felt?

Perhaps, in truth, all things are already connected.
But we, as human beings, sometimes need a sign ─ a spark ─
A shape rendered in language, in sound, in light ─
To remind us of that hidden thread which binds us all.

This is merely one reflection on the nature of the moving image.

─── Norifumi Kudeken