Hans Belting

One of the key points from talking to Michelle was Hans Belting and his book 'An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body.' - Michelle thought some of his ideas were inkeeping with my plans, and as it turns out, his theories could be key in defining what it is I'm trying to achieve. Michelle pointed out two passages in particular that were of great help;

Human perception has repeatedly accommodated itself to new pictorial technologies, but in keeping with its nature it transcends such medial boundaries.
Like perception, images too are inherently intermedial. They transcend the various historical media that are invented for them, pitching their tent in one new medium after another and then moving on to the next. It would be a mistake to confuse the image with these media. For a medium is but an archive of dead images until we animate the images with our gaze.

And the last phrase is the key one. Music reviews don't come 'alive' until the reader takes all of the imagery and creates a vision of it. When I began this project, my original idea stemmed around the idea of cutting out the middle man, so to speak, and aiming straight for that vision. But of course, there are complications; the vision will then be reanimated in its own right, with the cycle never ending.

Belting goes on to discuss how we "conceal a photograph's existence as thought we wanted to make them immaterial images dwelling in our imagination." That's what my project is; a construction of these visual images and an analysis of the response.