"Visual Intellectuals and Networked Ideals"

Peter Lunenfeld

Media Design Program Art Center College of Design

Even when intellectuals are ostensibly not talking about words, they express themselves through, by, and with text to such an extent that what they generate can never be truly seen as a discussion about anything other than text. This explains the way that no matter how much art history, architectural criticism, or film studies claim to deal with visual and spatial systems, these discursive modes tend to resolve themselves finally around, well, around discourse itself. This is not to say that this text-based intellectual work is in the end about the craft of writing. But the long admitted though never addressed inadequacies of the academy notwithstanding, something new is brewing in the wake of the computer's dissemination through the humanities, and I would claim that we are about to witness the wide scale emergence of a breed of visual intellectuals. These would be people simultaneously making, pondering and commenting on visual culture, but in a way that doesn¹t follow the primacy of the word as with the text-based intellectual.