Images are complex and can be perceived differently by each viewer. Philosopher C.S Peirce’s definition is an interesting starting point to consider what is an image. He states that an image inherently possesses qualities such as shape, texture and colour, which provoke a resemblance of something else (CTMS, p. 39). Berlin Data artist Hannah Hoch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, compliments this definition (see Fig. 1). In this piece she creates an innovative, spliced together photomontage of women that appear somewhat intact, but with fractured contours. Here, Hock collects and remediates imagery, taken from magazines, popular publications and journals to comment on society during a time of social change and upheaval. This piece does somehow exemplify a sense of temporality, that depicts a fractal time signature of sorts. Perhaps, this is why the piece defies time and seems in motion, seems almost like a memory or hypnotic reverie…and “the shape and form it assumes” shifts first from a material object to become like a medium of some sort (CTMS, p. 39-40).

Works Cited

Höch, Hannah. Cut with the kitchen knife: The Weimar photomontages of Hannah Höch, 1919. Collage.

Works Consulted

Lavin, Maud. Cut with the kitchen knife: The Weimar photomontages of Hannah Höch. Vol. 11. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.

Mitchell, WJ Thomas, and Mark BN Hansen, eds. Critical terms for media studies. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Shanken, Edward A. “Art and electronic media.” (2009).