Article:

Zwischen Bild und Text: Von Guillaume Apollinaires CALLIGRAMES zur digitalen Kommunikation

Where is the boundary between writing and image? Where does the written word end and at what point can our perceptual apparatus recognize an image as such? These considerations are based on the pictorial poems of the French poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), which have their origins in Greek antiquity and have been taken up again in avant-garde typography. A pictorial poem, also known as a calligram, not only communicates the content of a text, but also creates a visual object of perception with its own level of meaning, thus combining text and image. 100 years later, the question arises as to whether the colourful helpers of our digital communication - we are talk-ing here about the so-called emojis (Japanese: picture characters, or moji, Jap-anese: writing) - can be regarded as the digital heritage of 20th century pictorial poems.