By now you've noticed the lines above. How do we read this?
Do you read it as a whole image noticing the bike or do you notice the letters then words?
Where do you first look?
Does it make anyone think of sounds?
It's kind of an interesting relationship, turning the words of an object into an image of the object. I mean this is how kids are taught through association and experiential association with words and worldly objects, at first sound to sight--speaking and revealing (or pointing to) a visible object of reality--but then from representational image of an image (a word) to iconic memory like the physical word on a page such as "cardinal" to the imagined "cardinal". Then from representational image to echoic memory like the sentence "A played middle c on the piano", but this second association can only happen for us only if we know what middle c is and what a sounds a piano makes, just like we need to know what a cardinal looks like to imagine it, but because we first translated sounds to image. Mostly, i bet you imagined the iconic piano when you thought of the piano's timbre even if you don't know how to hum middle c. Image can help display sound as sound can help display image.
What I notice is that you only need one word to describe what all these words are together--bike, but when I see the word bike my imagination takes me somewhere other than the image I am presented here, or rather multiple images that can be interpreted as one. The bike I imagine is red when the bike I own is yellow and purple. What kind of association is this? have i just seen more red bikes or is there a metaphysical bike that is surely red? What color of bike do you see when you read the word bike?
I dunno if this is at all helpful with what weve got going on with comics but i find it somewhat fun to explore... peace.
I think your post is definitely along the lines of what McCloud was explaining in his book about comics and you ask a lot of interesting questions regarding imagery. For me, when I first looked at this image, or words, I noticed the shape of a bike, and than began to look at the details of the wording. No specific color came to my mind, just the shape the image was representing. In the readings of Wolf and Mishra, they bring attention to some flaws they see with putting imagery and text together. But I like how you point out that as kids, we were "taught through association and experiential association with words and worldly objects...".I think Wolf and Mishra made some good points when they discussed certain flaws, but I think we rely on images to make written text more understandable. Everyone will experience imagery/text differently, just like you and I did since you saw a color and I did not, but we both decided on the word bike to describe what was being projected. Whether talking about comics, computer imaging and simulation, or images in textbooks I think most people's brains will have the same reaction to images and will find the usefulness of those images in association with alphabetic text.
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