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Caterina Toschi: The Two Times of the Word
The Two Times of the Word
(p. 495 – 513)

Caterina Toschi

The Two Times of the Word
Reading and Watching Dadaist Photomontages

PDF, 19 pages

  • physiology
  • history of science
  • gaze

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Caterina Toschi

is Instructor at the New York University in Florence and at Università degli studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled The Composition as Montage: From the Words in Freedom to the Dadaist Photomontage. She was a junior scholar at the Getty Research Institute of Los
Angeles, and she is an instructor at New York University in Florence. She is co founder and coordinator of the online contemporary-art journal Senzacornice, and scientific supervisor of Beatrice Monti della Corte’s Collection at the Santa Maddalena Foundation.
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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