Intertextuality
Intertextuality and the Continuum of Meaning
The main focus of the most recent work has been concerned with the idea of the intertextuality that exists all around us, on every surface of modern day life and principally with that which is always available to us on the city streets, mostly unobserved but always present. Intertextuality as a term was first introduced by the semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties, meaning amongst other things that a literary work is not simply the product of a single author, but is created through its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language. Kristeva proposed that all signifying systems are constituted by the manner in which they transform earlier signifying systems.
If Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, then the visual environment that we are constantly exposed to must be shaped by what has come before, what is surrounding and the constant change, addition, subtraction and redaction by street artist, tagger, workman, political activist, advertiser and of course, weather. It’s also shaped by the journey we make as, mostly unconsciously, we are imprinted by what is in our surroundings. If a text is constituted only in the moment of its reading then the visual environment is constituted literally in the moment of it’s experience.
